Study of a male nude holding a chalice and subsidiary studies

The two nudes, top right and lower left, derive, as James Byam Shaw had noted in an inscription on the back of the drawing, from a drawing by Antonio del Pollaiuolo in the Louvre, Nude man seen from three angles (inv. 1486 recto; A. Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, New Haven and London, 2005, fig. 119), dated to the early 1470s. Further copies of these figures are in the British Museum and elsewhere.
The central figure on the sheet is close to the one of Christ in Perugino’s Resurrection in the Vatican (Opera Completa, 77).