As the Duca Ferretti deduced in 1985, this is a study for one of four large canvases of scenes from the Life of Moses recorded by Luigi Pellegrino Scaramuccia as being in the house of the Marchese di Voghera in Turin in 1674 (fig. 1), A. Cifani and F. Monetti, op. cit., fig. 41. Of the four pictures commissioned by Amedeo dal Pozzo, two were by Poussin, the Adoration of the Golden Calf (London, National Gallery) and the Crossing of the Red Sea (Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria) and the others, Moses striking the Rock and Moses and the Building of the Tabernacle, were considered by Scaramuccia to be by Cortona. As Ferretti established, the four are first recorded in a Dal Pozzo inventory of 1634, in which the Moses and the Building of the Tabernacle is given to 'Romanino', evidently an error for Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, the most gifted of Cortona's associates, to whom Merz attributed the present drawing. In 1995 Cifani and Monetti published Moses striking the Rock and Moses and the Building of the Tabernacle, which proved to have remained in the Palazzo Dal Pozzo della Cisterna at Turin, now the Palazzo della Provincia. The correspondence between the present drawing and the picture is close, although the figures are more dominant in the latter. Cifani and Monetti consider both pictures - and this drawing - to be by Romanelli, observing, however, that of his works the Moses and the Building of the Tabernacle is 'the closest to the language of Pietro da Cortona'. The close co-operation between the two artists in 1631-2, at the time the pictures were executed, suggests that Romanelli may have worked to Cortona's design. Whether this study is by Cortona or the most compellingly Cortonesque early drawing by Romanelli, himself a draughtsman of high calibre, must remain an open question. However, its importance as a compositional study for a component of one of the key commissions of its period is not in question.