The attribution to Annibale was advanced by Aidan Weston-Lewis, who noted that it was part of a group of drawings inspired by the Antique sculpture group of Niobe in the Uffizi, F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique, New Haven and London, 1981, figs. 143-7. The present drawing is closest to the sculpture traditionally identified as part of the group, but which is now regarded as a figure of Psyche, Weston-Lewis, fig. 17. The present drawing and a comparable study in the Metropolitan Museum (Weston-Lewis, fig. 15) although not directly related to any painting, were clearly the source for figures such as the Earthly Venus in the Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne in the Palazzo Farnese