Studies of heads, after Raphael

The present drawing was part of an album of drawings of heads whose frontispiece bore the inscription 'Raccolta di varii Disegni fatta per un Principe che voleva imparar adisegnare che contiene Teste figure historie di posi tutti originale eccetto le Teste fatte da Raphaele da urbino de mano del famoso Cornelio'. Another sheet from the album was with Martin Moeller in Hamburg in 1993.
Similar, though in a different medium, to drawings sold at Christie's, King Street, 5 July 1994, lots 82-3 and South Kensington, 19 April 1996, lot 161, and in the Louis-Antoine Prat Collection (P. Rosenberg, Masterful Studies, Three Centuries of French Drawings from the Prat Collection, New York, 1990, no. 27, and fig. 1-2).