Studies of three heads (recto); Fragmentary study (verso)

Lively sketched in black chalk, the present sheet was originally part of an album of drawings assembled in the 17th Century and dispersed in these Rooms in 1980. In the sale catalogue, Herwarth Röttgen argued that this drawing and its companion portraying a young princess with an attendant (sold in the same lot in 1980) were drawn ad vivum by Cesari in Ferrara during the 1598 double wedding celebrations of King Philip III of Spain with Margaret of Austria and Archduke Albert of Austria with Isabella, daughter of King Philip II. The marriages were officiated by Pope Clement VIII, and Cesari followed his most important patron to Ferrara together with a group of artists from Rome, Giovanni Guerra, Ludovico Lanzi, Paolo Monferrato and the sculptor Ludovico Lanzi (B. Mitchell, 1598: a Year of Pageantry in Late Renaissance Ferrara, London, 1990, p. 61).