A seated youth holding a ram

This powerful figure is stylistically very close to Pietro da Cortona. In technique, format and size, the sheet for example is very close to the study of a Wind God at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (inv. 61.129.1; J. Bean and L. Turčić, 17th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1979, no. 140, ill.).

The handwritten numbering on the drawing is similar to that on other studies by Cortona and his circle. According to Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, who has identified over a dozen drawings with this numbering, the annotation is by a 17th Century hand and might derive from an early attempt to catalogue the sheets left in the artist’s workshop on his death (see S. Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, ‘Il Taccuino’, in Pietro da Cortona e il disegno, Milan, 1997, pp. 23-24).