Young Man Grasping a Column,

ca. 1575

Many Italian drawings lack inscriptions bearing the name of a particular artist. Such works often remain classified as “unknown” or “anonymous” until they are connected with an individual or a workshop on the basis of style, technique, or—in this case—an identical image in the artist’s oeuvre. This beautifully preserved sheet was first associated with the late-sixteenth-century Bolognese painter Bartolomeo Cesi, whose finely cross-hatched red chalk drawings of robust figures are strikingly similar. Although the drawing was published as such in 1977, more recently an alternative attribution was made to a contemporary of Cesi’s, the prolific Roman fresco painter Cesare Nebbia, who usually worked in pen and wash. One of his drawings, which is preparatory for the lost fresco Saint Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow, includes the same figure, grasping a column while observing the scene in question.