A galley and a landscape

A photograph reproducing a pen and ink drawing depicting a town on a hill and a partial study of a galley now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice (inv. no. 34 recto). This drawing features a depiction of a man fighting with a lion on the verso (see RCIN 852282 for a photograph of the verso of the sheet). Annotated on the verso. 

Ferino Pagden (see Bibliographic References) notes a similarity between this drawing and one by Raphael now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. no. WA1846.10, a photograph of which is at RCIN 851474). However, Ferino Pagden did not believe that the drawing in the Ashmolean is a copy of the one in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, or that both drawings are studies, made on the spot, not related to each other. Therefore, she catalogued this drawing as having been inspired by Raphael's drawing in the Ashmolean Museum. The galley depicted in the drawing is the continuation of that on another sheet of the sketchbook (see RCIN 854535 for a photograph of it).

This drawing is part of the so-called "Libretto di Raffaello" or "Libretto Veneziano", 53 sheets that used to be mounted in a volume. After complicated negotiations, the sketchbook was bought by the museum in the 1820s, after the death of Giuseppe Bossi, who was its previous owner. A number of scholars debated the author of the drawings (with many names proposed, such as Pinturicchio, Antonio da Viterbo, Eusebio del Giorgio, Girolamo Genga) and their date. In 1984, the Gallerie dell'Accademia catalogued the drawings as by an artist contemporary to Raphael, whose juvenile works he copied in this sketchbook (see Bibliographic References).

A copy of this photograph (RCIN 854525) can be found in the Prince Consort's Raphael Collection, portfolio 49 (970609)