An apostle

A facsimile etching of a drawing depicting a standing man now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice (inv. no. 18 verso). See RCIN 854655 for a photograph of the drawing. This print was catalogued by Ruland (1876) as having been 'published by Celotti'; by this he was presumably referring to Luigi's Celotti's 'Disegni originali di Raffaello Sanzio, per la prima volta pubblicati (da Luigi Celotti), esistenti nella Imperial Regia Accademia di belle arti di Venezia' (1829). Lettered with attribution of the drawing to Raphael, and numbered within the plate at top right: XXIII. Annotated on the verso.

Ferino Pagden (see Bibliographic References) catalogued the figure depicted in this drawing as a copy of the apostle to the right of St Peter in the 'Delivery of the Keys', frescoed c. 1481-1482 by Pietro Perugino in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican.Various copies of the same figure are also known. The drawing is squared up, although it has not been established whether this is actually to be attributed to a later hand, as the squaring up does not feature either in the etching published in 1829 by Luigi Celotti (see RCIN 854654 for it) or in the various copies after the drawing. 

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).