Three female heads

A facsimile etching of a drawing depicting three female heads now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice (inv. no. 40 verso). This drawing is on the verso of a sheet of putti (see RCIN 851875 for a photograph of the recto and 854418 for the verso). This print was catalogued by Ruland (1876) as having been 'published by Celotti'; by this he was presumably referring to Luigi 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). This print is lettered with the attribution of the drawing to Raphael, and numbered within the plate at top right: I. 

Ferino Pagden (see Bibliographic References) noted that this drawing was interpreted by Ernst Steinmann as being related to the fresco of 'The finding of Moses', painted by Pietro Perugino in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican and destroyed in 1540 by Michelangelo's Last Judgement. Others scholars have associated the heads depicted in this drawing with other compositions in the Sistine Chapel.

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).