The subject is some religious procession, treated in Polidoro's mature quasi-caricatural style; indeed this element of caricature led to it being placed in the eighteenth century among the drawings of the Carracci, despite the early ascription to Polidoro. A. Marabottini (Polidoro da Caravaggio, 1969, no. 114) described it as a procession of Capuchins, the Franciscan rule established in 1528, and the obvious delight that Polidoro took in portraying the hoods would support this idea.

This is one of a number of drawings of religious ceremonies in Polidoro's oeuvre, and is often connected with a study in the Louvre (inv. 6074) of a Mass. Such drawings were probably autonomous studies, and it likely that they all date from the latter part of Polidoro's career, after he fled the Sack of Rome in 1527, travelling south to Naples and then Messina. After a decade exposed to the sophistication and worldliness of the Church in Rome, the intense religiosity of the Spanish-influenced south of Italy must have been striking to Polidoro, even comical, a reaction that is not far below the surface of the present drawing.

The sheet shows clearly the source of Polidoro's red-chalk style in the drawings of Raphael's maturity. The flaring highlights in the hair and the broadly-hatched areas of shadow can be seen prefigured in Christ's Charge to Peter (RCIN 912751) and the rendering of the draperies in the Massacre of the Innocents (912737), especially of the mother at far right there, a sister of the peasant women who appear throughout Polidoro's genre drawings.