The drawing depicts the third-century monk St Anthony during his retreat in the Egyptian desert, tempted from his devotions by an apparition of a seductive woman. The landscape is entirely from Fra Bartolomeo’s imagination, with his habitual forms for trees, rocks and a distant town. Inscribed at lower right in an old hand: 'N. dell Frate'. 

Two figure studies of St Anthony for this composition, in black chalk, are in the Museum Boymans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Two further drawings of St Anthony and the woman are in the Morgan Library, New York, and in Dresden (Zeichnungen aus Toskana, exh. cat. 1997, no. 9, reproducing a small Rest on the Flight, location unknown, in which the woman recurs).

On the verso, a drawing of a Roman horseman galloping to the right, copied from a drawing in the Codex Escurialensis (fol. 59v; Library of El Escorial; by an artist close to Domenico Ghirlandaio), which records, with arbitrary ‘restorations’, an antique relief now in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua. Popham (in P&W 1949) judged that the style of the present drawing, if by Fra Bartolomeo at all, was very early, but this may be a consequence of him having copied a stiffer prototype. Another copy of the same model in the Codex Escurialensis is in the British Museum, Dept. Greek and Roman, Franks I, fol. 118 (from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo), with an old attribution to Fra Bartolomeo.

Also on the verso is a drawing of a woman running with a child on her shoulder in flight, positioned as if fleeing from the horseman – Fra Bartolomeo may have added this as a jeu d’esprit to create an episode from the Massacre of the Innocents.