A drawing of two male nudes, one lifting the other in the manner of Hercules and Antaeus. Having gathered the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, Hercules was challenged by the giant Antaeus; but Antaeus derived his strength from the earth, and when Hercules lifted him into the air he weakened and could be crushed to death.

The drawing was mounted in George III’s Raphael album, though it was recognised that it was the work of one of Raphael’s contemporaries rather than by Raphael himself. In the late nineteenth century it was identified as one of the finest surviving studies by Luca Signorelli, a generation older than Raphael, who spent most of his career in the hill town of Cortona in southern Tuscany.

In the absence of any painting by Signorelli of Hercules and Antaeus, it has been suggested that the drawing might instead have a connection with the figures in the Damned, part of Signorelli’s masterpiece, the fresco cycle of the Last Judgement in the Cappella Nova of Orvieto Cathedral (1499-1504). The recurring motif of the Damned is a struggle between two figures, a devil and a soul. While there is no direct match between the figures in the drawing and any of those in the fresco, such a lack of correlation is a common feature of Signorelli’s preparatory studies, including those more obviously connected with the Last Judgement. The sheet may thus be ‘background research’ for the Orvieto cycle, of a type often found when an artist is confronted by a project unusual in scale or subject (and here both). Extensive compositions of nude figures were not common during the Renaissance, and Signorelli began to explore the demands and opportunities of the Orvieto project through studies derived from more familiar subjects - in this case perhaps Hercules and Antaeus - with no intention of using them unchanged in the final work.