A drawing of a battle between naked men armed with shields, spears, and bows and arrows.

The attribution of this drawing is uncertain. The classical, slightly immature structure of the bodies is reminiscent of Perugino's warriors, but the strongest connections are with the early drawings of Raphael. The facial and physical types are close to a study of Hercules and the lion in the 'Venice sketchbook' (or 'Libretto di Raffaello'), which is apparently a copy after a lost Raphael. The same types recur in Raphael's Siege of Perugia in the Louvre – neat hands with small square fingernails, and meticulous facial expressions, especially the hook-nosed man in the background at centre left who is virtually repeated at the centre of the Siege of Perugia. The young Raphael used wash almost only in careful sheets, such as the Louvre Annunciation and the ruined Agony in the Garden in the Pierpont Morgan Library. Allowing for the difference in scale, the figure types, pen-work and delicate wash of Raphael's two large modelli for the Piccolomini Library – the Journey of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini to Basle n the Uffizi, and the Meeting of Frederick II and Eleanor of Portugal in the Morgan – are also close to those of the present sheet.

Antonio Pollaiuolo's famous engraving of a battle of nude men is an obvious inspiration, and Popham catalogued this drawing as by that artist (Popham & Wilde 1949, no. 27), though he later retracted that view. Most recent commentators have recognised that the style of the drawing is a little later than that of Pollaiuolo (who died in 1498), when the vigour of that artist's motifs was being overlaid by a certain daintiness: the style of the sheet might be characterised as the vitality of Pollaiuolo filtered through the sensibilities of Perugino. Although their temperaments may seem very different, Perugino and his followers were alert to the strengths of Pollaiuolo, and there are several surviving copies by Umbrian artists from what must have been one of Pollaiuolo's most esteemed compositions, of a prisoner led before a judge (eg. a sheet in the British Museum, A.E. Popham and P. Pouncey, , 2 vols., 1950, p. 138).

Raphael was periodically interested in the motif of the nude in action during in his late Umbrian and Florentine periods, and at least ten drawings survive on this theme, of a range of dates, types and formats. Unusually for Raphael, none of these can be related to a known project. The relatively large Siege of Perugia mentioned above may have been intended as a model for transfer to some other medium; the present drawing possibly served the same purpose, for it is indented with the stylus around some of its contours (these lines were made after the pen-work, not as underdrawing). The verso is not rubbed with chalk or charcoal, and any transfer of the outlines to another support must have been effected by placing a second, blackened, sheet between this drawing and the support, in the manner of carbon paper.

The two numbers inscribed on the sheet, probably in the seventeenth century, show that it passed through the same collections as a drawing by Raphael in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (a study of the Adoration of the Magi for the predella of the Vatican Assumption and Coronation) that bears numbers in the same hands and positions, 1193 at top left and 73 at bottom right. The former is consecutive with the number here, 1192, and as the subject of the drawing is so different this may indicate that the unidentified collector placed the drawings together in the belief that both were by Raphael.

Text adapted from M. Clayton, Raphael and his Circle,1999, no. 10.