This rare underdrawing for an unfinished manuscript illumination sheds light on the working practices of Lorenzo Monaco, the Camaldolite monk who became the greatest and most versatile late Gothic painter in Florence. It was produced at a time when most Italian studies were made on the same surface as the actual finished work. Tendrils of ornamental foliage, with exquisitely naturalistic flowers carefully constructed over ruled auxiliary lines, emanate from a historiated initial D. The elongated figures, set within the elaborate pictorial space of the initial, are modeled atmospherically with wash.

This and a related drawing, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem (now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana), originally formed a single page in the famous Santa Maria degli Angeli choir books—already regarded in the Renaissance as the crowning achievement of the art of illumination in fifteenth-century Florence. The page pertained to the sung liturgy of the Mass for Palm Sunday. Here, the figural scene within the initial was inspired by the recommended reading for the feast (Matthew 21:12). The presence of children at right alludes to the verses that immediately follow Christ's entry into the temple, his expulsion of the merchants, and the fulfillment of the prophecy ("Out of the mouth of babes . . . ").