The youth of this delicate study (probably a workshop assistant) wears the street clothes of early-sixteenth-century Florence: a large cap (berrettone), a shirt with puffy sleeves, tight breeches, and an enveloping cloak, which amplifies the volume of his body. Bachiacca articulated the figure and surrounding space softly, in an intermediate plane of tone but with a stunning vigor of mark. Much of the spirited hatching and cross-hatching in the shadows was left unblended, and the description of contours is expressive. To accentuate the depth of the shadows in the cloak's folds, he scratched in some contours with the stylus.

The drawing was preparatory for the figure of an onlooker at the extreme right in his panel painting The Discovery of the Cup in Benjamin's Sack (Galleria Borghese, Rome), based on an episode told in Genesis 44:12–13. That work was part of a famous narrative cycle on the life of the virtuous Joseph, which, along with panels by Francesco Granacci, Andrea del Sarto, and Pontormo, decorated the marital bedchamber of Pierfrancesco Borgherini and his wife, Margherita Acciaiuoli. Commissioned by the groom's father and probably executed between 1515 and 1518, the panels for the Borgherini bedroom rank among the canonical masterpieces of early Mannerism in Florence.