Gericault’s great appreciation for Renaissance and Baroque masters affected his art profoundly, making it possible for him to forge an original, robust style that veered away from the Neoclassical norm of his period. His study of engravings after Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rubens, the Carracci, and others, plus his firsthand encounter with Italian painting and sculpture during his sojourn to that country in 1816–17, helped him develop a repertory of muscled bodies in dynamic poses that brought great expressive force to his work.

This fluent drawing done in pen and ink with brush and watercolor interprets freely Annibale Carracci’s late-sixteenth-century painting of Venus and Cupid (Uffizi, Florence), imparting to the Italian work a singular exotic gravity. The composition may have been modeled on an engraving of the picture or on one of its painted copies, if not the original. The luxurious quality and painterly finish of the work bring it into line with several drawings heightened with gouache that Gericault made in Rome in 1817.

On the reverse of this sheet is a similarly finished drawing of a helmeted soldier in battle with a sword and a shield. This composition, too, may depend upon an Italian prototype, perhaps an Antique Roman relief.