This drawing of powerful chiaroscuro and dazzling execution with the brush appears to be the only extant autograph cartoon (full-scale drawing) in monumental scale by Parmigianino. The artist calibrated the difficult three-quarter view of the saint's head, seen in perspective "from below" (sotto in sù), with the help of a grid of vertical and horizontal parallel lines, incised with a stylus against a ruler and now only faintly visible. These lines guided the artist in placing the saint's foreshortened facial features along the curving axes of the head. Over the charcoal underdrawing, Parmigianino applied the two colors of wash with an awesome rapidity of the brush, and in a manner that is very similar to that of his mature easel paintings. For example, the flickering treatment of the bishop's hands with quick, broad brushstrokes is strikingly like that in Parmigianino's panel painting of the Portrait of a Man with a Book (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which is also in an equivalent scale. The motif of the flamelike praying hands lit from below, as seen in the cartoon, is among the most distinctive of Parmigianino's stylistic devices, and it would also be often emulated by Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli, the artist's less talented older cousin.

The number of pentimenti in the Metropolitan Museum cartoon, particularly in the charcoal underdrawing on the right, suggests the extent of Parmigianino's reworking of the bishop saint's figure at this advanced stage of the composition. The eyes of the figure were originally open, and his gaze directed to the upper right. As is typical of such large rendered Italian Renaissance drawings, the chiaroscuro in Parmigianino's cartoon is calibrated broadly and boldly for legibility at a far viewing distance. The atypical use of a brush and wash medium with charcoal seems indebted to the Renaissance tradition of cartoons for stained glass.

In scale and design, the Metropolitan Museum cartoon is closest to the broadly painted bishop saint on the left in the so-called Madonna of Saint Margaret (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna), which Parmigianino finished in 1529–30 for the nuns of the convent church of Santa Margherita, Bologna.

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