Agnolo Bronzino, a revolutionary second-generation Italian Mannerist painter, ranks among the greatest draftsmen of all time (although fewer than forty sheets can be securely attributed to him). This powerful, carefully rendered life study is connected to one of his most historically significant paintings, The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence. It served as the design for a seated river god at the lower right in the fresco. Duke Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned the fresco on February 11, 1565, in a letter written directly to Bronzino (then a distinct honor for an artist). Giorgio Vasari, an exuberant admirer of Bronzino, noted the fresco as a "work in progress" in his Lives of 1568. The final work was unveiled on August 10, 1569.

The complex pose of the figure was designed to display Bronzino's mastery of drawing technique, anatomy, and difficult effects of perspective (a competitive allusion to Michelangelo, who died in 1564). The modeling was achieved with seamlessly blended strokes, while the outlines maintain an impressive vigor of stroke and tonal inflection. The head and foreshortened facial features, in particular, were boldly, almost incisively drawn with the stick of chalk so that the design could be seen from a distance.

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