A drawing of a woman standing in a rocky landscape. She wears a long, flowing dress, her right hand on her hip and her left hand outstretched, wings on her head.

The careful execution, with elaborate white heightening, indicates that it is not an exploratory study for a single painting but rather served as a finished drawing, a model to be referred to repeatedly and adapted for use as appropriate, and variants of the figure appear several times in the work of Santi. This practice was a continuation of the medieval pattern-book tradition and a strong trait of late-Quattrocento Marchigian and Umbrian painting.

This figure corresponds most closely to the Muse Clio, now in the Galleria Corsini, Florence, one of a series of panels of Apollo and the Muses that decorated the Tempietto delle Muse of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, in the Palazzo Ducale at Urbino. The structure of the tiny Tempietto and its adjoining rooms was apparently complete by 1480; the paintings, by Santi and his assistant Evangelista di Pian di Meleto, were probably begun shortly after this date, though the cycle remained incomplete and Timoteo Viti finished the work in the 1510s. Further adaptations of the figure are found in the background of Santi's Visitation in Santa Maria Nuova, Fano, and as the Archangel Raphael in two versions of Tobias and the Angel -- a panel in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino, and a fragmentary fresco in the Oratorio di San Giovanni in the same city. Popham (Popham & Wilde 1949, no. 28) puzzlingly deduced from Santi's multiple use of the motif that the invention was not his own, and O. Fischel ('Die Zeichnungen der Umbrer', Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 1917, no. 219) suggested that it derived from the circle of Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. This is not borne out by Fiorenzo's oeuvre, though Santi did elsewhere reuse motifs from the circles of Fiorenzo and Perugino.

There are small but significant differences between the figure as drawn and those as painted, most notably the wings on the head here. Popham suggested that she might represent the Cimmerian sybil, who is shown with comparable wings on an anonymous Florentine engraving (A.M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving. Part I: Florentine Engravings and Anonymous Prints of Other Schools, 4 vols., 1938, no. C.II.4). However this is not a standard attribute of any sibyl; for example none of those in a contemporary set of drawings in the British Museum, attributed to Girolamo di Benvenuto, bears wings (A.E. Popham and P. Pouncey, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, 2 vols., 1950, nos. 76-85).

Watermark of an anchor in a circle, cut.

Text adapted from M. Clayton, Raphael and his Circle, 1999, no. 1.