A drawing of an enthroned bishop on a raised dais, under a vault, between a king and another bishop.

The drawing was presumably produced as a modello for a major altarpiece, though no such work is known. The enthroned bishop appears, almost identically, as Saint Ambrose at the centre of a polyptych by Cima in the church of Sant'Ambrogio, Ornica (Bergamo) (ill. G. Villa, ed., Cima da Conegliano, Poeta del Paesaggio, 2010, p. 35).

The drawing was first attributed to Cima himself by Berenson (1901), but Hadeln (Venezianische Zeichnungen des Quattrocento, 1925, p.63) and the Tietzes (Drawings of the Venetian Painters, 1944, no. 661) did not accept its autograph nature. More recently it has been generally accepted as by Cima.

By ruling black chalk lines which extend out from some of the architectural forms and down the centre of the sheet, Cima was able to achieve the distinct symmetry and spatial and compositional harmony that characterise his work. The groined vault and detailed architectural setting in which the figures have been place was designed to create the illusion that viewer was looking not at a painted image but into a chapel within the church - the conceit of extending the actual architecture of the church into the fictive architectural setting of the painting was popular in Venice at the end of the fifteenth century.

The sheet has been badly creased and abraded, and appears to have been cut on all four sides of the sheet. It is possible that the drawing originally included the design for its frame (P. Humfrey, Cima da Conegliano, p.177).