Study of the Head of a Bearded Older Man. Verso: Studies of Hands holding a Sheet of Paper

This drawing has previously been identified (see inscription on the verso) as a study for the head of Zacharias in Gaulli's ca. 1693-94 modello, now in the Accademia di San Luca, for his ca. 1698 altarpiece depicting the Birth of St. John the Baptist, in the Altieri chapel of Santa Maria in Campitelli, Rome. While the heads are very similar in type, Zacharias looks upward in both the modello and finished painting, so the link between the drawing and those works is open to question. An alternate possibility is that the drawing relates to Gaulli's late project for mosaics in the antechamber of the Baptism chapel at San Pietro in Vaticano. Although this project was not completed before Gaulli's death, there is a close correspondence between the head on this sheet and that in a drawing for the Baptism of the Centurion by St. Peter (Dusseldorf, inv. FP 11300; see Graf 1976, cat. 429).
A number of Gaulli's late portraits (for example the ca. 1705 Portrait of Cardinal Taddeo Luigi dal Verme at the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design) show figures holding letters, and the studies on the verso likely relate to such a picture.
The sheet comes from an album of late studies by Gaulli that was broken up and sold on the Roman art market around 1958, drawings from which are now scattered among many collections (see Macandrew and Graf, "Baccicio's Later Drawings," Master Drawings 10, no. 3 (1972), 237 and 359n16).