Description: Several light-brown and one green spot. Laid down. Inscribed at lower left in pen and brown ink. Tiz. Numbered and inscribed at lower right: 11 14 1801 Titien, and on the old mount: 23 (struck out) and 1213. (Sparre). 

This drawing has not been commented on in modern times. Like the sheet of an ox in the Florence Uffizi, it has a traditional attribution to Titian. Although the perception of the motif, the scale, etc., are very similar in the two drawings, there are definite differences in the penwork, that seem to rule out our sheet as an original. Instead of the nervous strokes in the Uffizi sheet one finds a technique with long, sweeping lines. At the same time there are parallels to be found in the manner of modelling bodies.
The Uffizi sheet has been ascribed to Giovanni Bellini by W.R. Rearick, who has found similar renderings of cattle in the middle distance and background of, for instance, the Transfiguration in Naples. The Madonna del Prato and The Martyrdom of St. Peter, both in London. The first of these was begun in 1487, while the Uffizi drawing is dated to roughly the same period as the London paintings, i.e. the first decade of the 16th Century.
The anatomical structure, posture and so on in our drawing are closest to a cow in the background of The Martyrdom of St. Mark, Scuola di S. Marco (Ospedale Civile), Venice, which was completed by Vittore Belliniano ten years after Bellini's death. Our drawing, however, can hardly be connected directly with the painting, though like this it no doubt does come from an immediate follower of Bellini.
W.R. Rearick, Tiziano e il disegno veneziano del suo tempo (exhibition catalogue), Gabinetto disegni e stampe degli Uppizi 45, Firenze 1976, p.15, no. 11, fig.2. [Bjurström, It. Drawings, cat. no. 5]

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