This badly damaged copy is after the foreshortened man who reaches down to rescue a drowning comrade in the so-called Bathers group in Michelangelo´s lost cartoon of the Battle of Cascina. The appearance of the group is preserved in a grisaille copy by Aristotile da San Gallo (1481-1551) in the collection of the Earl of Leicester at Holkham Hall. The Prado drawing is more likely to be an indirect than a direct copy from Michelangelo´s cartoon, which was dismembered at some time during the second decade of the cinquecento. The pose of this nude soldier was memorable, and Michelangelo himself reused it, in reserve, in the Last Judgement, for an angle who leans over front of a cloud, his right hand stretched down, to assist a soul floating upwards towards him.

The drawing is too abraded to judge the identity of its author, thought the dark-brick coloring of the chalk suggests a Florentine from the following of Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530), probably working in the 1540s or 1550s. Among the most likely candidates is Giovanni Battista Naldini (c. 1537-1591), whose name is here very tentatively proposed as the copyist.

Turner, Nicholas, From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracc: a century of Italian drawings from the Prado, Virginia, Art Services International, 2008, p.318