This impressive study typifies the lively, decorative style that was in vogue in Rome during the closing years of the sixteenth century and is associable with the movement generally referred to as Late Mannerism. The fluent lines and athletic forms that characterize these drawings owe their origin to the work of a number of Raphael´s followers, such as Perino del Vaga (1501-1547) and Polidoro da Caravaggio (c. 1499-c. 1543), and the principal exponent of this new graphic language was Taddeo Zuccaro (1529-1566), whose vivid imagination brought a new creative energy to drawing of the period. Faced with giving the Standing Soldiers an attribution, the owner rightly placed it within a late sixteenth-century Roman context, identifying it as the work of Taddeo´s younger brother Federico (1540/41-1609).

The style is not however especially Zuccaresque and seems more characteristic of the work of Cherubino Alberti. The attribution here proposed is made on stylistic grounds. A similarly lively and sinuous line is found in his drawing Pompey before the Censors in the British Museum, London, where the treatment of the soldiers with spears in the right background recalls some of the passages in the present sheet (inv. no. 1965-12-3-1: Gere and Pouncey, 1983, no. 10). Also characteristic of Cherubino´s work as a draftsman are the rather elongated, marionette-like figures.

Turner, Nicholas, From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci. A century of Italian drawings from the Prado, Chicago, Art Services International, 2008, p.156