A newly discovered drawing by Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, known as Il Perugino — the Renaissance master who taught Raphael — will go under the hammer at Dorotheum's Palais Dorotheum in Vienna on 21 October 2026, with an estimate of €200,000 to €300,000. The head study, dating from around 1485, is one of the highlights of the house's Classic Week Old Masters sale.

The sheet shows a young saint with his gaze turned upward and intricately curled hair, worked up on pink-prepared paper with delicate brushstrokes and white highlights. According to Dorotheum's Old Masters specialist Mark MacDonnell, the drawing can be directly connected to Perugino's celebrated Pietà, now in the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, and was most likely made as a preparatory study for the figure of Saint Nicodemus. The work can be traced back to Viennese collections in the 19th century.

The attribution makes the drawing a significant art-historical object rather than merely a market curiosity. Perugino (c. 1450–1523) was one of the defining painters of the early Italian Renaissance, and working drawings of this quality — sheets that open a window onto how a major altarpiece was planned — rarely survive, let alone come to auction. Dorotheum describes it as a rare example of Renaissance draughtsmanship and a rediscovery of considerable significance.

It leads a Classic Week offering that the house is pitching as unusually rich in fresh discoveries, with newly surfaced works by Bernardo Bellotto and Paolo Veronese also in the sale, alongside pictures by Luca Giordano, Guido Reni, Frans Pourbus and the studio of Pieter Brueghel the Younger. The Perugino, however, is the sleeper with the strongest scholarly backstory — a direct link from a teacher's sketch to one of the Renaissance's most famous altarpieces.