Non-invasive contactless analysis of an early drawing by Raffaello Sanzio by means of optical methods.

Studying highly valuable and fragile Renaissance drawings requires a non-invasive contactless analytical approach. In this work, we study an early drawing by Raffaello Sanzio, one of the most important artists of the Italian Renaissance, realized during his stay in Florence (1504-1508). Our analyses aimed to reveal the features of the paper support significant for its dating, identify and map the drawing media to understand the artist's technical approach, and document the drawing condition with imaging and single-sited optical methods.