Despite its extensiveness, the recognized corpus of drawings by Sebastiano Ricci is still missing sheets that can be securely linked to works from his early period. A heretofore unpublished drawing in the Louvre is now recognized as a preparatory sketch for "Pope Paul III Establishing the Jesuit Order", one of the paintings that Ricci made c. 1687–88 for Ranuccio II Farnese, now in the Museo Civico di Palazzo Farnese, Piacenza. This new sketch enables us to establish an important milestone in the painter’s early activity as a draftsman, and it may provide a further point of reference from which to arrange and organize his graphic oeuvre chronologically.
