15th/16th c. Italian drawing: school of Leonardo?

The Swan, from England, sells on 30 June a "15th/16th century Italian drawing" Virgin and child, estimated at £300 to £500.

It is a relatively large (35 by 45 cm) but rather battered looking drawing in the style of Leonardo da Vinci, and looks to be done by a fairly accomplished artist. The inscriptions on the back certainly add to the impression that it is genuinely old. In that case, it should be worth more, at least £1,000 to £2,000 without even guessing who the artist might be.

The drawing depicts a Virgin and Child with a St. Joseph to the left (so really a Holy Family), and the head of an old man more faintly to the upper right. I would describe it as School of Leonardo, but wasn't able to find any paintings really similar to it (many matching elements, but e.g. the child seems to sculpted and muscled to be by Leonardo, and he usually didn't show the ear of the Virgin but hid it beneath hair), and am curious if it will attract a bidding war or not. All ideas on who the artist might be, or what school or date, are welcome!

UPDATE: an anonymous  reader commented (see below this post) and showed me the artist and painting..

This is a painting by Il Sodoma, contemporary of Leonardo but from Siena. The Virgin and Child are quasi identical.

The Joseph can be compared with the one in the above painting.

Are the drawings by Sodoma, a follower, or fakes? Perhaps they are just drawing made by an artist on his Grand Tour seeing the works of Sodoma. But it's good to be able to put a possible name to the origin of them.

UPDATE 2: WITHDRAWN! Last minute withdrawn from the auction. Whether that has anything to do with this blog is anybody's guess of course.

Potential sleeper

Versailles, French auction house, sold on 21 July 2015 a "17th century Italian school" drawing, estimated at 150 to 200 Euro.

It sold for a rather surprising 10,208 Euro instead, suggesting that some people recognised the hand of a known artist in this. The inscriptions read (approximately) "Renone fiume" and "Bachilione fiume". The Bacchiglione is a river in Northern Italy (Vicenze, Padua). In Vicenza, there is also a Retrone river, which ends in the Bacchiglione.

I haven't got a clue who might be the artist behind this, the drawing in itself doesn't warrant the price.

A reader pointed me to some similar drawings by Giorgio Vasari, but those ones were better than the one sold now. But it certainly is the closest I've come yet to identifying this one!

Results and surprises

Checking back on some of the auctions I already mentioned in previous posts, I noted a few surprises.

At Galerie Moderne in Brussels, their sale of 13 January 2015, lot 140 was a pair of anonymous gouaches, seemingly designs for an interior of a grand house. Estimated at 100 to 150 Euro, they eventually sold for 1,400 Euro.

More surprising still was a 10 by 17cm drawing of a "study of heads", Italian school of the 16th century. Estimated at 300 to 400 Euro, they didn't look in any way remarkable to me (good enough, but nothing that stood out). It went for an impressive 7,500 Euro. Obviously someone (or rather at least two bidders) saw something there which I (or the auctioneer) wasn't aware of, and now I can't help but wondering what. The style of a famous artist? One of the heads returned in a famous painting? I have no idea, so anyone who does know or has a reasonable guess is invited to comment!

At Kaminski, many paintings remained unsold or performed under the lowest estimate (e.g. a Florent Willems low estimate of $15,000 but sold for $9,000 instead), with a minority on estimate and only a few exceeding it (e.g. a Winter Scene by Halsall, top estimate $700 but sold for $1,700, and a Still Life attributed to Max Weber, estimated 800 to 1,200 but sold for $3,000).  Nothing spectacularly exciting here though. While the painting I discussed, attributed to Wouwerman, did not reach my hopeful estimate, it still just exceeded the lowest estimate of $2,000 at $2,100, which wasn't bad for that sale.