It is not often that one can enjoy a figure drawing by Baccio Bandinelli in the company of one by his pupil and biographer, Giorgio Vasari. But this is only one of the pleasures of this stately presentation, Old Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, at W.M. Brady & Co. The exhibition extends between the 16th and 19th centuries, with satisfying emphasis on the Italian and French schools.

Bandinelli’s fame was widespread in his lifetime for draftsmanship and command of anatomy. The tightly crosshatched pen and ink study, “A Dancing Man” (c. 1530–40), almost Germanic in its taut graphism, illustrates his facility with nudes in complicated and transitory poses. A difficult personality, Bandinelli was absolved of his faults by Vasari on grounds of expertise: “His disegno was of such excellence that it superseded all his natural defects.”

Drawing, or disegno, referred not only to mastery of line but also of proportion. It included that supra-rational correspondence between hand and recording eye that establishes the right relation between one part of the body and another, and its position on the page as well. No separation between drawing and design existed for the Renaissance artist, and certainly not the Florentines.

Vasari is represented by an eloquent drawing of a Bacchanalia. His linear definition is less elaborate than his tutor’s, making use of drawing’s innate powers of suggestion. His “Bacchanal” (c. 1555) embraces the motif’s canonical elements: drunken Bacchus falling about with satyrs, Silenus, and male and female bacchantes. A riot of ivy, figs, grape leaves, goatskins, and wine goblets is statutory.

A particularly charming ink drawing by Giulio Romano, “Putti Harvesting Grapes” (c. 1535–40), repeats the motif, familiar to artists from ancient sarcophagi in Rome. While the subject points back in time, the linear clarity of the forms foretells the Neoclassical period when “chaste outline” was considered the finest expression of art. The clarity of John Flaxman’s line is embodied in “A Scene from Medieval History” (c. 1793). Flaxman’s drawing combines Neoclassical linear austerity with a fascination for things Gothic that the artist shared with William Blake.

An exquisite study of two heads by Il Guercino (1591–1666) is refined by halftones achieved with delicate stumping of the sanguine lines. In François Boucher’s drawing of a woman crouching, the feminine sweetness of the head is offset by the planar rigor of her gown.

A leading printmaker, Georg Philipp Rugendas, the Elder (1666–1742), was the foremost Bavarian painter of battle scenes in his time. His pen study of a standing man seen from behind illustrates drawing’s vital connection to conceptual precision. Drawn from a bronze statuette by Willem van Tetrode (d. 1580), it is a powerful depiction of the laws of leverage that muscles obey in overcoming gravity and inertia. Although described as an écorché (a depiction of the body with its skin removed), the figure does not appear flayed as in medical illustration. Agitated motion, its stresses fixed in the moment, emphasizes the body’s structural complexity and mechanical play. Rugendas’s skill in subordinating firmly delineated details to larger masses is a major reason for his standing among other artists.

Dominating the 18th-century portion of the show is Anton Raphael Mengs’s large-scale bozzetto “The Glory of Saint Eusebius,” a model in oil for the ceiling fresco in Rome’s Church of S. Eusebio, begun in 1757. The martyred saint is borne aloft by a battery of ascending angels and helpful putti. Mengs’s mastery of the conventions of Roman baroque ceiling painting is as stunning as his palette. Key colors, the iridescent pinks and greens of shot silk — angelwear — hold the center of a light-filled composition punctuated throughout with spare color notes.

Henry Fuseli’s pencil portrait of Harriet Mellon, a celebrated actress before making a monied marriage, is a delightful tour de force. Mellon was famous for her beauty, but you might not know that from the 1815 drawing. Her profile is stylized almost to the point of a caricature of classical profiles on Attic vases. Fuseli incised the sheet with a tart quote, in Greek, from Euripides on clever women. She must have been a piece of work.

Simon-Joseph-Alexandre Clement Denis (1755–1813) is represented by a lively oil sketch of the arched interior of the stables of Maecenas at Tivoli. Despite extensive production of finished paintings, Denis earns his place on the art-historical time line with such gems as this. It is a vivacious expression of French plein air painting in its infancy. The artist brought great painterly freedom to the study of often unglamorous landscape motifs and their individual parts. The 19th-century portion of the exhibition is capped by an atmospheric plein air panorama by Théodore Rousseau painted in the Ile-de-France circa 1830–35.

Many persuasive offerings here are by artists better known to specialists and aficionados of the field than to casual viewers. The hand of Simone Cantarini, trained in the workshop of Guido Reni, is one of the loveliest here. Carl Vanloo’s red chalk “Portrait of Cristina Somis” (c. 1740–45), the artist’s wife and a celebrated singer, repeats the formality of antique coins and cameos. Charles Parrocel (1688–1752), famous in his lifetime for his draftsmanship, is represented by a sanguine drawing that exemplifies the two subjects he was associated with: military scenes and turqueries. “A Turkish Fusilier” looks decidedly modern in its energetic handling and casual attitude toward finish.

In sum, this is a substantial exhibition, impressive in range and quality.

Until February 14 (22 E. 80th St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-249-7212).