NEW YORK—On January 23, Sotheby’s New York will offer 115 Italian drawings from the collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz. Now a private investor, Horvitz was, until 1980, a dealer of modern and contemporary art and a few years later began acquiring French and Italian drawings. The latter constitute only about 10 percent of a collection that Horvitz describes as "pathologically large"—about 1,400 sheets—but they still represent "probably the largest collection of Italian drawings in private hands in North America."

Faced by a collection that was extending rapidly into other areas, Horvitz decided to donate some of the Italian material to museums and sell the rest. "It’s a lot of stuff for a private collector to just sit on," he says.

"There are not a lot of great drawings around of such consistently high quality," says Gregory Rubinstein, worldwide director of Sotheby’s Old Master drawings department, and the total estimate of $5 million to $7 million seems to reflect the company’s confidence in the material.

The drawings range from the early 16th to the early 19th centuries and demonstrate various aspects of the creative process. There are preliminary "first thought" drawings such as Annibale Carracci’s pen study for his painting "The Choice of Hercules" (1590s, for the Palazzo Farnese in Rome) as well as several preparatory drawings inscribed with squares for transfer to the full-size canvas, notably Giulio Romano’s design in pen-and- brown ink and wash for a painting (now at Hampton Court Palace) showing "Jupiter and Juno Received in the Heavens by Ganymede and Hebes." A highly finished design by Lelio Orsi done in pen and brown ink and wash heightened with white representing "Apollo Driving the Chariot of the Sun" is among the highlights here.

Other sheets to look out for: Federico Barocci’s study of the head of a woman in colored chalks for the "Madonno del Popolo" altarpiece (in the Uffizi); a fine drawing by Pietro da Cortona in pen and brown ink and wash, squared for transfer, showing "The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence"; and Guercino’s "Study of the Head of a Man in Profile," executed almost entirely in sepia with bold and fluid brushwork. There is also a group of no less than 11 sheets by Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo.