Die Fornarina

Raphael painted this portrait of a young woman around 1519, near the end of a short life; he died in 1520, not yet 40, at the height of his fame in Rome. Tradition calls her the fornarina, the baker's daughter, and names her as the painter's lover. Look closely at the slender armband on her raised left arm and you can read Raphael's own name lettered there, as if he had signed her rather than the picture. The work was probably still in his studio when he died, and his pupil Giulio Romano seems to have finished and sold it. Modern X-rays found a change underneath, a landscape first, later painted over with the dark myrtle bush behind her, a plant long linked to Venus and to love.