Dame mit dem Einhorn

For a long time nobody was even sure who this young woman was. By the 1760s the Borghese inventory listed her as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, painted by Perugino. She had a wheel, a martyr's palm, and a heavy cloak over her shoulders, all of which pointed to the saint. Then in the 1930s restorers began lifting away later paint, and the props came off with it. Under Saint Catherine's attributes sat a small white unicorn in her lap, a medieval sign of chastity, and under Perugino's name the hand of the young Raphael. Radiography later found yet another layer beneath the unicorn, a little dog, an emblem of faithfulness in marriage, which suggests the portrait may have marked a betrothal. What survives now is close to what Raphael left around 1505, a girl turned three-quarters to a window with the open sky of Umbria behind her.