Copy after Raphael
The story
Copy after Raphael is a cataloguing label for paintings that repeat a known composition by Raphael, the Renaissance painter from Urbino, made by other hands, usually unnamed and at many different dates. His pictures were copied constantly, by students learning their craft and for collectors who wanted his designs on their walls.
Copies under this heading include the round Madonna della Seggiola, whose original hangs in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, at the University of Exeter and at Lambeth Palace in London. In Munich the Alte Pinakothek has copies of the Madonna with the Veil, the Archangel Michael and a Madonna and Child, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, one of the designs Raphael made for tapestries in the Sistine Chapel. The Galleria Borghese in Rome owns a 16th-century copy of his portrait of Pope Julius II, and a small copy of his self-portrait that was stolen from the gallery in 1978 and is still missing.
