A Young Roman Woman

In 1511 the banker Agostino Chigi brought a young Venetian painter to Rome to help decorate his riverside villa, the Farnesina. The painter, Sebastiano, arrived carrying the soft, dreamy manner of Giorgione and found himself among Raphael and Michelangelo at the height of their powers. This portrait of a young woman, made about a year later, shows him changing under that pressure. The wistful Venetian mood gives way to something weightier and more solid, a monumentality he was taking directly from Michelangelo. She holds a fold of drapery and looks steadily past us. For a long time the picture was admired as a Raphael, and only in 1835 did the gallery's first director restore it to Sebastiano's name.