La donna gravida

Raphael painted this pregnant woman in Florence around 1505, when he was in his early twenties and had just arrived from Urbino to study what Leonardo and Michelangelo were doing. You can see him watching Leonardo closely. The calm three-quarter pose, the hands folded low, the soft modelling of the face all echo the Mona Lisa, which Leonardo was working on in the same city at the same time. What is unusual is the subject. Renaissance portraits almost never showed a woman visibly pregnant, yet here her left hand rests plainly on her belly and the loosened gown makes no attempt to hide it. We do not know who she was. The picture was catalogued at the Pitti Palace as the work of an unknown hand, and only in 1839 did anyone connect it to Raphael.