Portrait of a Young Woman as Saint Catherine of Alexandria

A young woman in strict profile, her hair bound up in pink and green ribbons, and at first glance nothing to mark her as holy. Then the edges give it away. A thin gold halo is traced behind her head, and at the lower left a piece of a spiked wheel pokes into the picture, the wheel on which, according to legend, Saint Catherine of Alexandria was to be broken. The Galleria Borghese reads it as a nod to the sitter's own name, which would make her a Caterina painted in the guise of her patron saint. The small panel was long filed under the school of Raphael, until the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson proposed Brescianino in 1909. It was painted in the 1520s, was recorded in the Borghese collection by 1833, and is kept today in the museum's storerooms.