Portrait of Andrea Navagero and Agostino Beazzano

These two men were Venetian scholars passing through Rome in the spring of 1516. On the left is Andrea Navagero, a poet who had just been made keeper of Venice's great library at St Mark's, and beside him his friend Agostino Beazzano, a diplomat. They moved in Raphael's circle in Rome, a group of writers and courtiers that also took in Baldassare Castiglione and the poet Pietro Bembo, and a letter from that year records the friends planning a country trip together. Raphael painted the pair as a gift for Bembo, so he would keep their faces once Navagero went back north to Venice. Setting two sitters in one portrait, turned as if mid-conversation, was still an unusual thing to attempt.