Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione

Raphael painted this around 1515, at the height of his fame in Rome, and the sitter was a close friend, the diplomat Baldassare Castiglione. A few years later Castiglione would write The Book of the Courtier, the era's manual on how a cultivated man should carry himself, and he coined a word for the ideal, sprezzatura, a kind of studied effortlessness that hides all the work behind it. That is more or less what the portrait shows. The palette is almost entirely black, grey and white, the fur soft, the pose relaxed, nothing shouting for attention, and yet the man holds the room. His eyes follow you. Rembrandt admired this picture enough to sketch it at auction more than a century later, and you can feel its calm in his own self-portraits.