Portrait of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese

The young cardinal in this portrait was made a prince of the church at 14, because his grandfather happened to be pope. Raphael painted him around 1509 in Rome, when the Farnese were climbing fast and Alessandro was still in his early twenties. Decades later this same man would be elected Pope Paul III, the pope who opened the Council of Trent and set Michelangelo to work on the Last Judgment. Here none of that has happened yet. Raphael sets him near a window, a bright foreground giving way to a dark hall behind, and puts a folded letter in his delicate right hand. It is the portrait of a careful young man who already knows how power is held, made by a painter who was himself the most sought-after in Rome.