Portrait of Pope Julius II

Raphael painted Julius II around 1511, and when the portrait went on public view at Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, viewers reportedly found it unnervingly lifelike, a pope caught sitting and thinking instead of posed in profile. It was copied from then on, and the copies grew hard to sort out. The panel now in the National Gallery in London was catalogued as a copy of the Florentine version until 1970, when X-rays, a misread inventory number and a cleaning identified it as Raphael's own. The Florentine picture that had held that rank is a canvas from Raphael's workshop, probably made for the della Rovere court at Urbino and inherited by the Medici, and it hangs in the Saturn Room of this gallery. The panel here is a further copy, carried in the Pitti's separate inventory of art objects and kept in the deposits. Older catalogues attach to it the name of Giulio Romano, Raphael's chief pupil, and the museum lent it under that attribution to an exhibition in 2022.