Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami

Rome, around 1510. Tommaso Inghirami ran the Vatican library for Pope Julius II and was the most admired speaker in the city. Romans called him Fedra, after the night he played Phaedra in a Seneca tragedy and the stage machinery broke down, leaving him to hold the audience with improvised Latin verse until it was fixed. Raphael painted him at his desk in red robes and cap, pen in hand, eyes lifted as though the next sentence has just arrived. Inghirami had a pronounced squint, which that upward glance carries rather than conceals. Two versions of the portrait exist, this one and another in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, and scholars have argued for over a century about which came first from Raphael's own hand. Isabella Stewart Gardner bought this panel from the Inghirami family in 1898, the first Raphael to reach the United States.