Self-Portrait

This small panel has been missing since 11 November 1978, when it was stolen from the Galleria Borghese. It copies the self-portrait Raphael painted in his early twenties, around 1506 to 1508, now in the Uffizi in Florence and one of his most copied pictures. Who made this version is unknown, and it is dated only loosely, to the first half of the 16th century. The Borghese inventories kept changing their minds about it. In 1693 it was listed as Raphael himself, in 1700 as his pupil Giulio Romano, and from 1790 as Timoteo Viti, a painter from Urbino. In 1959 the gallery's cataloguer, Paola Della Pergola, called it a mediocre copy, its wood split and its paint worn, above all across the dark jacket. An old black-and-white photograph still shows those long cracks running down the background.