Venus

This Venus has travelled down the line of Raphael's circle, one name at a time. The Borghese inventory of 1693 listed it as Raphael himself. By 1790 it had passed to Giulio Romano, his chief assistant. In 1869 it moved to Baldassarre Peruzzi, the Sienese painter and architect who worked in Rome in those same years, and that name was widely accepted for more than a century. In 1988 the scholar Pierluigi Leone de Castris gave it to Leonardo Grazia of Pistoia, placing it in the painter's Roman years in the 1530s, well over a decade after the master's death. The museum follows that view. On the panel, a smooth, pale body stands against an almost black ground, the fair curly head turns aside with a faintly melancholy look, and a blue-grey cloth slips from her arm.