Portrait d'une femme

Sebastiano had just come down from Venice to Rome when he painted this, around 1512, and he brought the soft glowing manner of his teacher Giorgione with him. For centuries almost nobody believed he had done it. An old inventory gave it to Raphael, then to Giorgione, and by the late 1700s the gallery's own director insisted it was Raphael's portrait of his lover, the baker's daughter known as La Fornarina. Only later study handed it firmly back to Sebastiano. Who the woman actually is has never been settled either. One recent proposal names her as Francesca Ordeaschi, the mistress and later wife of the Roman banker Agostino Chigi, who was Sebastiano's patron in those years.