Portrait de jeune femme (La Muette)

Raphael painted this dark, watchful portrait of an unnamed noblewoman around 1507, when he was steeped in the work of Leonardo, and you can see it in the turned pose and the folded hands that echo the Mona Lisa. She has long been nicknamed La Muta, the mute woman, for her closed, silent expression. The painting hangs in Urbino, Raphael's birthplace, but it very nearly vanished. In 1975 thieves broke into the ducal palace there and took it along with two panels by Piero della Francesca. For more than a year the works were gone, until they were tracked down and recovered in Switzerland and brought back to the same rooms. She is there now, in the Duchess's apartment, still refusing to say who she was.