Portrait de Bindo Altoviti

Raphael painted this young man around 1515, in Rome, at the height of his own fame at the papal court. The sitter is Bindo Altoviti, one of the most powerful bankers of his generation and a genuine friend to the artists of the day, Michelangelo and Cellini among them. He turns back over his shoulder toward us, one hand at his chest, his fair hair loose, in a pose so graceful that for a long time people wondered whether it might even be a self-portrait of Raphael. The picture stayed with Altoviti's descendants until 1808, then went to Bavaria and hung in Munich for over a century. In 1936 it was sold out of Nazi Germany, and it eventually reached Washington, where it hangs today in the National Gallery of Art.