Ritratto di Agnolo Doni

Around 1504 a wealthy Florentine cloth merchant named Agnolo Doni married a young noblewoman, and to mark the wedding he hired a painter barely into his twenties to make portraits of the pair. That painter was Raphael, and he was in Florence at the moment soaking up everything Leonardo da Vinci was doing. You can see it in how Agnolo is posed. He sits turned slightly toward us, one hand resting over the other, set against a calm low landscape, the same quiet, three-quarter arrangement Leonardo had just used for the Mona Lisa. Agnolo was a serious collector, and around the same years he also commissioned Michelangelo to paint a Holy Family for the family, the tondo now known as the Doni Tondo. The two wedding portraits still hang together in the Uffizi, the husband and his bride facing one another.