Ritratto di Emilia Pia da Montefeltro

Emilia Pia da Montefeltro was one of the sharpest women at the court of Urbino in the early 1500s, and anyone who has read Castiglione's Book of the Courtier already knows her voice. In that famous dialogue on the ideal courtier, set in the Urbino palace over four evenings, she is the quick, skeptical woman who keeps puncturing the men's fine speeches. This small panel from around 1504 shows her in dark, sober dress against a plain ground, and it is usually given to the young Raphael, then in his early twenties and working near Urbino. The attribution has been argued over for a long time. What is not in doubt is the sitter, named in an old inscription on the back, and the panel travelled to Florence a century later as part of a Medici bride's dowry.