Ritratto di Guidobaldo da Montefeltro

Raphael grew up in Urbino, where his father was the duke's court painter, so when he made this around 1506 he was painting his own sovereign. Guidobaldo da Montefeltro had been through a hard few years. In 1502 Cesare Borgia's troops drove him out of Urbino and seized the city, and he got it back only after his brother-in-law was elected Pope Julius II. His court, for all that turmoil, was the most polished in Italy. The writer Castiglione set his famous Book of the Courtier in these very rooms, staging elegant evening conversations around the duke and duchess. Raphael shows him quiet and a little worn, in dark clothes against a plain ground. Guidobaldo was often ill and had no children, and when he died two years later the Montefeltro line died with him.