男の肖像

Around 1502 the painter who would later run the Vatican's art was a teenager from Urbino, not yet 20, still absorbing the manner of his master Perugino in the hill towns of Umbria. This early portrait comes from those years, before Florence, before the papal rooms in Rome that made his name shorthand for High Renaissance grace. The sitter is unknown, turned three-quarters against a plain ground, the face modelled with the smooth, even calm Raphael carried out of Perugino's workshop and never quite lost. It is the work of someone learning to make a face look composed and self-possessed with almost no drama. Raphael would be dead by 1520, at 37, his late Roman workshop so busy that assistants finished much of what left it, while this quiet early panel came wholly from his own young hand.