피에트로 벰보의 초상

Raphael was only about 21 when he painted this, around 1504, still early in a career that would carry him to Rome and the papal apartments. The young man in the cap was long identified as Pietro Bembo, the Venetian poet and scholar who became a cardinal and Raphael's friend, and the picture is said to have hung in Bembo's own house for years before it disappeared. But there's an honest doubt about that name. The face here, especially the nose, doesn't much match other likenesses of Bembo, and some scholars have proposed other sitters, among them Agnolo Doni, whom Raphael was painting around the same moment. When the panel resurfaced in the Esterhazy collection and came to Budapest in 1820, it was catalogued not as a Raphael at all but as the work of Bernardino Luini, a lesser Lombard painter. It hangs now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, a young man's face whose name we hold only loosely.