Autorretrato

This small portrait of a dark-eyed young man in a plain cap is thought to be Raphael looking at himself, painted around 1505, when he was barely into his twenties and moving to Florence to learn from Leonardo and Michelangelo. For a long time scholars argued about whether it was really by him or a later copy, partly because the face turns up again, older, among the philosophers in his fresco The School of Athens. Technical study in the 1980s, reading the underdrawing beneath the paint, came down on the side of Raphael's own hand. What strikes you is how little there is, no rich costume, no setting, just a soft brown ground and a quiet, almost guarded expression. He would be dead at 37, already one of the most celebrated painters in Rome.