Портрет Томмазо Ингирами, прозванного Федра

Around 1510 Raphael was working at the papal court in Rome, and this is one of his sitters from that world: Tommaso Inghirami, a celebrated orator whom the pope had just made keeper of the Vatican Library. He had earned the nickname Fedra years before, when a stage mishap forced him to improvise Latin verse so brilliantly during a play that the name of his role, Phaedra, stuck to him for life. Inghirami had a pronounced squint, one eye drifting upward, and rather than hide it Raphael has him glance up from his writing as though a thought has just struck him, turning the flaw into the look of a mind at work. The pen is poised, the page half filled.