玛达莱娜·多尼肖像

Around 1504 Maddalena Strozzi, of one of the great Florentine families, married the cloth merchant Agnolo Doni, and the young couple commissioned Raphael to paint them both, one panel each. What makes her portrait worth pausing on is what Raphael had just seen. Leonardo's Mona Lisa was in Florence at about this moment, and it clearly got into Raphael's eye. He sets Maddalena the same way, turned slightly, one hand laid over the other, a landscape opening behind her. Then he does it his own way, bringing her forward, dropping the horizon, keeping the space clear and firm rather than veiled. Look at the pendant at her breast, a little gold unicorn set with a ruby, an emerald and a sapphire, with a single pearl beneath it, the old sign of purity and fidelity fitting for a new wife. The same Agnolo Doni also commissioned the famous round Holy Family from Michelangelo. Both portraits are in the Uffizi.