Sublime Beauty: Raphael’s Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn

Celebrating one of Raphael’s most beguiling and enigmatic paintings, his Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn of 1505-6, from the Galleria Borghese in Rome, this fully illustrated volume presents extensive new research and conservation work in a clear and engaging way. It features two essays by leading specialists in 16th-century Renaissance art, Dr. Mary Shay-Millea and Dr. Linda Wolk-Simon. They explore, respectively, the stylistic relationship between this masterpiece and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, also dating from this period, and the link between the work and Petrarch’s notions of beauty in Renaissance art, as well as attributions and the painting’s distinct iconography. The painting poses many interesting questions about both nuptial imagery and patronage during the 15th and 16th centuries. Esther Bell presents details of the painting’s conservation; recent x-rays of the panel have revealed that the animal figure was originally intended to be a dog, and was altered, possibly as a result of a change to the terms of the artist’s commission when the unknown sitter’s marriage was called off. With a thoroughly researched chronology and bibliography, ‘Sublime Beauty’ is an important contribution to the existing research on Raphael’s iconic painting and to the study of the artist’s working practice. AUTHOR: Esther Bell is curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Mary Shay-Millea is an independent scholar based in New York, and formerly a Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum Linda Wolk-Simon is the director and chief curator of Bellarmine Museum of Art at Fairfield University, CT 33 colour illustrations