Raphael
The Borghese Gallery holds four works attributed to Raphael — and the collection is more complicated, more dramatic, and more revealing than its modest size suggests. Two of the four are genuine autograph paintings; two are period copies. One of the originals is among the most important altarpieces of the High Renaissance. The other spent most of its history disguised beneath later overpainting. Together, they offer a Raphael experience that neither the Vatican nor any major museum can replicate: close, unhurried, and stripped of the monumental scale that so often turns his art into spectacle.
Raphael died in 1520. Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the family’s great collector, was not born until 1577. Every painting here was acquired as a trophy — seized, purchased, or inherited long after the artist’s death. The story of how these four works arrived in Rome, and what survived and what was lost along the way, runs beneath the surface of every canvas in Room IX.
Why the Borghese is the right place to see Raphael
Most encounters with Raphael happen at monumental scale: the Stanze at the Vatican, where entire walls and ceilings dissolve into fresco cycles designed to overwhelm. The Borghese inverts that experience entirely. Here, four easel paintings hang at eye level in a single intimate room of a seventeenth-century suburban villa. The scale is human, not architectural — which means the paintings can be read as paintings, not as decoration. Brushwork becomes visible. Flesh tones reveal their layered glazes. The difference between a Raphael original and a workshop copy declares itself without the aid of a catalogue.
Intimacy as method
The gallery limits entry to 360 visitors per two-hour slot across 20 rooms. Room IX, on the upper floor, rarely feels crowded. At that distance and that pace, Raphael’s characteristic quality — what contemporaries called grazia, the appearance of effortlessness — becomes palpable in a way it never can in the Sistine Chapel crowd. The Deposition measures roughly 175 × 179 centimetres: large for an altarpiece, manageable as a painting. The Lady with Unicorn is barely larger than a laptop screen. These are works built for private viewing, and the Borghese returns them to something close to those conditions.
Four works, two originals — and why that matters
The Borghese’s own scholarly catalogue is transparent about the attribution status of its Raphael holdings. The Deposition and the Portrait of a Young Woman with Unicorn are autograph originals. La Fornarina is now attributed to Raffaellino del Colle, a member of Raphael’s workshop. The Portrait of Pope Julius II is a Roman school copy — the original has been at the National Gallery, London, since 1824. Knowing this does not diminish the collection; it sharpens it. Standing before a copy of one of the most revolutionary portraits in Western art, knowing the original hangs in London, is itself an education in how paintings move through history.
Raphael and the Borghese collection
Cardinal Scipione Borghese assembled his Raphael holdings through three distinct channels: confiscation, purchase, and inheritance. The Deposition was removed from its church in Perugia in 1608 under cover of night, on papal authority — a seizure the city protested for years. The Lady with Unicorn entered the collection in 1682 through the Olimpia Aldobrandini inheritance, disguised as a Saint Catherine by Perugino. La Fornarina was first documented in the collection in 1833. The original Julius II portrait was acquired early, then lost again: it left the family during the upheavals of the 1790s and eventually reached London. What remains is a fragment of a formerly much larger holding — but the two originals that survive are extraordinary.
How to look at Raphael: four qualities most visitors overlook
Raphael’s paintings reward sustained attention precisely because they appear, at first glance, to require none. The compositions feel inevitable. The figures settle into their poses without apparent effort. That appearance is the art. Look longer, and the decisions that produce it begin to emerge.
Grazia: effortlessness built on labour
Giorgio Vasari, writing within living memory of Raphael, described his art as the union of “inexhaustible riches” with “a certain nonchalance.” The Italian term is grazia — grace — and its secret is that immense preparatory labour produces the appearance of inevitability. For the Deposition alone, more than a dozen preparatory drawings survive, tracing a radical two-year evolution from a static Lamentation to the dynamic transport scene on the panel. By the time paint reached the surface, every decision had already been made. The result looks as though no other arrangement were possible.
Composition as a question with one answer
Raphael’s figures occupy space as though they grew into it. The pyramidal groupings, the warm distributed light, the way bodies echo and answer one another across the canvas — these are not conventions inherited from his teachers but solutions arrived at through systematic study of ancient sculpture, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. In the Deposition, the V-shaped diagonals of the bearers and the counter-diagonal of Christ’s body produce a tension entirely new to altarpiece design: the calm of the composition is achieved against, not through, the emotional weight of the subject.
The dialogue with Leonardo
The Lady with Unicorn was painted in Florence around 1505–06, the same years Leonardo was working on the Mona Lisa. The debts are explicit: the three-quarter format, the loggia opening onto a landscape, the folded hands, the pyramidal arrangement. But where Leonardo creates psychological ambiguity through sfumato, Raphael produces clarity. The young woman’s gaze is watchful and direct, her form precisely bounded, her light even and warm. Raphael absorbed Leonardo’s innovations and transformed them into something more accessible — not shallower, but differently resolved.
Portrait as moral argument
Raphael’s portraits are never simply likenesses. The Lady with Unicorn addresses virtue symbolically; the original Julius II addressed power psychologically. In Raphael’s hands, a portrait becomes a statement about what the sitter wishes to be understood as — and the painter’s intelligence lies in making that statement feel like observation. The unicorn’s presence, originally a lapdog painted over, was itself a revision: a shift from conjugal fidelity to chastity, probably because circumstances changed between sittings.
The four paintings at the Borghese Gallery
The Deposition
Commissioned in 1504 by Atalanta Baglioni of Perugia for her family chapel, the Deposition is a memorial as much as an altarpiece. Her son Grifonetto had conspired to massacre the ruling family, then been cut down before she could shelter him. The young bearer at the right of the composition, with wind-lifted hair and a red tunic, is widely identified as a portrait of the slain Grifonetto himself — grief made into narrative, grief made into paint. Mary Magdalene tenderly cradles Christ’s lifeless hand; the Virgin swooning behind mirrors Atalanta’s own collapse. Raphael completed the panel in 1507, the culmination of two years of preparatory drawings in dialogue with Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà and ancient sarcophagus reliefs. It hung in Perugia for 101 years. On the night of 18–19 March 1608, agents working for Cardinal Scipione Borghese removed it under papal authority. The city protested; the cardinal was sent two copies and five silver lamps in reply.
Portrait of a Young Woman with Unicorn
The painting visitors see today is the result of three successive identities layered onto one panel. Raphael first painted a young woman holding a small lapdog — a symbol of conjugal fidelity, likely a bridal portrait. He then painted the unicorn over the dog, shifting the symbolism to virginal chastity. Centuries later, an unknown hand transformed the whole into a Saint Catherine of Alexandria, adding a martyrdom wheel, a palm frond, and a heavy cloak. The work passed for generations as a Perugino. In 1927, the art historian Roberto Longhi recognised it as a Raphael. X-rays in 1933 revealed the hidden forms; restoration in 1934–36 stripped the Saint Catherine additions; a second radiographic study in 1959 uncovered the original lapdog beneath the unicorn. The sitter’s identity remains unresolved — candidates include Maddalena Strozzi and Laura Orsini — but the painting’s long concealment has left its conservation history as one of the great detective stories in Italian art.
La Fornarina
The Borghese La Fornarina is a period copy, now attributed to Raffaellino del Colle, of the celebrated painting at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome — a half-length figure long identified as Raphael’s companion Margherita Luti, a Trastevere baker’s daughter. The Barberini original, one of Raphael’s last works, features a gold armband inscribed RAPHAEL VRBINAS: the artist’s name written directly onto the sitter’s skin, an act without parallel in Renaissance portraiture. X-ray analysis in 2001 revealed a hidden ruby ring on her left hand, sparking debate about the nature of their relationship. The Borghese copy, first documented in the collection in 1833, allows comparison with the original on a future visit to the Barberini — and makes visible, through its small departures from the source, precisely how Raphael’s touch differs from that of a gifted follower.
Portrait of Pope Julius II
The Portrait of Pope Julius II here is a Roman school copy; Raphael’s original has been at the National Gallery, London, since 1824. The original, painted c. 1511–12, was among the most revolutionary portraits of the sixteenth century: the first to show a pope in three-quarter view, seated, apparently lost in thought — where previous papal portraits demanded frontal dignity, Raphael showed interiority. Julius’s beard, grown as a sign of mourning after losing Bologna to the French, dates the painting to a span of nine months in 1511–12. Vasari recorded that the image “frightened everyone who saw it, as if it were the living man himself.” The copy at the Borghese preserves a readable version of that invention for those who cannot make the journey to London — and marks, in its own quiet way, how much of the original Raphael holding once passed through these rooms.
How to see Raphael at the Borghese Gallery
The right sequence
Begin with the Portrait of a Young Woman with Unicorn. Its small size and calm surface invite the kind of close, patient looking that rewards everything else in the room. Then move to the Deposition: after the quiet of the portrait, the altarpiece’s controlled tension — bearers straining, grief cresting, composition holding everything in place — becomes more legible. Save the two copies for last, not because they are lesser objects but because comparison sharpens perception. Standing before a copy after you have looked carefully at an original is one of the best exercises in visual intelligence the gallery offers.
What to look for in each painting
In the Deposition, follow Raphael’s handling of hands: the lifeless weight of Christ’s, the Magdalene’s tender cradling, the bearers’ gripping effort. Each pair of hands tells a different story about presence and absence. In the Lady with Unicorn, study the transitions in flesh tone from forehead to throat to the unicorn’s flank — and consider that the animal you see is the second creature Raphael placed there, painted over the first. In La Fornarina, notice what the copy shares with the Barberini original and where the handling grows softer, less certain: that is the difference between Raphael’s touch and a workshop hand following his model. In the Julius II, even in copy, the downward gaze and the hands resting on the chair’s arms carry the weight of the original invention — a pope made psychologically present rather than ceremonially displayed. Room IX rewards as long as the visitor is willing to remain in it.
