Portrait of Agnolo Doni

The Florentine cloth merchant Agnolo Doni - who would also commission a famous tondo from Michelangelo - sits half-length before a clear landscape, hands quietly folded, a ring on each. Raphael, newly arrived in Florence and studying Leonardo hard, lifts the format of the Mona Lisa, elsewhere in this collection: the three-quarter turn, the folded hands, the parapet, the atmospheric distance. But where Leonardo veils everything in smoke, Raphael makes it bright, clear, and solid, the sitter frankly present. It is one of a pair with his portrait of Doni's wife Maddalena - two of the sharpest character studies of the young Raphael.