"Raphael. Portrait of Young Woman with Unicorn" on Display in Naples

Following the success of the last edition of "The Illustrious Guest", a project of exchanges between our museum venues and prestigious Italian and international museums active since 2015, the Gallerie d’Italia in Naples will host a true masterpiece for the 2025 edition: Portrait of Young Woman with Unicorn by Raphael Sanzio, on loan from the Borghese Gallery in Rome.

The Young woman with Unicorn was attributed to Raphael by art historian Roberto Longhi in 1927 when it still bore overpaintings that, covering the unicorn, had transformed it into a Saint Catherine holding a spiked wheel and a martyr's palm. Shortly thereafter, the artwork underwent restoration, which removed these later alterations.

Radiographic analyses of the painting revealed that before the unicorn—an emblem of chastity (or of excesses and intemperance being tamed)—Raphael had initially painted a small dog, a symbol of fidelity. This suggests that the portrait was likely commissioned for a wedding. Some scholars have proposed identifying the sitter as Maddalena Strozzi before her 1504 marriage to Agnolo Doni, who was also a patron of Michelangelo and was portrayed with his wife by Raphael in the two paintings now housed in the Uffizi Gallery. However, the woman depicted in The Young woman with Unicorn has different eye and hair colors, leaving her identity still unknown.

The painting’s composition bears similarities to the Mona Lisa, which Raphael is generally believed to have seen for the first time shortly after moving to Florence at the end of 1504.

However, several elements suggest that he may have visited the city earlier, in the second half of 1503, and that he came into direct contact with Leonardo da Vinci at that time. A documented source confirms that by October of that year, Leonardo had already painted the head and possibly the bust of Mona Lisa. Raphael likely saw the work at that point, as indicated by some of his early sketches, which appear less refined than the Young woman with Unicorn at the Borghese Gallery. Dated to the beginning of Raphael’s second stay in Florence in early 1505, the painting seems to result from a later engagement with Mona Lisa, which by then had reached a more advanced stage of execution.

The exhibition can be visited with the Campania>artecard pass.