Sublime Beauty: Raphael's "Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn" focuses on one of the artist's most beguiling and enigmatic paintings and the mysterious blonde sitter who epitomized his female portraiture during his Florentine period.
Two essays by leading specialists in Renaissance art, Linda Wolk-Simon and Mary Shay-Millea, explore the stylistic relationship between this masterpiece and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and the link to Petrarch's poetry and popular notions of beauty in Renaissance art. They examine attributions and the painting's distinct iconography, and why, in place of the usual lapdog, the woman holds a unicorn.They also address the intriguing question of the sitter's identity, and whether she is in fact the half-sister of Lucrezia Borgia.