Sublime beauty

de Esther Bell, Linda Wolk-Simon, Mary Shay-Millea, Anna Coliva

"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 blond 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 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"--