In the 1930s, detailed X-ray analyses of the painting were undertaken and the unicorn discovered and restored. Later, in the 1950s, decades after every trace of the Saint Catherine disguise had been removed from the portrait, further radiographic analysis of the painting’s hidden layers revealed what appeared to be an even deeper truth – that Raphael himself had applied an early filter to his painting to conceal what he had initially intended to place in the young woman’s lap: a small floppy-eared lapdog – a stock symbol for marital fidelity that invigorates paintings from Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, to Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 1538.
The palimpsest
For the past 70 years, the painting has been understood as a tangled tissue of muddled meanings – as much about what is not there as what is. As a result, it has become a poignant palimpsest of enforced feminine ideals, as the subject has fitfully mutated from faithful wife to incorruptible virgin to divine saint. Whether there was, in fact, ever really a lapdog beneath the unicorn (the curators of the current exhibition think not), there is little doubting the power of Raphael’s mercurial masterpiece, one of more than 170 paintings, drawings, and tapestries assembled for Raphael: Sublime Poetry.
Once unpacked, the alternately hidden and restored layers of Raphael’s transfixing portrait chronicle the ever-evolving ideals of and demands on femininity as set by male master painters and patrons. The restless image speaks with remarkable urgency to our own age’s obsession with carefully curated identity – how we forge, finesse, and falsify who we are and who we are told to be, seeking simultaneously to preserve and erase ourselves in an avalanche of filtered selfies and fabricated identities. Never before has an age been so technologically equipped to record and store semblances of itself while at the same time so self-consciously uncertain about who it really is.
Raphael: Sublime Poetry is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until 28 June.
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