The Self-Portrait with a Friend (also known as Double Portrait and as Raphael and His Fencing Master[1]) is a painting by
ItalianHigh Renaissance painter
Raphael. It dates to 1518–1520,[2] and is in the
Louvre Museum of
Paris,
France. Whether the figure on the left is actually a self-portrait by Raphael is uncertain,[better source needed] although it was already identified as such in a 16th-century print.[3]
^Theodore K. Rabb identifies the figure on the right as Giulio Romano, in "Why is Raphael So Central to Western Art?," TLS, July 6, 2012, reprinted in Why Does Michelangelo Matter?: A Historian's Questions about the Visual Arts, Palo Alto, California: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 2018, p. 216.
^Ingrid Rowland writes, "[Tom] Henry and
[Paul] Joannides argue that the famous double portrait of Raphael and a younger friend shows Raphael and Giulio Romano, and the identification has much to recommend it, although there are some significant differences between the features of the young man and
Titian’s later portrait of a middle-aged, successful Giulio (unless the older Giulio had begun plucking his eyebrows and Titian ignored the shape of his ears). Infrared reflectography reveals that the two figures were once posed almost side by side, but Raphael eventually thought better of it and moved his own figure higher, so that he could clap his friend paternally on the shoulder—another reason to suppose that the friend might be restless, ambitious Giulio." Rowland, Ingrid, "The Gentle Genius,"
The New York Review of Books, January 10, 2013