Portrait of the Young Cardinal Ippolito I d'Este

In a note dating from 1530 the Venetian patrician and art lover Marcantonio Michiel mentions a portrait painted by Raphael of the poet and humanist Pietro Bembo, which he saw in Bembo's house in Padua. The picture was painted in Urbino sometime between 1504 and 1506: in other words it is one of Raphael's early works. As such, the tight space, the motif of the parapet, and the somewhat unnatural positioning of the hands resting on it still betray the influence of Netherlandish models and of Perugino. Bembo became one of the leading figures of Renaissance literary life primarily with his poems written in the style of Petrarch, his treatise on love, Gli Asolani, and his linguistic-stylistic work entitled Prose.