Why is this 16th century masterpiece not what it seems?

In the 1930s, detailed X-ray analyzes of the painting were carried out and the rhinoceros was discovered and recovered. Later, in the 1950s, decades after every trace of Saint Catherine’s disguise had been removed from the picture, further radiographic analysis of the painting’s hidden layers revealed what appeared to be a deeper truth—namely, that Raphael himself had applied an early filter to his painting to obscure what he had initially intended to place on the young woman’s lap: a floppy-eared little dog—a standard symbol of marital fidelity that animates Jan Van Arnolfini’s paintings Portrait of Ecce, 1434, to Venus. Urbino by Titian, 1538.

palimpsest

For the past 70 years, painting has been seen as a tangled tapestry of confused meanings – about what is not there as much as about what is. As a result, it becomes a poignant palimpsest of imposed feminine ideals, with the subject shifting intermittently from devoted wife to incorruptible virgin to divine saint. Whether there was, in fact, a small dog under the unicorn (the current exhibition’s curators don’t believe), there is no doubt about 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 striking portrait chronicle the evolving ideals and demands of femininity as defined by master painters and male patrons. This turbulent image speaks with remarkable urgency to our era’s obsession with carefully curated identity – how we forge and falsify who we are and who we are told to be, simultaneously seeking to preserve and erase ourselves in a torrent of filtered selfies and fabricated identities. Never has an age been so technologically equipped to record and store manifestations of itself, and at the same time so self-consciously unsure of its true identity.

Raphael: Sublime Poetry is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through June 28.

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