The curators of the grandiose Raphael exhibition at London's National Gallery could have begun the first comprehensive exhibition of this multifaceted oeuvre outside Italy with the delicate portrait of a youth from the Ashmolean Museum, which has often been identified as a self-portrait.
Instead, they chose a sheet from the British Museum, also in black chalk.
Parts of the head are only vaguely indicated on it, but the eyes, nose and mouth of the still boyish-looking face are finely nuanced.
Through the concentrated look in the mirror - and into the future - the depiction not only acquires emphatic immediacy.
The view also suggests a strength of will that is not present in the Oxford drawing and is sometimes unnoticed due to sheer idealization,
Gina Thomas
Features correspondent based in London.
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With its sketchy features, the sheet creates a succinct introduction to an exhibition that gives the artist's actions and works more concrete features: like a finished painting based on a rudimentary preliminary drawing.
This is all the more true as the studies on the back that penetrate the paper give an idea of the many facets of Raphael's abruptly interrupted career, which are taken into account here - from painting to dealing with antiquity, architecture and applied arts to prints , in which Raphael recognized a medium for the wider dissemination of his creations, not least thanks to the example of Dürer, which is also a sign of ambition and business acumen.
In this context, the competing motifs on the front and back of the drawing with the supposed youthful self-portrait seem like a symbol of the demands on the workaholic artist that soon came from all sides.
His death at the age of 37 is more likely to be attributed to being overworked than to the erotic strains that Vasari names as the cause in his vita.
Although some things remained unfinished or unfinished, Raphael's clients, unlike Michelangelo and Leonardo, did not usually have to push or even wait in vain for their orders.
This reliable concession has of course also contributed to the reputation of an affable artist.
The enormous productivity, the fluid lines of his drawings and the spiritually calm perfection of Raphael's art left an impression of lightness.
In the presentation of his career, however, the London exhibition makes it clear how intensively he dissected the characteristics of his artistic ancestors and contemporaries in order to then use his extraordinary ability to assimilate to adapt what he had learned to his own expressiveness and to find that harmonious resolution that was his trademark is.
The so-called Moon Crucifixion from the National Gallery, towards which the visitor approaches when entering the exhibition, can hardly be distinguished from Perugino's work, as Vasari already observed.