How Much Is a Raphael Painting Worth? Auction Records and What a Reproduction Costs

How much is a Raphael painting worth? More than almost anyone can pay, and the question is mostly theoretical, because almost none of them ever come up for sale. The auction record for one of his paintings is £18.5 million ($37.3 million), paid at Christie's in London in July 2007 for his portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici. His drawings have gone higher: a black chalk head of an apostle made £29.7 million ($47.8 million) at Sotheby's in 2012. At the bottom of the range, a panel barely 15 inches tall sold for $3.1 million in 2025.

Those three sales tell you most of what you need to know. The Raphael paintings people know best belong to museums and churches, and they are not leaving. What reaches the market is small, early, or on paper, and the price depends on which of those it is.

The prices on record

Here are the Raphael sales with a known price that matter most, from a private deal of the 1930s to the most recent auction.

The Lorenzo portrait is the one people mean when they say "the Raphael record." Painted in 1518, it shows the Duke of Urbino, who ruled Florence from 1513 until his death in 1519, in red and gold against a green ground, holding what is probably a miniature of his future wife. It sits in the 1553 inventory of Cosimo de' Medici, passed through English collections, sold at Christie's in 1892 for 567 guineas, and was bought at a New York auction in 1968 by the dealer Ira Spanierman. In 2007 a private collector on the telephone won it after a ten-minute fight, at a price that was then the record for any Italian Old Master painting.

The Madonna of the Pinks never went to auction, which is why its price is worth a look. The Getty had offered £35 million ($62 million) for it in 2002. It stayed in Britain, and the National Gallery bought it for £22 million with an £11.5 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and a public appeal. It measures 27.9 × 22.4 cm, and you can see it in Room 61 in Trafalgar Square. Few objects that small have ever cost so much.

Why a sheet of paper outsold the paintings

Both of the top Raphael prices were paid for chalk drawings, and that surprises people until they see what the drawings are for.

The Head of a Muse, sold at Christie's in December 2009, is a study for one of his frescoes in the Vatican. It fetched £29.2 million, double its estimate, from an anonymous telephone bidder. Three years later Sotheby's offered the Duke of Devonshire's chalk head of an apostle, a full-size study from around 1519–20 for a figure in the lower half of the Transfiguration, kept for centuries at Chatsworth. The estimate was £10–15 million. Four bidders fought over it for 17 minutes, and the hammer fell at £29.7 million, a record for any work on paper. Gregory Rubinstein, who ran Old Master drawings at Sotheby's, put it simply before the sale: "If you are lucky, at some point in your career a work like this comes along."

The logic is supply. The frescoes and the altarpieces are owned by the Vatican and by museums. A drawing made for one of them is the closest a private buyer can get, and a few collectors will pay painting prices, or more, for that link.

The $3.1 million Magdalene

The most recent Raphael painting to sell shows what an early, small panel is worth. Saint Mary Magdalene is oil on a panel 15 × 5¾ inches, painted around 1503, when Raphael was about 20. It was one wing of a small devotional piece, painted on both sides, with a prayer to the Virgin on the back and one of the artist's fingerprints in the paint. Sotheby's specialist Daria Foner called it "a wonderful example of Raphael at this really early moment in his career."

On February 6, 2025, an anonymous telephone bidder won it at $2.6 million, or $3.1 million once fees were added, against an estimate of $2–3 million. The seller had bought it at Christie's New York in May 2000 for $611,000, when it was catalogued as Saint Mary of Egypt. That's a fivefold gain in 25 years, and still a long way below the Lorenzo portrait. Size and subject count: a small wing panel painted at 20 does not compete with a life-size portrait of a Medici duke.

What painting sold for $1 million?

A Raphael did, long before anything sold for tens of millions. Andrew Mellon, then building up pictures for the public gallery he planned in Washington, bought the round Alba Madonna, painted around 1510, out of the Hermitage from the Soviet government, and issued polite denials for years. Moscow put the price at $1,500,000. In March 1935, after a tax hearing in Pittsburgh, Time set the record straight: Mellon had paid $1,166,400, the highest price ever paid for a single masterpiece at the time.

That deal is also the reason a museum-grade Raphael is so hard to buy now. Paintings like the Alba Madonna went into public collections in the last century, and public collections rarely sell.

How can you tell if a painting is worth money?

Three of the six works in that table spent years under the wrong name. The Madonna of the Pinks was dismissed as a copy for centuries and was only accepted as Raphael's own in 1991, after scientists studied its underdrawing and pigments, including a rare powdered bismuth. The Magdalene sold in 2000 as a different saint. The Lorenzo portrait went for 567 guineas in 1892. So yes, overlooked pictures exist. But for every one of them there are thousands of old copies, and a copy after Raphael, even an old and skillful one, is priced as a decorative painting, not as a Raphael.

If you own something you think might be valuable, four things decide it:

• Who made it. Only specialists can attribute an Old Master, usually after technical study. A signature proves very little.
• Where it has been. A chain of owners, sales and inventories (the Lorenzo portrait goes back to 1553) is worth money in itself. Look for labels, seals and numbers on the back of the canvas or panel.
• Condition. Heavy repainting and damage cut the price hard.
• Subject and size. A portrait or a Madonna sells better than a fragment.

Start by photographing the front, the back and any labels, then send the pictures to the Old Master department of a major auction house or to a regional museum's curator. Either can tell you whether it deserves a closer look before you spend money on research.

What a hand-painted copy costs

For everyone else, the practical answer is a copy painted in oil by hand, which costs roughly what a good sofa does. The prices below are the ones listed on the product pages, per size.

A copy of the Transfiguration, the altarpiece Raphael was still working on when he died in 1520, starts at $299.95 for a 16 × 20 inch canvas, $449.95 at 24 × 30 inches, and $1,299.95 at 48 × 72 inches, the largest of seven listed sizes. The original, 410 × 279 cm, hangs in Room VIII of the Vatican Pinacoteca. Framing options are offered, and any other size can be commissioned.

The same seven-step price ladder, from $299.95 to $1,299.95, applies to the Sistine Madonna with its two famous cherubs, painted in 1512/13 for the monastery of San Sisto in Piacenza and bought for the Dresden picture gallery by Augustus III in 1752/54. It also covers his Marriage of the Virgin, the small St. Michael and the portrait of the Florentine merchant Agnolo Doni. The square Three Graces panel is priced on its own scale, from $249.95 at 16 × 16 inches to $1,149.95 at 60 × 60.

A useful comparison: a 24 × 30 inch copy is several times the surface of the £22 million Madonna of the Pinks. Every copy is hand-painted in oil on linen canvas, so the $299.95 one is a real painting, and nobody will mistake it for the $37 million kind. If you're still choosing a subject, a longer list of paintings worth living with includes Raphael alongside the other names that sell at this level.

A Raphael you can actually hang

Art & See paints its Raphael copies by hand, in oil on linen canvas, in the listed sizes or a size you specify, with framing if you want it. The originals will stay in Rome, Dresden and London. The copy can go over your fireplace. Browse all the Raphael canvases the studio paints and pick the one you'd look at every day.

Sources

• Sotheby's, Raphael, Head of a Young Apostle, lot 52, London, 5 December 2012
• Sotheby's, Raphael, Saint Mary Magdalene, Master Paintings Part I, New York, 6 February 2025
• The Art Newspaper, New York Old Masters sales recap, 7 February 2025
• National Gallery, London, The Madonna of the Pinks (NG6596)
• Time, "Art: Mellon & Madonna," 4 March 1935
• Vatican Museums, Raffaello Sanzio, Transfiguration
• Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, The Sistine Madonna