Bildnis einer Frau mit Schleier (nach Raffael)

Portrait of a Veiled Woman (after Raphael) of 1865, in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, places Marées in dialogue with one of the most celebrated Renaissance portraits — Raphael's La Velata (c. 1514–15) in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence — a work that had been copied and studied by generations of European painters as a benchmark of female portraiture. Making a copy after the Old Masters was a standard part of European academic training, but Marées's engagement with Raphael went beyond mere exercise: he sought in Renaissance painting the principles of formal harmony and tonal unity that he could not find in contemporary Munich academic practice. Working after Raphael forced him to analyze how the High Renaissance master organized color, light, and surface, and the lessons fed back into his own original work.

Copying Raphael's La Velata required close attention to the veil's translucency — one of the most demanding technical problems in the original. Marées would have had to build up thin, semi-opaque layers to simulate the fabric's quality of simultaneously concealing and revealing the figure beneath. The warm, unified Raphaelesque tonality is consistent with the broader Mediterranean palette of his work in this period.