By Clara Ferreira-Marques
The tiny pearl brooch seems an innocuous detail in Raphael’s enigmatic Fornarina portrait.
But for one group of historians it unlocks a scandalous love affair kept secret for centuries.
According to new research, the pearl, pinned onto an elaborate turban, is part of a web of allusions to the Renaissance artist’s clandestine marriage to the beautiful sitter, a baker’s daughter – despite a very public engagement to the niece of a powerful Vatican cardinal.
Officially, Raphael died a bachelor at 37.
“It was an impossible love affair,“ says Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz, editor of specialist journal Stile, who led a year of research into Raphael’s romantic riddle.
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“It is hard to overstate Raphael’s status in Rome – he was a superstar. The distance separating them was like that which today would separate George Clooney and his cleaner.”
The pearl, also included in the Velata portrait, suggests the sitter’s name was Margherita – the Latin word for pearl – and not Maria Bibbiena, the artist’s intended bride.
It ties Margherita to a string of nuptial allegories in the Fornarina, from the band on her arm bearing Raphael’s name – an unusual way to sign a painting – to a wedding ring on her finger, later covered up by the painter’s anxious students.
“It may seem artificial to us, but these were everyday games at the Renaissance courts,” says Curuz.
“At least until the 18th century, the allegorical side of painting was extremely important. It was Impressionism that dampened our ability to read a painting like a book.”
The art historian says he has found evidence to support the allegories, from contemporary documents to x-rays of the Fornarina painting carried out during a recent restoration.
“Of course this is not just about the pearl, nor is it just about the documents. The absolute certainty comes from the way everything fits together,” Curuz believes.
“But the pearl was what tipped us off – we would have been forcing the allegory if it had been the other way around.”
The notion that Margherita was Raphael’s mistress is not altogether new – inspired by her coy smile in the Fornarina, 19th-century France’s Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted the muse sitting on the artist’s knee. A century later, Picasso portrayed their trysts in a series of explicit drawings.
Novelist Honore de Balzac also mentioned the two lovers.
But Curuz and his team have gone beyond the myth, tracing back the various symbols and uncovering documents to prove the two married in a secret ceremony.
The historians say they have also proved conclusively that Margherita is the subject of both the Fornarina and of the Velata, or veiled portrait, logged by one contemporary as the painting of the woman Raphael “loved until he died”.
Transferring the face of one painting to the other, thanks to computer technology, there is more than a passing similarity.
And, according to Curuz, Margherita is also to be found elsewhere in Raphael’s work, from the School of Athens fresco to the walls of the Farnesina palace in Rome.
In the School of Athens, painted on the walls of a room that is now part of the Vatican museum, all the characters are looking away or at each other – only Margherita and Raphael himself are looking defiantly straight at the visitor.
But despite her presence in his paintings, Margherita’s existence seems to have been kept carefully under wraps, if not by Raphael, then at least by his students.
Initial drawings uncovered under the Fornarina during recent restoration show the figure clothed in a diaphanous veil was sketched rapidly and presumably from life – another indication of the painter’s ties to his muse.
The sketched figure is set against quince and myrtle bushes – symbols of fertility and fidelity – and wears a wedding ring on her left hand.
But the final painting, completed after Raphael’s death with a clumsy hand, covers the bushes and the tell-tale ring.
“At the time of his death, Raphael’s school was painting the Sala di Constantino in the Vatican and they wanted at all costs to avoid losing that commission. It could have meant bankruptcy,” Curuz says.
To silence the rumours, Raphael’s students placed a plaque on his tomb in the memory of his eternal fiancée, Maria Bibbiena, as if to tie the two together after death.
Raven-haired Margherita was instead sent away. Four months after Raphael’s death, the convent of Sant’ Apollonia in Rome’s Trastevere quarter registered the arrival of “widow Margherita”, daughter of a Siena baker. – Reuters
- This article was originally published on page 9 of The Star on June 17, 2005
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