Margarita Luti
Margarita Luti (also Margherita Luti or La Fornarina, "the baker's daughter") was the mistress and model of Raphael. The story of their love has become "the archetypal artist–model relationship of Western tradition",[4] yet little is known of her life. Of her, Flaubert wrote, in his Dictionary of Received Ideas, "Fornarina. She was a beautiful woman. That is all you need to know."[4][note 1]
Life
According to
Margarita is not mentioned by Vasari but is named twice in sixteenth-century
In a recent article[11] Giuliano Pisani showed that the title “Fornarina” (first used by engraver Domenico Cunego in 1772) is rooted in a linguistic tradition, documented, among others, by the Greek poet Anacreon in the 6th century BCE and found in numerous literary texts from antiquity to the modern period. In this tradition, the italian words “forno” (“oven”) and its cognate “fornaia” (“woman baker”) etc. metaphorically indicate the female sexual organ and the woman prostitute. We must understand “what” the Fornarina represents as opposed to “who she is”, and Pisani advanced the hypothesis that Raphael, drawing his inspiration from Marsilio Ficino and Pietro Bembo, portrays in the “Fornarina” the celestial Venus, namely the type of love that raises the soul toward the search for truth by means of the “celestial” beauty. This Venus differs from the other Venus, the “terrestrial” Venus, namely the generating power of nature, who is connected with the terrestrial beauty and has procreation as her goal (the same interpretation for Titian, L’amor sacro e l’amor profane, Rome, Galleria Borghese). From this viewpoint, the “Fornarina” is interconnected with the “Velata”, whom Pisani identifyes as the terrestrial Venus, the bride, the mother.
Art
Two portraits by Raphael are identified as those of Margarita,
In addition, in his later years in Rome Raphael was one of the first Italian artists to consistently draw female figures from female models rather than the usual garzoni or young male assistants, and Luti probably modelled for many of the hundreds of his drawings that survive.
Vasari is said by Anthony Blunt to have invented the legend of Raphael.[21] The "Raphael-Fornarina myth" has been reimagined ever since "to fit the expectations of contemporary generations".[4] In Comolli's 1790 Life of Raphael, she is blamed for his death.[4] In Balzac's Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, she is the femme fatale or belle juive.[4] In Joseph Méry's 1854 novel Raphaël et la Fornarine, Raphael instead complains to the pope of the lack of blonde female models in Rome.[4] For Baudelaire, hers were "the affections of a courtesan".[16] Byron, struck by La donna velata while in Florence, styled his Venetian mistress Margherita Cogni as La Fornarina.[22] Caroline Norton wrote a sonnet in which Raphael tells Pope Leo X that she is his eyes.[23] Nabokov suggests there was a feud between Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo over rivalry for her affections, perhaps inspired by the former's La Fornarina and the latter's Portrait of a Woman, also known as La Fornarina.[24]
In 1820, for the three hundredth anniversary of Raphael's death,
Notes
References
- ^ "N. Cat. 00160382". Polo Museale Fiorentino. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-883-12430-4.
- ^ McMahon, Barbara (18 June 2005). "Art sleuth uncovers clue to secret Raphael marriage". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8032-2941-9.
- ^ a b c d e f Vasari, Giorgio (1568). "Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori II" (in Italian). Giunti. pp. 82, 87, 78.
- ^ Riding, Alan (29 December 2001). "In Raphael Exhibition, Women Do the Talking". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
- ^ ISBN 9781417919741.
- ISBN 9780766193963.
- ^ a b "Passavant's Life of Raphael (Review)". Quarterly Review. 66 (131). John Murray: 25. 1840.
- ^ Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
- ^ Giuliano Pisani, Le Veneri di Raffaello (tra Anacreonte e il Magnifico, il Sodoma e Tiziano, Ediart. Studi di Storia dell'Arte 26, 2015, pp. 97-122
- ^ Schumacher, Mary Louise (25 March 2010). "Raphael's masterpiece on view at MAM". Journal Sentinel. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
- ^ "La Fornarina" (in Italian). Galleria Borghese. Archived from the original on 19 May 2012. Retrieved 28 July 2012.
- ^ "Cosmetics Company Sponsors Beautification of Old Master Paintings". ArtWatch International. 30 May 2002. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
- ^ a b Burke, Jason (29 April 2001). "X-ray vision reveals how Old Master hid his love for the baker's daughter". The Observer. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-415-09801-4.
- Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
- Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
- ^ Rendina, Claudio (28 May 2007). "Il mistero dell'amante di Raffaello". la Repubblica (in Italian). Retrieved 27 July 2012.
- ISBN 978-1905886-821.
- .
- ISBN 978-0-674-80613-9.
- ^ Norton, Caroline (1840). The dream: and other poems. Henry Colburn. p. 285.
- ISBN 978-0-8101-2559-9.
- ^ "Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia". Tate. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
- JSTOR 25600666.
- ^ Smee, Sebastian (12 June 2012). "Hero worship, with nerve in 'Raphael and the Fornarina'". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on 18 January 2013. Retrieved 31 July 2012.
- ^ ISBN 978-0820450469.
- ISBN 978-0-7546-3484-3.
- ^ "Raffaelle and the Fornarina". Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Archived from the original on 19 August 2014. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
- ^ "Quartier Latin. The Modern Raphael and La Fornarina". The Rossetti Archive. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
- ISBN 9781417970254.
- ISBN 978-0-226-43983-9.
- ^ "The Metropolitan Museum of Art (search term: Fornarina)". Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 31 July 2012.
- Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
- ^ Murray, Scott. "Walerian Borowczyk's Heroines of Desire". Senses of Cinema. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
- ^ "Die Fornarina". Carl Zeller-Webseite. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
- ^ Kryukov, A. "Raphael: Musical scenes from the Renaissance". Stanford University. Retrieved 31 July 2012.
- ISBN 978-0-122-27620-0.
External links
- Media related to La Velata at Wikimedia Commons
- Media related to Fornarina portrait at Wikimedia Commons