A Pearl for the Baker’s Daughter

If you haven’t seen the painting, you can find it in Palazzo Barberini, in Rome.  It’s almost as famous as the Mona Lisa, and the woman in the picture has an equally enigmatic half-smile.  But, while Lisa’s smile is the first thing you notice in Leonardo’s masterpiece, the first thing you’ll probably notice in Raphael’s La Fornarina is that the sitter is very lightly dressed.  Her left hand rests on the discarded dress draped over her legs. With her right hand she holds a diaphanous fabric between her breasts.  Her index finger points to her upper left arm, encircled by a blue ribbon bearing the name Raphael Urbinas in gold lettering. 

Her skin is pale against a dark background of myrtle leaves. Over her dark hair, she wears a gold turban striped with blue, from which a jewelled ornament dangles.  Her eyes look coyly to her left.  If you think you’ve seen her before, your feeling of deja-vu may be because you’ve seen another famous painting in Florence’s Pitti Palace, though it’s not as popular or notorious as La Fornarina.

There, a beautiful young woman, whose dark eyes look directly at us, is seated before a deep brown background.  Her skin is pale gold, with a faint blush.  She wears a necklace of amber, and her right hand smoothes a silk bodice with gold piping over the white pleated fabric of her camicia. The great, slashed silk sleeve of her dress, piped with gold like the bodice, dominates the foreground of the picture.  She is called La Donna Velata because of the long veil that descends from a small round cap atop her dark hair.  From the cap, a jewelled ornament dangles.  It is the same ornament, two stones set in gold with a pendant pearl, that La Fornarina wears.  The woman is self-possessed, dignified, aristocratic – except that, just below the pearl, a few strands of her carefully coiffed hair have escaped, and fall loose past her brow. 

Most art historians believe that the model for both paintings was Margherita Luti, daughter of a Roman baker, and that she was both Raphael’s favourite model and his lover.  The story of Margherita and Raphael is a great favourite among romantically inclined art fanciers, and luckily for all of us, some of it is available in Giorgio Vasari’s biography of Raphael.  I’ve been guilty occasionally of making fun of Giorgio, but no doubt part of what he tells us is approximately true.  At any rate, he identifies the sitter for La Velata as Raphael’s mistress, “whom he loved until death”.  He tells us that Raphael was an extraordinarily passionate man.  He says that when Raphael was supposed to be hard at work for the wealthy banker Agostino Chigi, frescoing the “Triumph of Galatea” and the “Wedding of Cupid and Psyche” in Chigi’s palace (now the Villa Farnesina), he spent most of his time visiting “the lady of his choice” instead.  Poor Chigi had to arrange for Margherita to live in the villa so his distracted artist could get some work done.

Vasari tells us that when Raphael was dying at the tragically early age of 37, he dictated a will in which he provided for his mistress’s future.  Other documents have been found stating that a woman named Margherita, daughter of Francesco Luti, entered the Convent of Santa Apollonia four months after Raphael died.

In April 2001, when the Fornarina painting underwent restoration and x-ray analysis, it was discovered that on the “ring finger” of the woman’s left hand, there is a square-cut ruby ring.  It had been skilfully painted out, centuries ago. Was it a wedding ring?  This certainly called into question the identity of the sitter.

Some scholars suggested that the model for La Fornarina wasn’t Margherita at all, but a married woman who posed for a commissioned (and slightly naughty) portrait, probably to please her husband.  Some even say the sitter was Francesca Ardeasca, the young wife of Agostino Chigi.  After all, Chigi had already hired Raphael and Sodoma and others to paint some very sensual scenes in his villa.  But there are no portraits of Francesca to compare to La Fornarina.

Was Margherita married to someone else?  Or was the ring merely decorative, perhaps just a gift from an admirer? (But then why was it painted out?)

I have another theory:  La Fornarina is indeed the portrait of a married woman, painted to delight her husband; and her husband was Raphael.  I suspect that Margherita and Raphael were secretly married, and the picture was a kind of celebration, just for the two of them. The marriage would have to be secret, because Raphael had been engaged to Maria Bibbiena, niece of a powerful and influential Cardinal, for several years.  A broken engagement with Maria would cause a disastrous scandal. But perhaps Raphael didn’t care because he felt the approach of his early death. Unlike the Donna Velata picture, Raphael never sold La Fornarina.  It was still in his studio when he died.  One of his assistants probably painted over the ring, to protect Raphael’s memory.

Raphael had proclaimed his love for the baker’s daughter with a painted ring on her painted finger, and signed the painting on the ribbon around Margherita’s arm.  But her name, too, can be found on both La Donna Velata and La Fornarina, because the sophisticate in the golden gown and the nearly-naked temptress wore the same jewelled ornament, tipped with a large pendant pearl.  Pearl, in Italian, is perla; but pearl, in Latin, is margarita.

Text © 2020 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2020 by Patricia Gartman. First published In Italia! Magazine, January 2020