1520 (ca.), Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), La Fornarina (detail) -- Palazzo Barberini (Rome)
From the museum label: Flaubert dismissed La Fornarina in a few words: "She was a beautiful woman, that's all you need to know." Opinions of beauty often differ, of course, but historians have done their best to discover as much as they can about the elusive identity of this model who posed for Raphael, "a very amorous person, delighting much in women", or so Vasari tells us, and in particular in "a mistress" whom he is reputed to have portrayed. Yet we still do not know a great deal about this Fornarina - or "baker's lass", a name only given to her in the 18th century - possibly because Raphael himself did not wish to tell us more.
Raphael was more interested in turning to the conventions governing female portraiture in his day in order to transcend them. We see an ordinary woman, not a Venus or some other goddess or personification, yet her anonymous individuality actually celebrates, by vicarious substitution, the identity of the painter himself in his dual role as creator (signing his "creature" in bold letters) and as his own patron.
Raphael knows that "every painter paints himself" and while the Fornarina may be a portrait of his beloved, it is also an image of her lover who, as 16th century men of letters and philosophers remind us, "is the portrait of the thing he loves." The fact that he managed to create both a portrait and a self-portrait in a single work is a product of the dissembled contempt theorised by Baldassarre Castiglione in his Courtier (1528). In fact Flaubert might have had the Fornarina in mind again when he exclaimed: "Madame Bovary c'est moi." That's all we need to know.
Link to the full painting.
Link to other Raphael paintings.
1520 (ca.), Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), La Fornarina (detail) -- Palazzo Barberini (Rome)
From the museum label: Flaubert dismissed La Fornarina in a few words: "She was a beautiful woman, that's all you need to know." Opinions of beauty often differ, of course, but historians have done their best to discover as much as they can about the elusive identity of this model who posed for Raphael, "a very amorous person, delighting much in women", or so Vasari tells us, and in particular in "a mistress" whom he is reputed to have portrayed. Yet we still do not know a great deal about this Fornarina - or "baker's lass", a name only given to her in the 18th century - possibly because Raphael himself did not wish to tell us more.
Raphael was more interested in turning to the conventions governing female portraiture in his day in order to transcend them. We see an ordinary woman, not a Venus or some other goddess or personification, yet her anonymous individuality actually celebrates, by vicarious substitution, the identity of the painter himself in his dual role as creator (signing his "creature" in bold letters) and as his own patron.
Raphael knows that "every painter paints himself" and while the Fornarina may be a portrait of his beloved, it is also an image of her lover who, as 16th century men of letters and philosophers remind us, "is the portrait of the thing he loves." The fact that he managed to create both a portrait and a self-portrait in a single work is a product of the dissembled contempt theorised by Baldassarre Castiglione in his Courtier (1528). In fact Flaubert might have had the Fornarina in mind again when he exclaimed: "Madame Bovary c'est moi." That's all we need to know.
Link to the full painting.
Link to other Raphael paintings.