Raphael's The Girl in the Scarf
Raphael's "Academy of Athens"
Raphael self-portrait
One
The italian Renaissance "all-rounder" artists are numerous, many of whom are also poets. For example, Da Vinci and Michelangelo, their sonnets have a place in the history of literature. However, Raphael, who is also among the "three masters", seems to have always been regarded by us as a "technical" artist, and we know very little about his talents beyond painting, especially his literary achievements.
In his book On the Sonnets of Raphael Santi, published in Italy in 1902, the author giacomo vanzolini outlines raphael's image of the poet: "Raphael has the soul of an artist, is passionate about all the knowledge that the times have given him, he is not only a painter, architect and sculptor, but his flexible mind has seized enthusiasm for this exquisite art of rhythm (press: i.e., poetry) in the wind. ”
Raphael's love of literature stemmed from the family atmosphere of his childhood. His father, Giovanni Santi, was also a well-known painter and had a passion for poetry, writing a history of Urbino in the form of poetry, depicting 12 artists from Italy and Flanders.
Raphael, who was invited to paint the frescoes of the palace for Pope Leo X at the Vatican, had frequent acquaintances with the literary leaders of the time, Ludovico Ariosto and Baldassare Casti glione, who became his close friends and even helped him draft letters to Leo X and his secretary, the great literary magnate Pietro Bembo. Castiglione's artistic and literary influence on Raphael was so great that this can be felt in raphael's letter to him, for example, raphael said in a letter about his painting The Triumph of Galathea:
If this painting is half as good as Your Excellency says, I can satisfactorily call myself a true master! Your words and phrases are testimonies of the fraternity between us. However, I think that in order to portray women more beautifully, such unique vision and insight is very lacking to me, and I should discuss it with your excellency in depth.
From this we can imagine castiglione's relationship with Raphael's mentor and friend, as well as Raphael's improvement in literary attainment.
Around the end of 1508 to the beginning of 1509, perhaps during the period during which the frescoes of the Academy of Athens were painted, Raphael wrote six sonnets on the design draft he had prepared for the next fresco, the Controversy of the Sacraments, five of which were handwritten and one of which was forged by posterity. The poems are written on the front or back of the manuscript, in the style of the Petrarch style that was popular at the time, and the content is obviously related to love, expressing the chest in the first person, from the physical feeling beyond the earthly spiritual realm. In addition, from these poems, we can also clearly see that the author repeatedly emphasizes that this relationship cannot be made public.
The first poem resembles Raphael's message to the God of Love: he says that the God of Love captured him with a girl's beautiful eyes, her snow-white and rosy face, and her feminine voice and sweet words, and melted him into those bright eyes; Raphael said that he burned for love so that neither the sea nor the waters of the river could extinguish the flame; but he did not care that he would burn himself up, for he wanted to tell his loved one that by burning himself he would acquire the gift of not feeling the flame burning. The author then reminds the lover of how painful it is to be freed from the "shackles" wrapped around her arms and neck ("I feel the pain of death"). Fearing that death will fall on his love, the author avoids describing other details and turns his thoughts of his lover into silence.
The second poem also has a lot of "unspeakable" elements. The author compares himself to St. Paul, who descended from heaven after witnessing the mysteries of God, but did not reveal to anyone what he saw and heard. In the same way, the author also has a "veil of love" in his heart, and everything he sees, and everything he pays for happiness, will be sealed in his heart, even if he is old, he still has to bear the responsibility of silence. So he called for his lover's gift and wanted her to come to him, because he felt that he was dying little by little.
In the third poem, the poet, after experiencing the cruel torment of carnal desire, is accompanied by a fixed poetic form against the background of the dawn atmosphere, expressing the sorrow of the temporary separation between lovers before the day comes. Raphael confessed that he could hardly forget the experience of being "attacked" by the sweet "attack" of the love not long ago, but he also said that whenever he thought of leaving the woman, he felt a heavy heart, feeling like a sailor on the sea who had lost the guidance of the stars. He desperately wanted to untie the knot of silence, even for a moment, to express a heavy apprehension that had been aroused by the sweet deception of love, but even so, he wanted to thank Eros and praise the woman. Then he remembered the moment he entered the girl's boudoir, when the sun had set and another star rose on the horizon—the moon and the woman—creating an atmosphere in the room that was only actionable and no words. No matter how eager he was to describe the feeling of being burned by the fire of pain, he was ultimately silenced because he could not express this emotion.
However, the most allegorical hint of raphael's mysterious relationship with this woman is one of the poems that begins with "sate seruir par mi stegeniase amore" (if you need to love God is angry with me). The poem was written in the upper part of a painting with many deletions depicting a man in ancient Roman attire and a. In this poem we seem to see raphael defending himself in the presence of his beloved, showing his ambivalence that he could not openly love at this time. His poem is roughly saying that if Eros refuses to let this woman fall in love with him because he cannot fully express his love, he wants his beloved to understand that even if he does not write it down and does not say it, but that love is in his heart. If Eros had rebuked him for this, he would have replied, "You (lover) are my master, more than Jupiter and Mars at the center of the heavens, you don't need any protection, and no one can hide from your power and desire." Raphael in the poem clearly states: "If I cannot write it on paper, I will not be able to prove my feelings." ”
Two
So why was Raphael so obsessed with an undisclosed relationship? What will be his secret?
In fact, what Raphael was expecting at this time was a sublimated love. At first, he sought worldly love, but when he was inspired by Petrarch to turn his gaze to the highest realm of emotion and knowledge, the spiritual inspiration became clearer and stronger, and reminded him to re-examine his own conception of love. According to Vasari's Raphael Biography: "He was born a lover, loved to chase women, and was willing to serve them at all times. This undifferentiated worldly love for the opposite sex keeps him bound by the flesh and makes it difficult to open the door to the highest spirituality. Therefore, the sublimation of love has become the goal pursued by Raphael, who hopes to raise the height of thought through the fusion of each other's spirits, and only this improvement of love and beauty can allow him to complete the transition from "vague knowledge" to enlightened reason.
In this way, Raphael's pursuit of love changed, he placed the soul in a higher spiritual world, such a change had previously occurred in Dante and Petrarch, and in reality the hopeless love for Beatrizy and Laura brought endless pain to these two poets, yet they transformed the pain into the tension of the divinity of poetic creation, thus leaving an immortal masterpiece. In Raphael, however, the quest for spiritual love is more modern—while taking spiritual fusion as the starting point, it does not exclude the intervention of sensibility and the flesh. Neoplatonism is an unrestricted love of the flesh, especially as interpreted by Fetchino, one of the most influential philosophers of Raphael's time, that the mind and the body are no longer incompatible choices for love, as evidenced by the profound erotic implications in Raphael's poetry. It should be known that Feccino's ideas were enshrined by the Medici family, and the court of Raphael's hometown of Urbino was closely related to the Medici family, so it was only natural that Raphael's concept of love was influenced by Neoplatonism, especially Fetchino's thought. So Raphael must have read something similar:
Of all these desires, love is the strongest and most superior: I say it strong because all other desires need it essentially [...] True love is just an effort to fly to the divine beauty that inhabits us and takes on the face of the beauty of the flesh. Thus, as long as it does not stop at the simple enjoyment of the lover's flesh, then this beauty can open the way to meeting God.
Castiglione, who was deeply respected by Raphael, also believed that for love, the attraction of the flesh was not enough, which was not enough to promote the elevation of the realm of love, so it was crucial to the liberation of values other than the body. Under such influence and influence, Raphael, like Petrarch, prepared the "bait of love" in his heart (Pietrak's poem: The bait of love is already in the chest / Will that miracle make me burn at once?). ), waiting for her own "Laura" to come from the sky. For Raphael at this moment, this love that is different from the past will become a source of happiness and inspiration for him.
Claudio Strinati, a well-known contemporary Italian art historian, pointed out that Raphael's trip to Rome was inspired by this "inspiration", because his paintings here show an elegant tension, which can be understood as the painter's yearning and pursuit of a higher spiritual realm. In Strinati's view: "This shows that Raphael has a new interpretation of the concept of 'inspiration'. Perhaps this is no accident, but in his earliest works in Rome, the preferred theme was closely related to inspiration and prophecy. Galathea in The Triumph of Galatia is an "inspired" figure, a sea goddess with brown hair and a sweet face that people familiar with Raphael's paintings will associate with many of his female figures. Raphael simply brought the femininity and elegance to the extreme, which was the perfect woman he was fascinated by—it could bring the painter's neoplatonic emotions into a mature stage, and also deeply influenced the evolution of the painter's painting style. In real life, the girl with brown hair and big eyes who has been serving as Raphael's model gave Raphael the hope of climbing to the top of her ideals: true love does not separate spiritual pursuit from physical enjoyment, and in a sonnet, Raphael likens this process to heaven and unveils the veil of truth.
Today, in the National Gallery of Antiquity in the Palazzo Barberini in the center of Rome, there is a painting by Raphael, "Fornalina", which is almost the treasure of the town hall here, which is the last year of his 37-year short life (1520). This young master, who has been passing down through the ages by painting the image of the Virgin, left us such a secular and controversial work before his life reached the end of his life. The woman in the painting is almost completely naked, only wearing a transparent white veil in front of her, she has one hand on her chest and the other hand hanging between her crotch, but she has no intention of covering her shyness. In fact, people who have a little common sense of classical sculpture can easily see that this arm posture is the typical image of virginity Venus, and the transparent scarf covering the body, although it directs the audience's attention to the parts of the painting that the characters want to avoid, but they just reflect the chastity of the characters. The dark hair of the character is neatly tied under the golden velvet satin turban with blue stripes, and the turban is knotted behind the head, all of which sets off the elegance and refinement of the character. Raphael is best at portraying the gentleness and innocence of female characters, but in this painting, the more regular face shape, more solid and clear eyes, more moist and plump lips, and slightly pink cheeks are all intentionally telling us that the women on this painting are very different from the images of dozens of virgins and saints in the painter's pen, which can almost let us see Raphael himself outside the picture. On the woman's left arm, Raphael drew an armband and left his capitalized name "raphael vrbinas", which is undoubtedly a love bond and a way for men to "declare sovereignty" to their beloved woman. In the background of the picture, we can faintly see a bush, the plant of which is known as the "wood of the god of love", peach wood, in ancient Greek mythology, this is the sacred flower belonging to the god of love and beauty. In addition, a quince symbolizing fertility is hidden in the background.
The painting, whether in its lines, composition, colours, or the expressions and details of the characters, is so perfect that some people have called it a "nude bust of Venus" despite its obvious earthly implications. The French writer Stendhal, who had an Italian complex all his life, saw the painting during his trip to Italy and described Raphael's ingenuity in depicting the figure's chest, right arm and head. Raphael's precise brushstrokes give the picture a near-saturated tension, and this subtle and lingering visual sensation makes many viewers associate erotic and indulgent, and Castiglione describes himself as "uncomfortable with the desire to enjoy love" in his work. The direct expression of personal lust may bring us closer to Raphael's true inner world, where holy beauty and worldly love can really be perfectly combined. As Western art historians have pointed out, this portrait is full of suspense and desire, unlike most of Raphael's works, it focuses on the true beauty of the human world and the most difficult elements of human nature, with the help of soft and precise shapes, as well as warm skin tones, reflecting the superiority of human nature and the dignity of human love.
Three
"Fornalina" is not the real name of the portrait's protagonist, she is actually the daughter of a baker in the Trastevere area across the Tiber River in Rome. In Italian, "Fornalina" means "little female baker" and can also be understood as "baker's daughter". She was so beautiful that Raphael was so amazed when she saw her that she fell in love with her and regarded her as a muse. According to art historians, her real name is Margherita Luti, whose ancestral home is Siena. In fact, with the help of the pearl on the headdress of the portrait, Raphael has revealed to us the real name of "Fornalina", because the name Margarita means "pearl" in Greek. From this clue, we can conclude that Raphael's portrait The Girl in the Scarf was also made for Margarita, because in the same position as the character, there is also the pearl that implies the name.
In addition to these two portraits, the image of Margarita has almost become the "protagonist" of Raphael's later works, whether it is the Virgin or the goddess, even in the portrait of the sages of the "Academy of Athens" that we are most familiar with, Margarita's face can be found: on the left side of the picture, dressed in white robes, looking lonely and lonely, looking sideways at 45 degrees to the audience - Raphael gave the image of his beloved to the ancient Egyptian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Hypatia, the first female mathematician in the history of the world. With her outstanding talent and contributions, she is one of the best scholars in the ancient world. It is worth noting that the image of Raphael himself on the right side of the picture echoes Margarita, on the same level, and looks at the audience with an almost mirror-facing posture and expression.
Even if most people, after reading Vasari's Biography of Raphael, think that Raphael was a playboy, and even believe that he died young because of excessive indulgence, it is also in Vasari's pen that Raphael was an "artist of both virtue and art", "a life of integrity", with "loving and highly respected character", and Vasari also called on the world to learn from Raphael and "maintain a high character in life". Judging by the trust and position Raphael gained in the Vatican, he was probably one of the richest and most promising artists in Italy in the early 16th century, and Leo X is said to have granted him the position of cardinal, and perhaps even the Pope would have thought that such a great artist was entitled to spend his days and drunkenness. But we can clearly feel from Raphael's poems and paintings that his pursuit of love, soul and spirit seems to be in stark contrast to the impression he left on us.
Perhaps the reader will remember vasari's story: the cardinal proposed to Raphael that he wanted to marry his niece Maria. The cardinal was Raphael's greatest bole, patron and superior besides the pope, and the humble Raphael could not refuse directly, but passively delayed until the marriage was settled. In the process, Raphael's love for Margarita has never diminished, and even we can guess that Raphael delayed his marriage to Maria and never talked about marriage with any woman, in large part because he had deep feelings for Margarita, because this woman could satisfy all his ideals of love from spirit to body. And the reason why he did not marry the woman who accompanied him all his life was precisely because of the obscure secrets he described in the poem: "This is the gift of Love God to repay my deep sorrows", and in the end his love is doomed to a dilemma: "But I am still swayed by my passion / It is so annoying to me, because men tend / The more they have something to say, the more they are silent." 」 ”
Raphael is said to have been only 15 days from his illness to his death, and at the last moment of his life, he made a will to send the woman out of the house "like a decent Christian" after his death and give her a large sum of money for the rest of her life. Raphael could not have imagined that 300 years after his death, his love story with Margarita would be re-fermented, laid out by the romantics and neoclassicists of the 19th century, and became a love story that people talked about for more than 200 years, and was recited like Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura. At a time of modern times, some scholars have proposed that Margarita was an elegant renaissance woman with all the virtues that court life should have.
In 1858, the Italian Romantic poet Aleardo Aleardi wrote in an annotation to a poem:
Fornalina's home and her garden face the Tiber River, towards the steep embankment, where the water of the Tiber River lapses at the broken piers of the Subriccio Bridge, not far from the Church of Santa Cecilia, at the end of the slopes of The Gianicolo. It was here that Raphael saw this beautiful girl on the other side of the Tiber for the first time, and he blushed his cheeks and turned the memory of the moment into a sonnet and threw it to the kind girl. The artists of the time knew all about it.
Alaiardi's verse describes the scene when two young men first meet, especially when Raphael is fascinated when he first sees the baker's daughter (Fornalina). The poet imagines Fornalina's beautiful countenance and elegant posture: she has full hair, full lips, and a gentle and delicate character between her hands and feet. The poet's Raphael "has a good face, delicate features, likes to wear long brown hair, and brown eyes are full of gentle kindness." His neck is long and his skin is slightly olive-colored. He was tall, elegant, and had an innate courtesy to people. "In the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, we can see a self-portrait painted by Raphael between 1504 and 1506, which basically confirms Alaiardi's description.
In 1814, Ingres, the standard-bearer of French neoclassicism, depicted this love in 1814: indoors, Fornalina sat on Raphael's knee, dressed exactly like Raphael's original, and on the easel was a sketch of the original work—the narrative moment that Angle chose seemed to be Raphael's break between creations, taking a nap and flirting with the model Fornalina. Ingres' reverence and imitation of Raphael is evident in this work. In the background, another of Raphael's masterpieces, the circular "Madonna in the Chair", looms, perhaps another hint that Ingres gives us - the model of this madonna is also The prototype of The Virgin is also Fornalina.
In the 1860s, a sculpture by Pasquale Romanelli depicted the image of Raphael and Fornalina: it was their first meeting, and Raphael tried to persuade a pretty girl to pose as a model. He put a hand lightly on the girl's shoulder, surrounded her, and looked at her tenderly. The girl put her hand on the painter's leg, trying to keep a distance. The shape of the girl in the sculpture is obviously taken from the painting "Fornalina", but the sculptor undoubtedly has obvious romantic characteristics in details such as clothing and expressions, especially the grasp of the moment of action.
Combing through the history of art, we will find that the works of art with raphael and fornalina as the theme of the love are very rich, and the Italian artists alone are Giuseppe sogni, Cesare mussini, Francesco valaperta, Francesco Gandolfi, Felice schiavo ni) ... and there are not a few artists in France, Germany, and England. Entering the 20th century, Picasso continued this tradition in his own style. In recent years, the American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin has also made new attempts. In addition, since the 19th century, poetry and novels based on this theme have also emerged. All these works, I am afraid that even Raphael himself will not be able to believe that his "secrets" have been passed down to future generations as his works.
Raphael's great influence on future generations goes without saying, but compared to Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, our understanding of him is still very thin, and there is very little content except for a few conceptual words, so that he has become the "perfect stranger" in our vision. In the exact 500 years since he left this world, injecting flesh and soul into his image in our minds is the best way we can commemorate him. (Wen Zheng)
Source: China Reading Daily