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Updated: June 29, 2025
It is a very queer, as well as a very remarkable picture. But we passed hastily by this, and almost all others, being eager to see the two which chiefly make the collection famous, Raphael's Fornarina, and Guido's portrait of Beatrice Cenci.
Would the Blessed Mary reveal herself to his spiritual vision, and favor him with sittings alternately with that type of glowing earthliness, the Fornarina? But no sooner have we given expression to this irreverent criticism, than a throng of spiritual faces look reproachfully upon us.
She was all rose, and when, laughing, with a delicious movement of the arms, she hitched back her bustle, she lost her original air, and looked as might have done the Fornarina when not sitting in immortality. It was the battle of blonde tints: Olive with primroses and corn, May with a cadmium yellow and red gold.
The charm of this picture is as notable as the skill of Raphael's: it is wholly joyous, and the little Madonna really once lived. Both are reproduced in this volume. How it came to be considered Raphael, except that there may be a faint likeness to the Fornarina, is a mystery.
I have written, in connection with Lionardo's 'Jaconde' and Raphael's 'Fornarina, of Titian's 'Bella Donna. He has various 'Bellas, but, as far as I know, this is the 'Bella Donna, 'a splendid, serious beauty, in a red and blue silk dress, in the Sciarra Gallery, Rome.
Did you draw her portrait? You know you drew her portrait. You painters always pretend to admire girls with auburn hair, because Titian and Raphael painted it. Has the Fornarina red hair? Why, we are at Croydon, I declare!"
And who can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or receive any of his Virgins as heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing, for example, the Fornarina of the Barberini Palace, and feeling how sensual the artist must have been to paint such a brazen trollop of his own accord, and lovingly?
Had she married Burgo they would have been in sunny Italy, and he would have told her some other tale than that as they sat together under the pale moonlight. She had a little water-coloured drawing called Raphael and Fornarina, and she was infantine enough to tell herself that the so-called Raphael was like her Burgo no, not her Burgo, but the Burgo that was not hers.
If it be barbarous, it is at least braver than stabbing in the dark. Raphael is remembered in Trastevere for the beautiful little palace of the Farnesina, which he decorated for the great and generous banker, Agostino Chigi, and for the Fornarina, whose small house with its Gothic window stands near the Septimian gate, where the old Aurelian wall crosses Trastevere and the Lungara to the Tiber.
Look at the great master Raphael, whom the Pope honors and the world admires. He's no despiser of wine and bread. "'And he even appreciates the baker's daughter, the pretty Fornarina, added Angelo, one of the merriest of the young friends. "Yes, they said a good many things of the kind, according to their age and their reason.
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