habemusmamam: @historicwomendaily celebration week: Favorite Artist or Artist’s Muse ↳ M
habemusmamam:@historicwomendaily celebration week: Favorite Artist or Artist’s Muse↳ Margarita Luti Margarita Luti (also 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”, yet little is known of her life. According to Vasari, Raphael was a “very amorous man and affectionate towards the ladies”. He is said to have painted portraits of his mistress and to have assigned the engraver il Baviera to serve as her page. When commissioned by Agostino Chigi to decorate the Villa Farnesina, he was unable to dedicate himself properly to his work due to his infatuation - until she was allowed to come to live at his side. Again according to Vasari, it was Raphael’s immoderate indulgence in “amorous pleasures”, one day taken to excess, that brought on the fever which led to the young artist’s death in 1520. Although in the Pantheon he lies beside his fiancée Maria, daughter of his patron Bernardo Dovizi, Raphael had long delayed his marriage; on his deathbed he sent his mistress away “with the means to live an honest life”.Margarita is not mentioned by Vasari but is named twice in sixteenth-century marginalia to the second edition of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, beside the passage describing La donna velata: “portrait of Margarita, Raphael’s mistress Margarita”. By the mid-eighteenth century she was referred to as La Fornarina. In a letter of 1806, Melchior Missirini recounted the tale of their first meeting, of how Raphael fell in love after watching her as she bathed her feet in the Tiber in the garden beside his house in Trastevere, only to discover that “her mind was as beautiful as her body”. Although this story is retold in Passavant’s 1839 Life of Raphael and elsewhere, Missirini was known for his “pseudo-traditions”; se non è vero, è ben trovato. In 1897 a document was discovered indicating that Margherita, widowed daughter of Francesco Luti of Siena, retired to the Convent of Santa Apollonia four months after Raphael’s death. A small residence in Via di Santa Dorotea is now identified as her former home, one of three possible sites examined by Lanciani.Two portraits by Raphael are identified as those of Margarita, La Fornarina, where she is naked from the waist up, and, rather more demure, La donna velata. The former was already the subject of several early testimonies before featuring in a 1642 inventory of the Barberini collection. X-ray analysis during restoration work at the beginning of the twenty-first century revealed a ring with a ruby on the third finger of her left hand. She wears a ribbon with the artist’s name; the ring may hint at betrothal and the depth of their bond. The latter work is identified by Vasari as a portrait of Raphael’s mistress, “whom he loved until he died, and of whom he made a most beautiful portrait, which seems spirited and alive”. She also served as his model for the Virgin and in other religious works -- source link
#history#margarita luti#16th century