Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks

Milan, June 15 (Reuters): The tiny pearl brooch seems an innocuous detail in Raphael’s enigmatic Fornarina portrait, but for one group of historians it unlocks a scandalous love affair kept secret for centuries.

According to new research published in May, the pearl, pinned onto an elaborate turban, is part of a web of allusions to the Renaissance artist’s clandestine marriage to the beautiful sitter, a baker’s daughter ? despite a very public engagement to the niece of a powerful Vatican cardinal.

Officially, Raphael died a bachelor at 37. “It was an impossible love affair,” says Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz, editor of specialist journal Stile, who led a year of research into Raphael’s romantic riddle.

“It is hard to overstate Raphael’s status in Rome ? he was a superstar. The distance separating them was like that which today would separate George Clooney and his cleaner.”

The pearl, also included in the Velata portrait, suggests the sitter’s name was Margherita ? the Latin word for pearl ? and not Maria Bibbiena, the artist’s intended bride. It ties Margherita to a string of nuptial allegories in the Fornarina, from the band on her arm bearing Raphael’s name ? an unusual way to sign a painting ? to a wedding ring on her finger, later covered up by the painter’s anxious students.

Bernardelli Curuz says he has found evidence to support the allegories, from contemporary documents to x-rays of the Fornarina painting carried out during a recent restoration.

The notion that Margherita was Raphael’s mistress is not altogether new ? inspired by her coy smile in the Fornarina, 19th century France’s Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted the muse sitting on the artist’s knee. A century later, Picasso portrayed their trysts in a series of explicit drawings.

But Bernardelli Curuz and his team have gone beyond the myth, tracing back the various symbols and uncovering documents to prove the two married in a secret ceremony, a relatively common practice at the time.

The historians say they have also proved conclusively that Margherita is the subject of both the Fornarina and of the Velata, or veiled portrait, logged by one contemporary as the painting of the woman Raphael “loved until he died”.

But despite her presence in his paintings, Margherita's existence seems to have been kept carefully under wraps, if not by Raphael, then at least by his students. “At the time of his death, Raphael’s school was painting the Sala di Constantino in the Vatican and they wanted at all costs to avoid losing that commission. It could have meant bankruptcy,” Bernardelli Curuz says.

Michelangelo, Raphael’s greatest rival, was pressing the Vatican to hand him the commission.

To silence the rumours, Raphael’s students placed a plaque on his tomb in the memory of his eternal fiancee, Maria Bibbiena, as if to tie the two together after death. Raven-haired Margherita was instead sent away. Four months after Raphael’s death, the convent of Saint’Apollonia in Rome’s Trastevere quarter registered the arrival of “widow Margherita”, daughter of a Siena baker.