Poems, portraits, and paper: Raphael’s sonnets and the fabric of friendship

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that Raphael’s double portrait of Agostino Beazzano and Andrea Navagero formed the painter’s fullest response—made in purely pictorial terms—to Renaissance prosody as it was then being developed by his friends, especially the portraits’ sitters and Pietro Bembo. The drafts of Raphael’s own sonnets on drawings made while he was painting the Stanza della Segnatura are visualizations of the intellectual labor his poetic compositions entailed. A close looking at their placement across the paper on these “ekphrastic sheets” (to use Francesco Di Teodoro’s term) as well as changes in the sonnets’ texts offer tools for understanding the double portrait of Raphael’s poet-friends. Raphael’s often dismissed efforts at poetry made on these study drawings thus blossomed half a decade later in the contribution to Renaissance literary theory he made as a painter.