Ut pictura poesis: a new reading of Raphael's portrait ofLa Fornarinaas a Petrarchan allegory of painting, fame and desire

Abstract

Abstract The singularity of the semi-nude portrait of a woman called La Fornarina, now in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, has managed to elude scholarly attention for centuries (figure 1). The portrait, attributed to Raphael and most often dated c. 1520, the year of his death, depicts a lifesized woman in a three-quarter-length pose. She is seated on a ledge surrounded by a nimbus of green laurel leaves. Her thighs are covered with a thick red drapery while she holds up a transparent piece of white silk that is caught in an antique band encircling her abdomen. An exotic turban of striped gold silk, a costume piece for a sixteenth-century Roman woman, nearly conceals her dark hair. Attached to the turban is a small pendant of gems encased in gold with an oriental pearl, which rests over her left eyebrow. The corporeal physicality of the woman's body is accentuated by the close proximity of her bare arms and breasts to the picture plane and by the contrast of her white skin against the dense green foliage th...