Raffaello Sanzio.

The laboratory house where Raffaello Sanzio[1] was born.

In the picture : Urbino, leaving the Albornoz Fortress towards Raffaello Sanzio’s birthplace. The Fortress was built between 1350 and 1370 at the behest of the cardinal Egidio Alvaros de Albornoz, and already in 1375 had to resist the siege of Antonio da Montefeltro who claimed the city handed over to him by people rebellion.

 

 

On the first floor of the birthplace in Urbino, there is a fresco in the room where Raffaelo himself was born in 1483[2] : a young woman reads with an absorbed look and almost forgets about the child sleeping on her legs; it cannot go unnoticed, indeed it immediately indicates the author, passionate and shy, who was Giovanni Santi, Raffaello’s father and mature spouse of the young Magìa of Battista Ciarla[3].

Raffaello, who was weaned in this room and played until he could go down to his father’s workshop – where he began to learn the job very early and precisely from the older collaborators to whom he was entrusted – learned of the marital bound, about which he had no doubts in the years to come, even from that simple fresco by his father : the fresco is known as ‘Madonna di casa Santi’ and confirms the competence of the young wife, also in their neighbourhood.

Orphaned at just a few years old, first of his mother and then of his father, Raffaello was in fact adopted by his father’s workers over whom ‘Perugino’ virtually supervised, and to whom Giovanni Santi had presented the youngest Raffaello in 1494, for him to work for the Master as an apprentice[4] : at seventeen, therefore, Raffaello found himself master of his father’s laboratory – thanks to his real talent but also to his father’s prudent foresight – and above all capable of obtaining work orders.

If the sketches constituted a precious and indispensable investment for a Master and for his laboratory – so much so that they formed ‘de facto’ alliances when they were lented to other Masters[5] or significant damage when they were sold clandestinely – Raffaello knew well what he intended to achieve for a commissioned portrait : so that we do not find in his many Madonnas the same intense gaze of the young woman portraied by her husband in their marital rooom, although we are equally admired in the commissioned works by the unique and refined colours that distinguish Raffaello’s painting and the perfection of his drawing.

With a surprising, but reasonable reinterpretation for the working methods and the environment that they both frequented, Giovanni Santi would have taken from Piero Dalla Francesca and from his work now known as ‘Pala Brera’[6] (1472) – commissioned to him by Federico di Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino - the conceivability of a ‘politician’ woman, exempt from those formalities and forced care with which instead women were trained and made useless by the courteous Culture.

 

P.S. I sincerely thank the museum ‘Casa natale di Raffaello’ at Urbino and the ’Accademia Raffaello’ for their advice during the visit.

 

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – December 29,  2020

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[1] “Lavamini ed mundi estote” is the Latin inscription that can be read on the wash basin in the courtyard on the first floor that connects the house, with entrance on the main street – now Via Raffaello – purchased by Giovanni Santi in 1460, with the house on the first floor overlooking the narrow  Via Santa Margherita, brought as a dowry by Raffaello’s mother, Magìa Ciarla Battista’s, and equipped with a well : the motto speaks of the power of everyone in being able to amend one’s mistakes when they are truly recognized. The laboratory house helped Giovanni Santi to immediately get started working in the Duke’s service as a decorator of painting tables, so that he was subsequently able to transform his activity into the most sought-after ‘painting laboratory’.

[2] Raffaello lived between 1483 and 1520 : 2020 is in fact the 500th since his death.

[3] As still happens in some Countries - in Russia and the ex-Soviet area, but not only – already at Raffaello’s time, women were identified by paternity : and this well beyond marriage.

[4] “…And Pietro (Perugino) who was benign by nature, not being able to fail in that great desire, accepted Rafaello. So Giovanni (Santi) returned to Urbino with the greatest joy in the world and, not without Rafaello’s mother tears and great cries he took him to Perugia. Where Pietro (Perugino), having seen how Rafaello drew, his manners and customs, made with all this a judgement which time proved true…”, p.612 ‘Le Vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri. Nell’edizione per i tipi di Lorenzo Torrentino, Firenze 1550’, Giorgio Vasari – Giulio Einaudi editore 2015.

[5] Not only Raffaello Sanzio but also other artists, later even Leonardo Da Vinci, used the same sketch several times, adapting it to the client and to the work.

[6] ‘Pala di Brera’, or ‘Pala Montefeltro’, is located in fact in the ‘Pinacoteca di Brera’ in Milan.