VII.v. The House where Raphael was Born
"Here's one in whom Nature feared--faint at such vying -
Eclipse while he lived, and decease at his dying."
- Thomas Hardy
After a long day I had finally reached Urbino, a genteel place lost in the hilly inland reaches of Le Marche, in truth hardly worthy of being called a city. After the departure of my visiting relatives and a rather uneventful intervening week, I had decided to leave Bologna for three days. As usual, I was seeking out the excitement of the past. Urbino's obscure diminutiveness, its inaccessibility, can be misleading; for a few bright years this was a centre of culture unlike anything that had existed before. The historian Kenneth Clark once referred to the city and its illustrious court, the gracious conversations of which are immortalized in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, as a high point of Western civilization. A good part of the modern world was born here, Raphael Sanzio being among it.
Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father, had a house built here for his family and included, on the ground floor, space for his burgeoning workshop. He himself was never destined to become a great painter, but he did his best, and his work for the dukes of Montefeltro, the greatest of patrons, didn't go unrewarded. The house is sizeable, sparsely furnished only due to the losses of time, and is lit by large windows. In the courtyard there is still the stone on which he, perhaps in the company of his young son, ground pigments and mixed paint. In the end, Giovanni hadn't done so badly. Through a bitter mixture of agony and fortune, he died when his son was just eleven, and so the young Raphael was apprenticed to Perugino, and was given a training that his father could never have matched. By the time he was twenty-five, Raphael was one of the greatest painters who has ever lived.
Whether it was chance alone that saw to Raphael growing up here at such a time, or whether, as most like to believe, it was something more, there is no doubt that the few streets that make up Urbino, and the townhouse where he lived, have been witness to some extraordinary things. The room where he was born is bare save for a small fresco of a mother and child, a thing as touching as it is debated by art historians; is this gentle recognition of motherhood the work of a devout father or of a young, gifted son? A nearby plaque reminds the reader not to belittle his surroundings. The most divine of things, after all, are often set forth in the humblest of disguises.
This is the staring point for devout pilgrims of Urbino's most famous son, the beginning of a journey that ends exactly thirty seven years later on a deathbed in Rome. Raphael died on Good Friday in 1520 at the same age, according to some, as Christ. Something more than mere mythology, Raphael's life has been romanticized for centuries and a nondescript house in Urbino is at the centre of the romance.
I slept at a pension next door to the Casa di Rafaello, in a room furnished no more lavishly. It had been a tiring journey, since in the same day I had first visited Pesaro, a pleasant seaside town just on the border between the Marche and Romagna. Like many Adriatic towns in Italy, the seaside itself, forlorn and lined with concrete bathing houses and pastel coloured hotels, isn't nearly as attractive as the older historic centres somewhat removed from the beach. Pesaro's real treasure though, at least in my eyes, is a huge altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini, the closest Venetian counterpart to Raphael. Bellini's work solicits almost without fail an intensely emotional response, one that begs a comparison between the two masters.
I had long been in love with Raphael's Madonnas, that is sure; they are among the most sweetly seductive things in the whole history of art. As an adolescent, I could never think of anything as wondrous as those precious hours spent at the Louvre, staring at La Belle Jardinière, with her softly averted eyes and tousled braids. She was the benchmark of my half-serious yearnings. Yet since arriving in Italy my passion for Bellini, for his version of the oft-repeated mother and child, had only grown, and that morning, in the little museum in Pesaro, I think I decided why.
No art historian will ever tell you what he or she thinks personally of a painting, and would shudder to write or to read about passion in any context, but for as much as I can help it I am not an art historian, and I will tell you what I feel. Raphael's women, La Belle Jardinière for one, are, undoubtedly and incredibly, life-changingly beautiful. They are perfectly real, vivid, painted with god-like tenderness and realism. Yet, in the end, they are nothing other than pretty Roman girls, because they are so perfectly believable in all their beauty.
Bellini, for his part, makes some concession to poetry where Raphael works in only the most eloquent of prose. If you stare long enough at a Bellini, besides growing faint, you will notice something peculiar; his women, with their dark open eyes and long noses, are too beautiful to exist in the flesh but too realistic to be mere invention. Yes, they are perfectly rendered with the virtuoso near-photographic precision one comes to expect from the Venetian master, but they have an unbelievably all their own that melds into their realism and enhances their mystery. They are the hodegetria, the classic eastern Byzantine queen, updated for the nascent modern world. One would never cross them in the street, because it is simply impossible that they could exist, though when you stare at them they might seem as realistic as a photograph. This is the genius of Bellini. This is why, in Pesaro on that day in my mind, he surpassed even the divinity of Raphael.
Julia Kristeva, the semiotician who I had so extraordinarily met, along with Umberto Eco, a few weeks earlier at Professor Cavina's Palazzo, wrote an influential essay in feminist theory called "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini." In it, she explores the notions of maternity as expressed by the painter, complex notions that the man modified throughout his life as he progressed from bachelor to husband to father. It is interesting that Kristeva didn't wish to explore Raphael's work, as the latter's paintings often serve, despite what I mentioned above, as a starting point for contemporary feminist critiques of idealized motherhood. Perhaps Kristeva too was thinking in some way of what I had grasped that morning in Pesaro.
I thought about these things as I lay in bed at the pension in Urbino. About Raphael, about Bellini, about whether or not I put too much stock in the past, and then I fell asleep.
Pomodoro's Golden Sphere, by the Sea in Pesaro
Giovanni Bellini's Pesaro altarpiece
The Room where Raphael was born
The Casa di Rafaello, from the street
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