The woman in Raphael's La Fornarina is traditionally said to be Margherita Luti, a baker's daughter from Rome and the painter's lover. The tradition is old, but every source that names her was written after Raphael died.
Raphael painted the portrait around 1518 to 1519, shortly before he died at thirty-seven. She sits half undressed, one hand over her breast, a blue and gold turban on her hair, and on her left arm a gold band carries his signature, Raphael of Urbino. The picture has belonged to the Barberini collection since 1642 and now hangs in their palace in Rome.
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The name on the label is the first thing that does not hold. Fornarina means the baker's girl, and Giorgio Vasari, who told Raphael's life in 1568, never uses it. He never names the woman at all. He says only that Raphael was a very amorous man, and he links one portrait to a woman Raphael loved until he died.
Nobody seems to have called this portrait the Fornarina until the eighteenth century, more than two hundred years after the painter was buried. The woman may well have existed. It is the story around her that arrived late, and each version added a detail Raphael never confirmed.
Who invented the baker's daughter?
An engraver did. In the eighteenth century Domenico Cunego put the word Fornarina on this portrait, and it stuck because a story was already waiting for it. Years earlier, in the margins of Vasari's second edition, a reader had written the name Margarita beside the portrait Vasari describes as the woman Raphael loved, the veiled lady now called La Velata.
Vasari supplied one more piece of the legend. According to him, Raphael could not give his mind to the frescoes in the Villa Farnesina until his patron Agostino Chigi let his sweetheart come to live at his side. The tale of their first meeting arrived later still. In 1806 the writer Melchior Missirini told it in a letter, and historians now treat it as an invention.
Then painting gave the story a face. In 1814 Ingres showed Raphael in his studio with a woman in his arms and dressed her in the same blue and gold turban as the portrait in Palazzo Barberini. For Ingres, the Fornarina was the model of feminine beauty. After that, the baker's daughter no longer needed a document.
What You'll Discover
What the one surviving record says.
What the X-ray found on her hand.
Who Raphael was supposed to marry.
What really killed him.