Raphael’s Inamorata                                                                          —Myrna Stone


I

     Madonna della Sedia (Madonna of the Chair) oil on wood, circa 1513–1514

 

Into the tondo’s circumference 
Raffaello paints his lover, Margherita Luti, 
as a Virgin whose gaze is marked by ambivalence— 
shy but direct, ethereal yet sexually alert— 

her arms enfolding the Child who rests
His forehead against her cheek while the boyish 
Baptist, praying beside them, presses a cross of reeds
fervently to his chest. Conjoined like this,  

they, and the chair itself, are fairly honeyed 
with light, though none more so than the robust 
Babe whose hand nestles beneath a green and oxblood
shawl laid upon the Virgin’s mothering breast.

But Margherita, Raffaello’s fairest muse
and baker’s daughter, is not a mother, nor ever 
will be, though she is his secret wife he will twice use
again, clothed, then unclothed in his final effort

to record her in La Fornarina. Thereafter,
at the age of thirty-seven, he dies—according to his
biographer, Vasari, of a surfeit of sex. Ardor or fever,
it is his surgeon’s bloodletting, and a myiasis

of maggots, that will doubtless undo him.
In the perpetual now of the painting’s moment, 
however, Margherita breathes still, her spirit abrim
with familial affection, soulful and potent. 


II

      La Donna Velata (The Veiled Woman) oil on canvas, circa 1516

 

Here light, softened to amber, draws us
first to the astonishing plush and grandiose 
sleeve of Margherita’s gown, its ivory silk fussed 
and embellished in gilt, though it is her face, 

in the end, that arrests us. Lit from within 
by an abundant flush of blood, she is no lesser
lit from without, her eyes wide, the irises rimmed 
in blue as she peers at Raffaello with a tender,

pensive vulnerability. For Margherita,
at his direction, wears the voluminous Roman
veil of a married woman—a sly pictorial avowal
of her status that hitherto he has chosen 

to conceal. In her family’s rustic bakery
in Siena, in the daily making of loaves of pane 
Toscano and dolci, she had no need of a strategy
for subterfuge. Yet here, even her name—

derived from the Latin word for pearl—
Raffaello refers to obliquely by the inclusion
of a jeweled hair clip onto which he has swirled
pigment into a plump and coruscant allusion.

Inside the confines of his atmospherics
she seems to be, as she will be to the ages, 
authentically and ironically herself, her sphere
of influence one even he cannot imagine.

 

III

       La Fornarina (The Baker’s Daughter) oil on wood, 1518–1520

          

Above Raffaello’s lush colorant 
of bramble rose at her hips, Margherita is nude 
but for the eddies of a gauze wrap, her skin opalescent
against a dark ground of myrtle leaves infused,

in the language of flora, with the import
of impassioned love. Inside the portrait’s clarity 
of light there can be no mistaking her triumph, dulcet
though her expression may be, nor the fidelity 

her pose implies in the delicate sweep 
of her hand laid upon her heart. For six years
Raffaello—betrothed to his wealthy benefactor’s niece—
has found means to delay his marriage vows 

to Maria Bibbiena. Now, there is no need
to deceive in the wake of Maria’s swift and sudden 
death from the bloody flux. Thus, loosed and heedless
of society, he proclaims Margherita’s deepened

meaning, ornamenting her left arm 
with a ribbon that bears his name and the third 
finger of her left hand with a fine ruby ring. What harm
comes to them from such exposure will stir

him not in his berth beside Maria’s tomb.  
As for Margherita the bereft: she enters forthwith
the convent of Sant’ Apollonia in the heart of Rome,
where, hidden, she follows him at last into myth.

 

Myrna Stone

Myrna Stone is the author of five books of poems. A two-time Ohioana Book Award Finalist, her work has appeared in over fifty journals, including Poetry, Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, Boulevard, Nimrod, and River Styx. She is the recipient of three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry, a Full Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year Award, and the 2017 New Letters Prize in Poetry. 

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