The New Girl in Town

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

There are many reasons to visit the Frick Collection: Duccio’s “Temptation,” Bellini’s “St. Francis,” El Greco’s “Purification,” Vermeer’s “Mistress and Maid,” Chardin’s “Lady with a Bird-Organ,” Ingres’s “Comtesse,” Corot’s “Boatman of Mortefontaine” – where, do you stop? And now there is one more: Raphael’s “La Fornarina” or “The Baker Girl” (c. 1520).


Raphael’s modest-sized portrait is on loan from the National Gallery of Art at the Palazzo Barberini, Rome. It is rare that New Yorkers get to spend time with a great Raphael, and if the mob of standing-room-only, shoulder-bumping museum members who showed up at the unveiling on Tuesday night is any indication of the fervor this masterpiece will generate, you can be sure that this “Fifth-Avenue Mona Lisa” will cause friction at the Frick.


The location of the painting, just inside the Oval Room, affords visitors a long view of the masterpiece from the Garden Court – though probably over the heads and shoulders of those who will be in front of you. When you get to the painting, which unfortunately is under glass, find a position free from glare and stand your ground.


Take in the cool, smooth-as-porcelain, glass-like surface of her skin, which is surrealistically hyper-beautiful and unreal. Light plays across and through her skin, as if it were somewhere between light, air, and solid. Take in the eyes (the larger of which should be farther away) and the mouth, which shift suddenly, dizzyingly, to her left and are countered by the part in her hair, the chin, and the broad nose. These pull to her right, jerking her head in both directions. It is as if, startled and unsure, she were looking toward you and turning away simultaneously.


Compare her small head, which oddly rushes forward, to her large left arm, which moves diagonally in space to the elbow, then turns unnaturally toward us like a barrier, parallel to the picture plane – keeping us at bay. The arm, much like the turban, swells and rotates inward then outward, inward then outward, subtly turning from elbow to wrist to the crab-like hand. Her stepped fingers crawl, animal-like, between her legs and then open and caress the darkness seductively.


Enjoy the belly button (covered by a billowing, transparent veil), which swoops or races across her stomach like a graceful bird or gazelle. Her bright, crimson-cloth-covered legs, oddly foreshortened, as if cut at the knees, rise upward like a swelling passion. They support her torso like a mountain. She rides them as if they were an unruly sea or a magic carpet. And then her leg appears to collapse under the weight of her left arm, as if the arm (the only thing between us and her nakedness) was weakening her very foundations, cutting her at the waist and allowing her to rise.


“La Fornarina” is one of the most famous and enigmatic pictures of the high Renaissance. So much scholarship surrounds the painting that it is in danger of being subsumed by the theories and questions, the art historical baggage, that – like a decomposing, severed limb – the portrait must inevitably drag along with it. Much remains unclear: Scholars do not know when the painting was painted or if it is finished (it may be the artist’s last picture); if Raphael or his assistants did most of the work; who the sitter is or what the artist’s relationship was to her (was she his lover, the bride or daughter of a patron, or Venus?). Numerous symbols can be found in the work that suggest any and all of the above, yet none change the nature of the painting. While reading the catalog essay for “La Fornarina,” I was reminded of a passage from Meyer Schapiro’s essay “On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content”:



If, before Rembrandt’s famous picture of ‘Man with a Knife,’ a beholder is unable to say whether it’s a portrait of a butcher or an assassin or of Saint Bartholomew who was martyred by a knife, he can still enjoy the painting as a beautiful harmony of light and shadow, color and brushwork, and appreciate the artist’s power of making the figure visible as a complex human presence steeped in feeling and reverie; and all this without linking in a specific way the qualities of the painting to the attributes of an intended subject. In a portrait we need not know the identity of the person in order to admire the realization of the individuality by painterly means. Yet for the artist that identity was essential.


Until January 30 (1 E. 70th Street, at Fifth Avenue, 212-288-0700).


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