Màgia, the mother shrouded in mystery

Fourteen pounds of candles. Giovanni Santi honoured his dead wife, Màgia di Battista Ciarla, with fourteen pounds of candles. Definitely a sign of love, compared to the six pounds – less than the half – that Santi bought when his own mother died. Màgia passed away in October 1491, leaving a son called Raphael, soon to be one of the most famous artists of all time. The child was only eight. Indeed, the information about his mother are more than scarce, not enough to clear the haze around her. One could say that History itself decided to hand down Raphael’s father as his only significant parent, as most of the information we have is about him.

Vasari gives us information about Raphael’s birth: “Raphael was born in Urbino, one of the most important city of Italy, in 1483, on Good Friday at three in the morning, of Giovanni de' Santi, a painter of no great merit, but of good intelligence and well able to show his son the right way, a favour which bad fortune had not granted to himself in his youth”.

He mentions only the father, as if Giovanni Santi were the only parent of Raphael. The mother is scarcely mentioned, and plays a role that is merely technical. “Giovanni, knowing how important it was for the child, whom he called Raphael as a good augury, being his only son, to have his mother's milk and not that of a nurse, wished her to suckle it, so that the child might see the ways of his equals in his tender years rather than the rough manners of clowns and people of low condition”. So, milk - Mother’s milk – plays a major role in this incredibly vague story. Back then, wet nurses often breastfed new-borns. Little Raphael, instead, was breastfed by his mother, accordingly to his father’s ideas. Moreover, Raphael did not have siblings, so his mother could devote herself to him only. Did Madam Màgia have the time to realise how special her baby was? We might venture an answer – yes, probably. It is difficult to assume how much she knew about the life in the workshop, but the child was so gifted and precocious that she must have heard about it.

Raphael’s biographers and scholars focused on how much of the memory of his mother lies in his work. Yet we are unable to demonstrate such conjectures and suppositions. Is there a piece of his mother in the many Madonnas painted by Raphael? And did he paint his several Madonna and child out of his need to remember her touch, her hugs, her eyes, her tender caresses?

The Madonna of the Goldfinch is often mentioned in this connection. Raphael painted two children in it – Jesus and the young John the Baptist, yet it is clear that the mother is focusing her attention and her love on her son. We may never know neither how strong was Raphael’s memory of his mother, nor how he dealt with her premature death. We can just be grateful to the woman who gave birth to him and try to express this a little better than Vasari did.

? 2020 Anna Maria Amato