Free Under the Egg by Laura Marx Fitzgerald Page B

middle of the street to check out the filigree work of a manhole cover or call me up to his studio to watch the golden-pink sunlight settle over Wall Street’s towers. “If you stop and look,” he once told me as we gazed at a fireworks display of cherry blossoms on East 11th Street, “you will be amazed at what you find.”
    So I spent those two weeks really looking. I looked at Michelangelos and Leonardos, of course, but also Peruginos, Bellinis, Titians, Georgiones, Simibaldos, Lottos, Pintoricchios, Solarios, Tifernates, Botticellis, Ghirlandaios, and all the Fras (Fra Bartolommeo, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Lippo Lippi, Fra Angelico).
    And the more I looked, the more the painting in Jack’s studio looked like a Raphael.
    But this was a problem in and of itself. For one thing, the more likely it was a Raphael, the more likely it was stolen.
    Still, if there was one thing I’d learned from the books on art fakes that Eddie found for me, it was that the best way to “find” an Old Master painting is to really, really want to find one.
    For example, there was this guy in 1940s Holland who specialized in forging Vermeers. Everyone wants to find a Vermeer—there are only about thirty-five known canvases in the world, and each one is worth a fortune. So experts fell all over each other to authenticate this one fake religious painting—even though it was a subject Vermeer never painted, in a size he never painted, and in a style that looked nothing like his other paintings! But everyone wanted to discover a Vermeer, so a Vermeer it became. For a while, at least.
    I had to focus on the hard facts, like when Raphael might have painted this particular Madonna and Child. So when the light faded in the studio each night, I headed down to the kitchen and strained my eyes to read one more book. It was one recommended by Eddie, who had called it “a backstage pass to the Italian Renaissance”: The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by an artist named Giorgio Vasari.
    Imagine for a minute that you attend Great Painters of the Italian Renaissance High School. Like any high school, you have cliques, rivalries, and big personalities. Vasari is the school gossip. Vying for valedictorian you’ve got Leonardo da Vinci, the quirky supernerd, and Michelangelo, the angry but brilliant loner. Then you have the guy everyone wants to be seen with: the star quarterback who’s been elected both Class President and Most Popular.
    That’s Raphael.
    You could also add “Class Flirt” to his list of titles. According to Vasari, Raphael was a “very amorous person, delighting much in women.” He strung along an engagement to the niece of a powerful cardinal for seven years while he fooled around with his mistress, even refusing to finish the Pope’s frescoes unless she was brought to his villa for “inspiration.” Vasari records his early death at thirty-seven as due to “sexual excess”—a medical condition that I’m pretty sure has since been disproven.
    This true love of Raphael’s, a local girl named Margherita Luti—nicknamed “La Fornarina” or the “Baker’s Daughter”—pops up throughout his work. Raphael adored the plump brunette and used her again and again as a model. Many of those famous Madonnas are based on her.
    He painted her portrait, too: once as an elegant woman in sumptuous robes and a modest veil ( La Velata ) and once in a pose better suited for a girlie magazine, topless except for a transparent wisp held coyly to her chest.
    Now some scholars deny these two paintings are of the same woman. Some even say that La Fornarina was a myth. But Renaissance artists loved nothing more than to leave little clues and riddles in their paintings, and Raphael was no different. So put the portraits side by side and look for yourself. Why are the women in the exact same pose: half profile,