Fragment of scandalous fresco comes to light
The fresco, painted by the early Renaissance artist Pinturicchio (1454-1513) for the Borgia apartments in the Vatican, showed the Borgia Pope Alexander VI kneeling at the feet of the Madonna and Child and cradling the infant Jesus’s right foot in his hand.
But it was an open secret at the Borgia court that the “Madonna” was Giulia Farnese, the 60-year-old Pope’s beautiful young married mistress.
Alexander VI was notorious for his love of luxury and women — he openly had four children by his previous mistress, Vanozza Catanei, including Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia. The picture provoked much speculation at the time that the baby held so tenderly by Signora Farnese and the Pope might be one of their own offspring.
When Fabio Chigi, a scholarly and deeply spiritual man, became Pope 150 years later, in 1655, and took the name Alexander VII, he had the offending fresco removed and broken up as part of a campaign to obliterate the legacy of his infamous Borgia namesake. Scholars have been pondering its whereabouts ever since.
According to Franco Ivan Nucciarelli, an art historian at Perugia University, who has reconstructed the saga of the “lost fresco”, the portraits of the Madonna and the infant Jesus ended up in the Chigi family collection, over time becoming misattributed to another artist, Perugino.
Professor Nucciarelli said, however, that he had identified them from a contemporary copy of the lost Pinturicchio masterpiece. The fragment depicting the infant Jesus was recently bought for an undisclosed sum from the descendants of the Chigi family by Giuseppe Margaritelli, an industrialist from Perugia.
He has donated it to a museum in Perugia, the Guglielmo Giordano Foundation, where it will go on show this year. Fabio Isman, art correspondent of Il Messaggero, the Rome daily, said that the Chigi family still possessed the corresponding fragment showing Giulia Farnese as the Madonna but apparently did not intend to part with it.
“As for the portrait of the kneeling Borgia Pope, its fate is unknown,” Signor Isman said. “Perhaps it was destroyed by his successors.”
Claudio Strinati, the Superintendent of Fine Arts in Rome, said that there was “absolutely no doubt” that the newly discovered picture of the baby Jesus — retitled Bambin’ Gesù delle Mani, or The Baby Jesus of the Hands — was by Pinturicchio, whose style was unmistakable.
Pinturicchio, born Bernardino di Betti, in Perugia, assisted Perugino in his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. As his fame grew he decorated the churches of Santa Maria del Popolo, Santa Maria in Ara Coeli and Santa Cecilia in Rome as well as the cathedrals at Siena and Orvieto.
His most celebrated commission, however, was the Borgia apartments, now part of the Vatican library. Although the “Giulia Farnese” fresco was removed as unsuitable, the others survived, including his paintings of the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Magi and the Resurrection, scenes from the lives of the saints and allegorical figures representing music, arithmetic and the planets.