ACADEMY OF SAN LUCA (ROME) - The fragment of the fresco with a Putto holding a manifeston donated in 1834 to the Academy of San Luca by the painter, merchant and artist Jean Baptiste is really by the hand of the great Raphael.
The confirmation of the attribution comes from a study, research and conservation project financed by the Patrons of the Galleria Borghese - Roman Heritage Onlus, on the occasion of the fifth centenary of the death of the great painter from Urbino (1483-1520).
Subject for decades of a heated debate on attribution, so much so that there were also those who claimed that it was a nineteenth-century fake, the pictorial fragment - according to the association of patrons chaired by Maite Bulgari - "was in many respects comparable to one of the two figures flanking the Prophet Isaiah made by Sanzio in about 1513 in the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome. Pico Cellini firmly supported the autograph, also referring to the testimony of Giorgio Vasari, who tells of a first version of Isaiah that Raphael allegedly executed and destroyed shortly after ".
The result of the cleaning of the Putto, recently completed, attested that the quality of the fragment preserved in the Accademia di San Luca was "heavily compromised in its legibility by the alterations of the materials attributable to the restoration carried out in the 1960s".
On the contrary, the painting has today revealed an extraordinary pictorial quality, according to the restorers "completely compatible with the technique used by Raphael in his certain works", a fact supported by diagnostic and chemical investigations.
The possibility of arguing that the painting is a false nineteenth-century, as hypothesized by some during the twentieth century, has therefore fallen from an objective point of view, "but above all it can be said with certainty that the work is to be traced back to Raffello Sanzio ".
The study, restoration and enhancement project born as an in-depth study on the occasion of the exhibition "Raffaello.
The Academy of San Luca and the myth of Urbinate" launched last year, was conceived and curated by the curators of that exhibition, Valeria Rotili, Stefania Ventra and Francesco Moschini (former Secretary General of the National Academy of San Luca) and involved an interdisciplinary team of specialists: Paolo Violini, master restorer of the restoration laboratory of the Vatican Museums;
Silvia Ginzburg, Professor of History of Modern Art at the University of Roma Tre, the nuclear engineer Claudio Falcucci and a working group of the Department of History, Design and Restoration of the Sapienza University of Rome, coordinated by Marco Fasolo with the collaboration of Leonardo Baglioni.
It is, the patrons conclude, "a significant discovery that offers the scientific community and the public the opportunity to review and appreciate the technical mastery that in 1858, in front of this work, made the French painter Gustave Moreau exclaim:" the most beautiful design and the most beautiful color combined ". (ANSA).