A Widowed Mother’s Woe: Reading Raphael’s Entombment through the History of Affect

• In Event: La città vedova: Widowhood and the Italian City from Birgitta of Sweden to Vittoria Colonna

Abstract

Raphael’s 1507 altarpiece for the Baglioni chapel in the church of S. Francesco al Prato, Perugia is well documented and much studied. In the artist’s dynamic staging and sophisticated figure treatment, scholars have recognized the influence of Florentine artistic theory and both contemporary and classical forms. The subject—the brutalized body of a beloved son carried to its tomb while his mother swoons in sorrow—has been tied to the patroness, the Perugian widow Atlanta Baglioni, whose own son was publicly murdered years earlier. This paper builds on previous scholarship by contextualizing Raphael’s compositional choices within their original emotional community. Raphael’s use of gendered movements and affective displays monumentalize and compartmentalize maternal woe, ingeniously enticing viewers’ to simultaneously celebrate and moderate female grief. A large-scale work in a prominent and politically-charged setting where family rivalries were manifest in public commissions, Raphael’s altarpiece visually articulated a widowed mother’s exemplary sorrow.

Author

• Heather Graham, California State University, Long Beach