At Home With Raphael and Vasari

Urbino continued to disorient me well into the evening, after stumbling into a bland suburban restaurant for dinner with a few tired friends and instead finding my professors there, excitedly looking over the menu in eager anticipation. We jointed them at the table and I found myself tasting some of the finest gnocchi I'd had thus far, garnished with duck sauce. It only got better, with an excellent, soft, smooth cup of tartufo bianco for dessert.

The next morning, before piling into the bus again for our journey over the Appenines, we stopped in town long enough to visit the birthplace of Raphael, whose tomb I would see in the Pantheon a handful of days later. It was a simple, elegant rowhouse, anonymous among the stony grey Urbino facades.

Within, all was whitewash and pale clear rainy morning light. Some sparse dark wood Renaissance furniture stood here and there, darker beams overhead, and a few minor paintings of Raphael's followers and contemporaries hung on the walls. Only one fresco fragment was actually the work of the Master. A small courtyard stood on the second floor, with a little detached dining room up a flight of stairs beyond, full of serene, simple leather-seated chairs and bull's-eye glass windows. It was perfect simplicity.

I'm not one for starkness or plainness; I got nicknamed "Mr. Baroque" fairly early on in Architecture School. Yet, Raphael's house, a plain, simple late-quattrocento middle-class townhouse satisfied any urge to the ornamental I could ever have. I can't say I would have been able to design it, but it was perfect.

It was difficult to visit, simply because you didn't want to just look around, but live there and never go home.

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We spent our morning on a bumpy and unsettling bus ride through the Appenines, mostly glimpsed by me in a sleepy stupor; a hazy panorama of perilous cliffs, switchbacks, vast, half-Slavic hillsides thick with forest, and the omnipresent thick layer of clouds and fog.

We arrived in Arezzo, in somewhat more temperate Tuscany and had a quick lunch eating slabs of excellent, steaming folded-over pizza we'd gotten from a tiny lunch counter with a wait-staff with an enormous number of body piercings. Then we spent an afternoon sketching the steep pitch of their principal piazza, lined with attenuated tower-houses and a grand, out-of-scale colonnade designed by the famous architect-turned-biographer Vasari, who made Arezzo his home. We stopped by his own house before we left that afternoon.

Unlike Raphael, who had merely grown up in the house we saw in Urbino, this was Vasari's studio. Every inch of ceiling and wall was frescoed in a marvelous panoply of allegory and iconography. A bare-breasted, winged Virtue overcame Fame and Avarice in a remarkable antechamber with walls filled with painted architecture that seemed to extrude into three dimensions at the richly-molded stone fireplace. In another room, richly-dressed images of the muses were painted on the vaults, each given the face and figure of his lovely blonde fiancee. I sketched Urania, the muse of Astronomy, bent over a globe in a ruff and golden-yellow Renaissance finery. Sometimes she's associated with architecture, as well.

It was a place for an artist to live out his life, to play out all the ideas he had accumulated since childhood, whether it was to imagine vast symbolic schemes or reproduce sevenfold his beautiful bride-to-be overhead. Raphael's house was the only place to raise an artist, filled with good simple design to be elaborated on, examined: the basics. And the simplicity, when the time came, would push him out into the wider world to examine the brightness and color that dwelled there.

I think I'd be happy to live in either home.