A letter to himself signed Raffaello (?)
The most famous item in the literary corpus of Raffaello is a letter to Baldassarre Castiglione, in which three topics are touched on in quick succession: the drawings executed by Raffaello following on from an idea of his interlocutor (probably to illustrate the acts of the Popes with the name Leone in the room known as the Incendio di Borgo, or perhaps for the vault in the Room of Eliodoro); the nomination of Raffaello as the architect of St Peters, in 1514, and the model he prepared in the months following the death of Bramante; the execution of the Trionfo di Galatea (1512 ca.) in the residence or Roman villa of Agostino Chigi.
The letter was first published in 1554, by Ludovico Dolce. But, due to its stylistic and intellectual quality, it went beyond what the artist himself would have been able to, and normally pen in hand did, produce. The doubts about the actual paternity first arose in the 1800s, when, however, it was only suggested that the letter had been drafted by Raffaello, and then had been revised and completed by one of his literary friends.
The letter contained no information that the assumed addressee, at the time of its composition (spring and summer 1514), did not know of his own accord (as Castiglione lived in Rome uninterruptedly from January to September of that year). Strictly speaking, the page would seem to be a fake, a retrospective counterfeiting performed by Dolce or someone in his entourage, as he had expressly suggested (C. Thoenes, Galatea: tentativi di avvicinamento, in Raffaello a Roma. Il convegno del 1983, edited by C. Frommel and M. Winner, Rome 1986, 59-72).
We should also mention the hypothesis presented by J. Shearman (Castiglione’s Portrait of Raphael, “Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz”, 38, 1994, 69-96): the author of the letter is not Raffaello, but Castiglione. The epistle is presumed to be the portrait of Raffaello (psychological and idealised) written by Castiglione, shortly after the death of his friend, and tellingly contemporary to the drafting of the poem De morte Raphaelis pictoris.
