Raphael Sanzio, one of the towering figures of the High Renaissance alongside Michelangelo and Leonardo, died in Rome, coincidentally on the same date as his birth thirty-seven years earlier. His death left his masterwork, the Transfiguration, unfinished on his easel, and Pope Leo X reportedly wept upon hearing the news.
Raphael had risen from Urbino to become the most sought-after painter in Rome, completing luminous frescoes in the Vatican's Stanze and portraits so refined that contemporaries considered his brushwork almost supernatural in its grace. By his mid-thirties he ran a workshop of fifty assistants and had amassed considerable wealth and papal favor.
According to his contemporary biographer Giorgio Vasari, Raphael fell ill after an amorous night with his mistress Margherita Luti, known as "La Fornarina," and made the mistake of not telling his doctors, who prescribed a treatment—bloodletting—wrong for his actual ailment. He worsened rapidly and died within days, at only 37 years old, on Good Friday, which by the old Julian calendar also happened to be his birthday.
His body lay in state beneath his unfinished final painting, the Transfiguration, and was buried in the Pantheon at his own request, an extraordinary honor. His epitaph, composed by the poet Pietro Bembo, declared that Nature herself had feared being outdone by his living hand and now feared dying alongside him. His death is often cited by art historians as marking the symbolic end of the High Renaissance's golden balance and grace.
Key people: Raphael, Pope Leo X, Margherita Luti