Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance, born in Urbino in 1483 and dead in Rome on 6 April 1520, at thirty-seven. He painted The School of Athens in the Vatican and the portraits of popes. He was a master at seventeen and, in his last years, directed the building of Saint Peter's. People still ask how he died, because the answer most of them know is a story.
He died shortly after ten at night on Good Friday. His body was laid out in Rome beneath his last altarpiece, The Transfiguration, and he was buried in the Pantheon, as he had asked. Thirty years later a version of those last days was in print, and it is the one repeated today.
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The version comes from Giorgio Vasari, who published Raphael's life in the middle of the sixteenth century. In his telling, Raphael caught a fever after a night with a woman, and the doctors, not guessing the cause, bled him, which was the wrong cure. It is a perfect story for the painter of love and grace, and it has been told ever since.
But a letter to the Duke of Ferrara dated 7 April 1520, the day after the death, tells it differently. It speaks of an illness that lasted fifteen days. Fifteen days is not one bad night.
The famous coincidence is shakier too. Vasari says Raphael was born on a Good Friday and died on one, which is why the story says he died on his birthday. The birth date usually given for 1483 is 28 March, and it is not 6 April.
Five centuries later the cause is still open. In 2026 researchers who tested bone fragments attributed to Raphael found the trace of a rare bacterium in one sample. They wrote only that it might have been a cause of death, and the fragments were never carbon dated.
What You'll Discover
How an orphan became a master.
What Florence taught him.
Who is hiding in the Vatican fresco.
What Michelangelo said about him.
The woman he never married.
What really killed him at thirty-seven.