It wasn’t the sex: bloodletting fatal for Raphael, study claims

by Ella Ide

A feverish Raphael suffering from “a coronavirus-like disease” died after failing to tell his doctors he had been secretly visiting lovers on freezing cold nights, leading them to wrongly prescribe bloodletting, a new study claims.

Popular myth has the Renaissance painter succumb to syphilis in 1520 after wooing one too many ladies, though experts widely agree that he died of an infection.

Laid low by a raging fever, the prolific painter, designer and architect, was tended to by “the best doctors in Rome, sent to him by the pope” who feared losing the invaluable artist, medical historian Michele Augusto Riva told AFP.

But according to Italian painter Giorgio Vasari and his 1550 masterpiece on the lives of painters, Raphael failed to tell the physicians of his “frequent night outings in the cold” to visit lovers.

“It was much, much colder in March in that period, and it’s very likely he caught pneumonia,” Riva said.

The doctors diagnosed a fever caused by an “excess of humours”, or blood, and let his blood — either through incisions or leeches — which fatally weakened him.

The artist, a child prodigy and part of a trinity of Renaissance greats along with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, died aged only 37.

Raphael was sent off with high honours at a grand funeral at the Vatican, and his remains rest in Rome’s Pantheon. A red rose graces his grave all the year round. (AFP)