Raphael Dies on Good Friday

April 6, 1520

Rome's favorite painter collapsed with a fever after, rumor said, a night of excess with his mistress. He was thirty-seven. His unfinished Transfiguration stood above his deathbed. The city mourned as if a prince had fallen, and a golden age of High Renaissance harmony quietly closed. His death on Good Friday, the same date as his birth, was regarded as a sign of divine favor by mourning contemporaries.