Before the "Transfiguration" was completed, Raphael was seized with a violent fever, probably contracted through his researches among the ruins of Rome. Weak from overwork, he seems to have realized at once that his labors were finished. He made his will, giving his works of art to his pupils; his beautiful home to Cardinal Bibiena, though the cardinal died soon after without ever living in it; a thousand crowns to purchase a house whose rental should defray the expense of twelve masses monthly at the altar of his chapel in the Pantheon, which he had long before made ready for his body; and the rest of his property to his relatives and Margherita.
He died on the night of Good Friday, April 6, 1520, at the age of thirty-seven. All Rome was bent with grief at the death of its idol. He lay in state in his beautiful home, on a catafalque surrounded by lighted tapers, the unfinished "Transfiguration" behind it.
An immense crowd followed the body to the Pantheon; his last beautiful picture, its colors yet damp, being carried in the procession.
His friend Cardinal Pietro Bembo wrote his epitaph in Latin: "Dedicated to Raphael Sanzio, the son of Giovanni of Urbino, the most eminent painter, who emulated the ancients. In whom the union of Nature and Art is easily perceived. He increased the glory of the pontiffs Julius II. and Leo X. by his works of painting and architecture. He lived exactly thirty-seven years, and died on the anniversary of his birth, April 6, 1520.
"Living, great Nature feared he might outvie
Her works, and, dying, fears herself to die."
Count Castiglione wrote to his mother, "It seems as if I were not in Rome, since my poor Raphael is here no longer." The pope, Leo X., could not be comforted, and, it is said, burst into tears, exclaiming, "Ora pro nobis." The Mantuan Ambassador wrote home the day after Raphael's death, "Nothing is talked of here but the loss of the man who at the close of his three-and-thirtieth year [thirty-seventh] has now ended his first life; his second, that of his posthumous fame, independent of death and transitory things, through his works, and in what the learned will write in his praise, must continue forever."
Three hundred and thirteen years after his death his tomb was opened, in 1833, and the complete skeleton was found. After five weeks, the precious remains were enclosed in a leaden coffin, and that in a marble sarcophagus, and reburied at night, the Pantheon being illuminated, and the chief artists and cultivated people of the city bearing torches in the reverent procession.
Dead at thirty-seven, and yet how amazing the amount of work accomplished. He left two hundred and eighty-seven pictures and five hundred and seventy-six drawings and studies. Michael Angelo said Raphael owed more to his wonderful industry than to his genius. When asked once by his pupils how he accomplished so much, Raphael replied, "From my earliest childhood I have made it a principle never to neglect anything."