Raphael
One of his most important papal commissions was the Raphael Cartoons (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), a series of 10 cartoons, of which seven survive, for tapestries with scenes of the lives of Saint Paul and Saint Peter, for the Sistine Chapel. The cartoons were sent to Brussels to be woven in the workshop of Pier van Aelst. It is possible that Raphael saw the finished series before his death—they were probably completed in 1520. He also designed and painted the "Loggie" at the Vatican, a long thin gallery then open to a courtyard on one side, decorated with Roman-style grottesche. He produced a number of significant altarpieces, including "The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia" and the "Sistine Madonna". His last work, on which he was working up to his death, was a large "Transfiguration", which together with "Il Spasimo" shows the direction his art was taking in his final years—more proto-Baroque than Mannerist.
Margarita Luti
Vasari is said by Anthony Blunt to have invented the legend of Raphael. The "Raphael-Fornarina myth" has been reimagined ever since "to fit the expectations of contemporary generations". In Comolli's 1790 "Life of Raphael", she is blamed for his death. In Balzac's "Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes", she is the "femme fatale" or "belle juive". In Joseph Méry's 1854 novel "Raphaël et la Fornarine", Raphael instead complains to the pope of the lack of blonde female models in Rome. For Baudelaire, hers were "the affections of a courtesan". Byron, struck by "La donna velata" while in Florence, styled his Venetian mistress Margherita Cogni as "La Fornarina". Caroline Norton wrote a sonnet in which Raphael tells Pope Leo X that she is his eyes. Nabokov suggests there was a feud between Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo over rivalry for her affections, perhaps inspired by the former's "La Fornarina" and the latter's "", also known as "La Fornarina".