Margarita Luti
According to Vasari, Raphael was a "very amorous man and affectionate towards the ladies". He is said to have painted portraits of his mistress and to have assigned the engraver il Baviera to serve as her page. When commissioned by Agostino Chigi to decorate the Villa Farnesina, he was unable to dedicate himself properly to his work due to his infatuation - until she was allowed to come to live at his side. Again according to Vasari, it was Raphael's immoderate indulgence in "amorous pleasures", one day taken to excess, that brought on the fever which led to the young artist's death in 1520. Although in the Pantheon he lies beside his fiancée Maria, daughter of his patron Bernardo Dovizi, Raphael had long delayed his marriage; on his deathbed he sent his mistress away "with the means to live an honest life".
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".