It wasn’t the sex: Bloodletting deadly for Raphael, study claims

A feverish Raphael suffering from “a coronavirus-like illness” died after stopping working to tell his medical professionals he had been privately visiting enthusiasts on freezing cold nights, leading them to wrongly prescribe bloodletting, a new research study claims.

Popular misconception has the Renaissance painter succumb to syphilis in 1520 after wooing one a lot of women, though professionals extensively agree that he passed away of an infection.

Laid low by a raving fever, the prolific painter, designer and designer, was tended to by “the best physicians in Rome, sent to him by the pope” who feared losing the important 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 stopped working to tell the physicians of his “frequent night trips in the cold” to visit fans.

” It was much, much colder in March because duration, and it’s very likely he caught pneumonia,” Riva stated.

The medical professionals detected a fever brought on by an “excess of humors”, or blood, and let his blood– either through cuts or leeches– which fatally compromised him.

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

Raphael was sent with high honors at a grand funeral service at the Vatican, and his remains rest in Rome’s Pantheon. A red rose enhances his grave all the all year.

Read likewise: All Raphael’s tapestries go back to Sistine Chapel after centuries

‘ His own mistake’

” Because duration, medical professionals were aware of the threats of bloodletting in the treatment of contagious illness, however were acting upon false information,” stated Riva, who co-authored the study with three fellow scientists from the University of Milano Bicocca.

” A medical error, and his own mistake in not faithfully stating his history, added to Raphael’s death,” he said.

The researchers had actually been preparing the short study, which was published today in the Internal and Emergency Medicine journal, before COVID-19 gripped northern Italy in late February.

As practicing physicians, they then had to put it on hold when they found themselves on the frontline of the crisis, taking care of medical personnel who had actually captured the virus in intensive care systems.

” From what we know, Raphael died of a lung disease really similar to the coronavirus we’ve seen now,” he said.

Contemporary accounts of his death expose the painter’s disease “lasted 15 days; Raphael was composed enough to put his affairs in order, confess his sins, and get the last rites,” the study states.

It said it was an intense illness, identified by high and continuous fever.

” A recent sexually transmitted infection– such as gonorrhea and syphilis– could not discuss the incubation period.

” A severe symptom of viral liver disease might not be considered without jaundice and other signs of liver failure. No epidemics of typhus or plague were reported in the city of Rome at that time,” it added.

Despite his sudden death, Raphael produced a vast ouevre of critical work, much of it at the Vatican, whose museums consist of a number of rooms filled with his frescoes.

Finished by Raphael’s trainees after his death, they stay some of the Vatican’s most popular spaces.