Margarita Luti

[5] 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.

[5] 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.

[5] 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".

[7][8] In a letter of 1806, Melchior Missirini recounted the tale of their first meeting, of how Raphael fell in love after watching her as she bathed her feet in the Tiber in the garden beside his house in Trastevere, only to discover that "her mind was as beautiful as her body".

[9] In 1897 a document was discovered indicating that Margherita, widowed daughter of Francesco Luti of Siena, retired to the Convent of Santa Apollonia four months after Raphael's death.

[7][10] In a recent article[11] Giuliano Pisani showed that the title “Fornarina” (first used by engraver Domenico Cunego in 1772) is rooted in a linguistic tradition, documented, among others, by the Greek poet Anacreon in the 6th century BCE and found in numerous literary texts from antiquity to the modern period.

[13] X-ray analysis during restoration work at the beginning of the twenty-first century, sponsored by Estée Lauder,[14] revealed a ring with a ruby on the third finger of her left hand.

[17][18][19] In the five or six sonnets attributed to the painter, the Petrarchan theme of ideal love is prominent; in one, perhaps apocryphal, there is an accompanying drawing sometimes identified as being of La Fornarina.

[4] 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.

[30] Among the drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, is Quartier Latin, the Modern Raphael and his Fornarina.