According to Vasari, Raphael was a "very amorous man and affectionate towards the ladies".[5][note 2] He is said to have painted portraits of his mistress and to have assigned the engraver il Baviera to serve as her page.[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".[5][6]
Margarita is not mentioned by Vasari but is named twice in sixteenth-century marginalia to the second edition of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, beside the passage describing La donna velata: "portrait of Margarita, Raphael's mistress ... Margarita".[7][note 3] By the mid-eighteenth century she was referred to as La Fornarina.[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".[7][9] Although this story is retold in Passavant's 1839 Life of Raphael and elsewhere, Missirini was known for his "pseudo-traditions"; se non è vero, è ben trovato.[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.[10] A small residence in Via di Santa Dorotea is now identified as her former home, one of three possible sites examined by Lanciani.