Rome, April 7, 1520
Raphael Sanzio died yesterday. Thirty-seven years old, on his birthday, of a fever. Rome has gone into a mourning I have not seen extended to an artist before and do not expect to see again in my lifetime, which is a more complicated statement than it sounds.
I stood in the crowd outside the Vatican this morning and watched people who had never spoken to him weep with a sincerity that I have rarely seen extended to anyone not a king or a pope. He was a painter. And he was, without question, one of the most gifted intelligences I have encountered in fifty years of moving through this world, which is saying something given the company I have kept.
We were not close friends. We occupied the same rooms, attended the same dinners, moved in the same conversations about beauty and antiquity and the divine. He knew I had been in Florence in the Medici years and treated me with a deference that assumed I was simply older than I appeared. I did not correct the impression.
What I am sitting with today is the specific grief of watching genius extinguished before it has finished what it came to do. There is no consolation in saying he accomplished more in thirty-seven years than most men accomplish in seventy. That is arithmetic. It is not comfort. The question is not what he finished. The question is what died with him. I have felt this before. I will feel it many times again.