Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History's Worst F*ckboys: Raphael

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

The Renaissance is known for its heady combination of sex, art and exciting new ideas about the world.Was Raphael, one of the superstar painters of the period, a Renaissance top shagger? Were sex workers essential to the artistic process of painting nudes? Why did historians think he died from having too much sex?Joining Kate today is the wonderful professor and author, Jill Burke, to help us get to know this man better.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link - https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/voting - and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely bed twixters. It's me, Kate Lister, you are listening to Bedwifters Sheeds. And thank you you, you are quite frankly, because without you, this is just nothing at all. But before we can go any further together, I do have to tell you once again,

and I will tell you from now until the time that we are cancelled. This is an adult podcast, spoken about adulty things, and an adulty way covering arranged adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. We call that the fair do's warning, because if you keep listening, you happen to get up, upset. Well, fair do's we did tell you. Right, on with the show. It's the early 16th century in Rome, and I have just snuck my way into Raphael's workshop while everyone's out for lunch to see if I

can find any clues about the naughty goings on that I have heard go on here. Let's see. Hmm. Hmm, searching amongst the easels and boxes of paints. What do we have? A few nude sketches. Well, that's not too bad, I suppose. I can certainly see why Michael Angelo. I can certainly see why Michael Angelou had a bee in his bonnet about this, Raphael is talented. But still, I'm looking for something saucier, and I heard a rumor about a local baker's daughter, who apparently Raphael has been having his wicked way with. If the rumors are to be believed, she was just one of many. So we're going to have to dig a little bit deeper if we want to find out if Raphael really was a renaissance fuckboy.

But let's get out of here before they come back. Why do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the fire. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.

Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets History of Sex Scandal in Society with B, Kate Lister. If you listened last week, you will know that hurrah, our miniseries on history's worst fuckboys is back. And we kicked it off by looking at Top Shagger Charles II. And this week we have esteemed Renaissance artist Raphael. And we're going to find out how he measures up. And joining me today is none of that than the marvellous Professor Jill Burke, author of How to Be a Renaissance woman. And she's going to take us back to the 16th century to see if this man lived up to his reputation.

And whilst I have you, you know that I have to ask this of you, so do forgive me. But please, please, please, would you vote for us? for the Listeners' Choice Award at this year's British Podcast Awards. We're actually in the top ten now. We're in the top ten. We could actually take this. I don't even want to get my hopes up. I don't think I can cope with the pressure.

But my fate is in your hands, dear listener. Right, the link is in the show notes for this episode. It takes two seconds about the amount of time that a fuckboy would have with you. So if you can do it, I will love you forever. Now that sounds like a fuckboy line. Right. Let's get back to Raphael. Hello and welcome back to Betwigs the Sheeds.

Totally, Jill Burke. How are you doing? I am so well and so happy to be here. Thank God you are. I know. I might have invited me back. It's so much fun talking to you about pubic hair and about Renaissance beauty standards, though. Yeah, I mean, we might get some pubic hair in this. We might get some pubic hair. Yeah, it's always a possibility.

Let's see where we go with this, because this is another installment in our little mini-series on history's worst fuckboys. and today we're looking at Raphael. Before we even get on to him, it occurred to me that if I met someone today called Raphael, my first thought would be fucked by. I wouldn't even need him to speak. I'd just be like, oh, I bet you write poetry, and I bet you go to India to find yourself,

and I bet you pretend to read Simone de Beauvoir, don't you? I think there's a lot to say. I don't know, I quite like Raphael. It's a good name, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, Raphael, today, it feels like someone who would be a bit like, oh, you know. Hi, I'm Raphael.

Hi. reads poetry on the cheap as you say and really likes women. Yes, I like to think of myself as a feminist. But the real Raphael. Do you have a bit of a soft spot for him? Because my producer, Stu, has got a bit of a soft spot for him. We were just talking before this. He went, I think he's quite nice, Kate.

So I don't know how this one's going to go. Yeah, he was lovely. He's lovely. I'm so sorry. I mean, he was notoriously in the Renaissance people thought of him as someone who was a bit of a shagger. is that he was kind of distracted by women. But he was just really charming.

People like to be around him. You know, compared to like the other Renaissance big boys, like Leonardo and Michelangelo. I mean, Leonardo was very difficult to pin down and he was kind of charming in his own way, but never finished anything. It was really frustrating. Michelangelo was just this incredibly grumpy, sarcastic, scary person.

And you get the sense that Raphael was just utterly charming. He was really lovely. They always are though, Jill. That's the problem. So let me give you a definition because fuck boy is not in the Oxford English Dictionary. I checked. So they need to update their terms, quite frankly.

So we're going to have to use urban dictionary and they have got it as a boy who plays with girls' feelings and doesn't really like them and would say anything a girl wanted to hear in order to have sex with her or to get something from her. So that's our definition. Well, I mean, he could be in that crowd of fuckboys,

I suppose he was betrothed to someone for a very long time. So he never got married to her and he was betrothed to her just because it was like politically expedient. So maybe. Maybe, maybe. Before we even get to his betrothal, I want to hear a bit of an origin story about Raphael

because I honestly don't know very much about him. He just seems to have leapt fully formed onto the Renaissance stage with a paintbrush. But where did he come from? So he was from Abino, which was a court town, a very kind of sophisticated town, court culture in northern Italy.

His dad was a painter. Nepo baby. Yeah, exactly. And he was one of these annoyingly kind of prodigious youth. He was like really good from a very early age, which is unnecessary, but he was. And he worked with an artist called Perugino. He does really sweet-looking madonos, this really charming painting. And he really painted a lot like Perigino in his youth. And then after he'd done his training and everything, he'd done some really great paintings in Bino, he moved to Florence in 1504. and this was a time when Florence was like the place, if you wanted to be a painter. Michelangelo was there, Leonardo da Vinci was there, they were painting up a storm, and Raphael went and he just was looking at all these sculptures and all these paintings about all these amazing Florentine artists. And he basically just absorbed everything he knew. And by the time he left Florence four years later, he was really started to be famous

all over Italy. And he could basically mimic the style of Michelangelo. took in those styles, he took in everything he thought was good. And then in 1508, you moved to Rome to paint a series of rooms in the Vatican, known off by the Italian named the Vatican Stansi, or Pope Julius II. How old was he then when he's doing this? I'm going to have to do maths now. Okay, sorry, sorry.

He was in his 20s. Jesus, though, like, that's impressive. He's a massively impressive person, Raphael. He really was interested in how you communicate stories in these rooms. And so he was really good at kind of telling the narrative history of things like the School of Athens, for example, which is a story about philosophy. It's a representation of philosophy, which shows Plato and Aristotle at the centre, and various philosophers arranged about them. And it's a really beautiful way of expressing ideas and the way that people communicate. And he did that all the way through the Vatican Stanzi with a lot of different stories.

And he became incredibly popular. And because of that, he ran a big workshop, which seemed to be really happy working together. So this is another reason why he actually seems to be quite a nice guy. He works closely with his peoples, Julia Romano and Maconetan, Romani. He prints a lot of his work. And so he starts to become famous well beyond Italy around Europe. And then he stays in Rome, doing all this work, very, very busy. And then he dies very young.

So he dies in 1520 when he's only 37 years old. Whoa, I thought he got to be older than that. No. No. Oh. As a Renaissance scholar, do you not ever think that it's so. bizarre that Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci were all knocking around at the same time in the same city? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Michelangelo particularly really hated Raphael. Oh, did he?

Why did he? Give me the gosh. Give me the gas. Why did he hate him? Because he was really good at painting. That'll do it. So it's professional jealousy. What can you take? So Michael Angel was a really difficult person. And after Raphael died, he was still painting these rooms in the Vatican when he died and there was a room called the Room of Constantine that was up for grabs really and Michelangelo wanted to get his friend Sebastian O'Del Pionbe to paint it and he wrote to the Pope

and he wrote a really sarky letter saying that basically comparing them to Capeoms which are like castrated chickens, the Raphael boys and saying they're like not like proper boys like a bitchy old queen isn't he quite frankly? Really absolutely the Pope at that time one of the Medioteu Pope says, you know, Raphael just copied everything from you, Michelangelo. Don't worry about it.

We know you're the better artist. But then at the same time, kind of shuffled Michelangelo off to Florence, so he didn't have to deal with him anymore. It's a real tricky character. Is there any truth in that that he copied some of Michelangelo's work, or was that just being said to just sue the damaged ego? He directly copied Michaelangelo's work, yeah. So, I mean, he copied it into drawings, but then kind of assimilated it into his own style. He went into the Sistine Chapel before it was finished and drew after figures in the Sistine Chapel ceiling

that my clunger was doing at 15-0-8 as well. So that would piss me off? Would that piss you off if you were doing these amazing paintings and this young kid comes along and starts just ripping off your work? Was that the done thing? It was a done thing within workshops to copy, you know, to work in a workshop style. But Raphael was a bit of a kind of intellectual magpie.

And so you'd take whatever he thought was best, which at that time was Lian. Leonardo da Vinci was Michelangelo and he'd kind of incorporate it into his own style. And I can totally see if he was like Aldi. Yeah, like Aldi, yeah. Exactly. Here's the Aldi Bernays his art. But what really annoyed Michelangelo is that he managed to incorporate this but still

make it his own and still be really, really good. Yeah, it's much worse, isn't it? He is copying him, but he's actually using his work and making it better. That's even more irritated. Yeah. It's really irritating. And he also just had a court thing down pat. He was charming.

He got on well with people. He joked with people. Everyone liked him being around. So he was young, charming and talented. So you can see why people didn't like him. So then why has my producer suggested Raphael for this series? Because he sounds utterly delightful so far. Well, he did do quite a lot of shagging around probably.

There we go. Okay. Let's talk about that. So, Vizari says that the reason he died when he did so young is partly because of overwork, but partly because he exhausted himself through having too many lovers. So there is, yeah. So it's an excess of sex. You can't die from too much sex. Can you? Can you? Well, I used to think that. I mean, no. No, no. No. Bonnie Blue's still going. It'd be fine. But they used to think that it weakened your constitution.

Oh, I see. It needs. Having sex in the Renaissance, particularly for men involved, involved with evacuation. Yeah. And the more you evacuate, the more heat you lose from the body. So if you have too much sex, it can make you very weak. Yes, they did think this, didn't they? They did think this.

Yes. Because sperm is so special and magical. Yes. Doctors would advise you not to have too much sex, not to indulge yourself. and too much canal activity because they really did think it would make you ill. And so Raphael, I mean, Vasari was writing in 1550. He was published in 1550.

So that was 30 years after Raphael's death. Well, how does he know then? Gossip. I mean, you knew people who knew Raphael. 30 years after you've died, people are still going, yeah, top shagga. That's, I mean, like hundreds of years after you've died. Do we know anything about his sex life? Sex life is really hard to say directly.

We do know that it's, you know, that it was out of his workshop. So one of the things, we might get back to pubic care, one of the things that Raphael did do was really start having a lot of female nude models. So there were a few female naked models, like life models before Raphael,

but Raphael moved to Rome. And in the Rome that Raphael moved to, there's a load of people who, basically a load of men who are working for the church and want to get advancement promotion within the church. And that means they cannot get married, right? Because it's Catholic church, you can't get married. Like, you're not meant to.

You can't get married and be in holy orders. That means that Rome is full of single men in the late 50th, 3016th centuries. That also means that Rome is full of sex workers. Of course it does. Supply and demand. Supply and demand. So they reckon that there's about 10% of the population are sex workers in Rome. Wow.

Yeah. That is significant. I mean, it's difficult to work out exactly, but that's the figure that's being suggested. And certainly... Even if that's not true, that would even be suggested tells you that it was very visible and that people were prepared to believe that.

Yeah. And it's in Rome where you first get the word courtesan used to Italian. Ah, okay. In the 1990s. Because this is a time... 1490s is a time of the Borgia papacy. And Alessandro Borgia...

They were the naughty ones, right? Yeah, they were the naughty ones. I mean, he had children. who he had with his mistress for not so Katanae, Gloucetio Borger, Chesere Borgia and others. And so it became, in the late 1490s, going into the early 16th century, it became normal for cardinals to have concubines

and to have courtesans who would come around in the Roman court for them. So these women weren't sex workers who'd work on the street. These were women who would have long-term relationships, but in that period of time would have been thought in the same way as prostitutes and he might work in brothels or something but these were people who would be

generally with rich clients and so Raphael was associated with some of these really famous, the very earliest, really famous courtesans. So there's a courtesan called Imperia who was active in Rome in the first decade of the 16th century and Raphael is meant to have painted her naked

and that painting was on the front of her house. Like when you said the front of her, house. What do you mean? Like her front door? Yeah, on the front wall of her house. Wow. The woman was really licentious at this point in time. That's a hell of a move, in it? Just here are my tits, behold. Yeah. And there's drawings, really early life drawings of a woman in the guise of Venus. So, you know, starting with that really typical pose with one hand's kind of half covering her breasts, one hand half covering her genitals. And they're probably portraits. And it might be connected to Imperial. It might be connected to this big naked portrait he did of Imperia at this time.

Was it a big deal that he was painting nude women? Because one of the things that I've learnt from talking to you is that there was a lot of gayness going around in the Renaissance courts and within the artists. It was a lot of man love. It was a lot of painting men. It was a lot of nude men, nude men painting, other nude men. And there was just a lot of bros, pros, bros. And it just struck me there when you said that Raphael started painting nude women. That that seemed an unusual thing from what I know about it. Had it been done before? A little bit.

So you have some Florentine artist painting nude women like Botticelli. So Botticelli's birth of Venus. Botticelli starts experimenting with female nudes, late 1470s, early 1480s. So you get some Florentine workshops doing that. But what Raphael does is like this big campaign of female nudes for his fresco series he does for Agostino Kiji. He's this massively wealthy businessman who lives in Rome

for a villa that's now called the Villa. a fan asina. And Raphael gets a lot of naked models. It's known that he drew after real life women, not kind of workshop boys pretending to be women or classical sculpture. And he really does it for the first time. And him and Titian, who follows up in Venice and they together just basically invent the female nude as an important genre in art. This all happens in the 15, tens, and 20s. And Raphael and that sexual culture of Rome, where you have the availability of a lot of women who, if you pay them, they'll take their clothes off. It's really important that needed to exist. And a whole kind of discussion of sexuality in a different way. Because the other thing that

came out of Raphael's workshop, and the other thing which will make you think of him as a fuckboy is it's a first printed porn. There you go. That'll do it. Okay. Tell me about that then. How did we go from frescoes in the Vatican to the first printed porn? Well, we know that there's a lot of boardy associations between art and sexuality. Definitely. Yeah. So people talk about your brush using your brush, like in Italian, it's Panello. In Italian, the word for penis is penne. Oh, look at that. Which can also mean little penis. Right. So there's this connection already. And they say, look, outworks are like the conception of men. And so they started to kind of riff on this. They're also rediscovering all this classical stuff, including

brothel tokens. Right. Like that you get from Pompeii as well, I think, you know, these spintry eye and these brothel tokens are like coins that have pictures of people having sex on them and they have they're in lots of different positions and so julia romano raffaels people starts to draw these and to share them like these drawings and they're called the positions and then after rachel's death in 1524 they get printed they're really the first kind of selection of porn i know those i'm sure you know that they were connected to raphael lo they get quickly banned by the Pope. Of course. Of course.

You know, the prints get banned and they get destroyed, but it's too late. By the time people have seen them, they've already been copied, they get collected in various places. And people start to ask to sell them in Venice, which is outside of the papal state. So they have license to sell them. Macantonia Romondi, gets imprisoned for a while because of his involvement. Gila Romano just, you did the original drawings, just goes. Goes to Mantua to work in Montreal, celebrate. But this is all to do with the kind of...

ethos of Raphael's workshop while he's there. He's have all these courtesans knocking around. He has these women knocking around. He's drawing after the female nude. And there's no sense then that female nude models aren't sexually available. Ah, so I was just about to ask you about the models. I used to work as a life model and there are quite clear boundaries in place and quite clear protocols that are followed and, you know, everybody's just very careful, knows what they're doing. I'm going to make an assumption that when Raphael was doing his thing that that might not have been in place. Given how careful people are generally with women's lives in this period. No, absolutely. I mean, it's really interesting talking to people who had been, and you worked on this quite a lot

about nude models, because there was, for a long time, amongst some types of art historians, this absolute disbelief that women would pose nude for artists in the 16th century, because there is a lot of taboos about female nakedness. But women were also often quite impoverished, and it was difficult for them to earn money and if they're young women who are also sex workers they would do this and there's records from Venice from Lorenzo's notebooks

that describe, like account records that describe paying women to take their clothes off to be drawn there's also a sculptor he was in Rome at the same time as Raphael called Chalini, Benadneuta Chilini who talks about in his diaries about his getting his female service

to pose naked for him and paying her. So it's definitely... Wow, that was some small print. Yeah, I mean, he treats them awfully. He's like, he really likes them, and then he goes on, yeah, and then she posts me, and then I had sex with her. And then she was really mean to me. She went off with someone else, so I got to pose in really uncomfortable positions for hours.

Oh, dick. Yeah, so it's all a bit of a mess. And Raphael has been connected, particularly with one woman who people think was a model for him, and her name was Margarita Luti. Ah, okay. Tell me about Margarita. Rita Lutti. So she was a baker's daughter and it's very complicated the way this story starts. There's a painting by Raphael called La Forna Arena. Yep, very beautiful. Very beautiful painting.

It's of a woman. Bamps are out. It's quite an erotic painting. Yeah. I mean, definitely it's because she's half dressed, right? It's not even a new, there's something about her just being in the process of on dressing. Yeah. And she is squeezing a boob. Do you have a bit of like a hot kind of a situation going on? That's not what he wanted to portray, obviously. Yeah, we're not over-reading this painting.

So she... No, no. She is naked, almost entirely naked from the waist up. And she's got this kind of diaphanous, kind of material, stattinous bale over her belly. And she's holding it up between her breasts. And she's got one of her fingers on her breast. She does. I'm looking at it right now. Yeah, I'm looking it now too.

And she's kind of looking sideways towards a viewer. She's got dark hair. She's not like a boring, typical Renaissance beauty with blonde hair and curly locks. She's golden blonde hair and curly hair. She's got dark hair. She's got a pearl in their hair. She's looking very individualized, which is interesting. And round her arm, there's a blue armlet.

And that says Raphael of Ebino on it. So this is kind of like a mark of. ownership. See, I just would like to say here to any listeners, if you are with a man and he asks you to wear a bracelet with his name on it, I think that's a red flag, personally. It's repainted. This is mine. I'll be back with Jill and Raphael after the short break. How did they meet if he's this big fancy fancy pants artist and she's working down Greggs? How does this come about? Well, you know, we don't know. I was really sorry. I mean, the evidence about Margarita is really patchy and it's really uncertain.

One of the problems with Raphael is that people really loved them in the late 18th and early 19th century. And so they made up a lot of stuff. A lot of art historians were like, oh yeah, we can know about his life. You loved women. Let's have a look at them. And this whole story is from, there was a tradition that we can only trace back to around the 1790s, calling this painting the baker's daughter La Foran Arena. and there was in the 16th century,

someone annotated a copy of the Zari's life of Raphael, where they've talked about another painting called the Dona Vallata, which is another really beautiful portrait of a woman by Raphael, and someone wrote next to that Margarita. So that's the two bits of primary evidence we have. Then people have put this together to find a baker's daughter called Margarita, who was around at the same time as Raphael and was the right age, and this is where Margarita Lute's name has come up.

We don't know anything else about her or about, I know, or about her relationship with Raphael. There's no written documentation about it. So it's all a bit patchy and people like with many things in these painters kind of believe whatever they want to believe. We've got more evidence about just loads of people being fascinated by sex in Raphael's workshop. Yes, yes. And about, you know, things like the Kijis, Agostina Kijis images. And Vazari says about Raphael that he was very amorous. He says he was fond of women and swift to serve them.

But I don't think any of this really leads to fuckboy status. It's more like nice man status. Looking at this portrait, I don't know, I'm extrapolating way too much from this, but looking at her, he clearly fancied her. She's beautiful and erotic and charged. And I don't know. Maybe I'm being too hot. I just can't imagine him putting his pen down.

and just go and see you later then, Love. I really think that Raphael was a decent person. There's another... Right. Yeah. Sonsoris. You don't have to apologise for that. That's a good thing.

I know. I mean, he's particularly within the time, right? The time period. Because this is a time... Well, tell me about his wife then. Well, he was never married. So he was associated with this woman. He was betrothed.

This other woman, one of the Bibiana family, who he never kind of. kind of seem to have much contact with. But within the time period, you know, people are treating women really, really awfully. There's a lot of violence against women. Just casual violence, casual everyday violence. People are urged to chastise their wives by beating them, you know, in marriage manuals, right? This woman, Margarita Lita, or whoever she may be, what we do know about is she turns up in Raphael's paintings for several years.

Oh, does she? Yeah. So we're talking about a relationship, at least of a model and an artist, that, goes on for maybe six or seven years. No, I don't think that we can pin that one on for being a fuckboy with that weird bracelet detail aside. So he's having a relationship with his model. From what we can see, it seems to be, I mean, it's a low bar, but he's being quite respectful.

Yeah, and it was very common for women, and this time for nude models to pose like Venus, as I said. And that little bracelet thing is something you do find on Venus statue sometimes. Oh, so he's off there as well. Yeah. And it could be just that he's saying that he wants to be, this is me romanticising Raphael, because I think he's very handsome as well.

They always are. That's the problem. It could be just him kind of binding his name to her for eternity, right? That is quite romantic. Did he meet his fiancé then, this woman that he was engaged to? Oh, God. You know, engagements in this period,

particularly these kind of political engagements are much more about the family joining together than anything to do, particularly when you get to like higher levels of society. Yeah. They have like in other places in Europe, they have like bundling before marriage. So, you know, you can basically sleep with the person you want to get married to before the marriage. But that tends to be for people who aren't so high up in society. For normal people that would happen.

But Raphael was friends with her uncle. He was a cardinal from Florence as well. And they were good friends. So this is really why it happened. He's just a bit of a social climate, Raphael, right? So he's taking advantage of anything he can get in order to secure his role. Didn't he keep delaying this marriage? He kept delaying it, probably because he was in Rome.

You know, you always said he's working for the Pope. He might, like a lot of people in Rome, he said might be helping. Maybe I can get a job in the Vatican. If I can get in the job in the Vatican, maybe I can go into Holy Orders. Did he dump her or did he die before? She died. She died? Yeah, she died just before he died.

You died young as well, yeah. So I don't know what was going on. on there. So I don't think she died of having too much sex, but... No. But do we know why she died? No, we don't know very much about her. She's like on a footnote. I mean, it'd be nice to know more about her, actually. And you might be able to find out more about her, but she doesn't come through the Raphael literature. Why does he have his reputation then as this absolute dog with two dicks running around Italy, can't get enough of it? Because from what

you're saying, he sounds reasonably well behaved. Yeah, I think it's just to do with Rome at the time. Okay. They're having these parties at the bat. You know the chess nut game. I don't know if you know about the chess. Well, I think you better tell us about the chestnut game. Would you like, you would like to know about the chestnut game?

I think we would. But this is the second time the word court is on is used in Rome and it's under the border. So it's going to be quite rude. There's a description of it in the papal diaries. So there's a guy called Burkhard who takes the papal diaries. And he describes a game in 50 in 01 where Duke Valentina, who's, the Pope's son, Chizori Borgia, invites 50 prostitutes to the Vatican,

who dance with the servants and others there, first in their clothes and then naked. And then they put all candles, lanterns with candles around, and they put chestnuts on the floor, which the prostitutes, I'm quoting now, naked on their hands and needs, had to pick up. The Pope, the Duke, his son and his sister, the Pope's daughter, Lucretzi Borgia, were all present and watching all these prostitutes crawling around the floor, kid picking up chestnuts. Finally, prizes were offered,

silken doublets, pairs of shoes, hats and other garments, for those, and I quote, who knew the greatest number of those prostitutes calmly. When I have my friends over, we have pasta. Yeah.

That's what happens. I mean, we could market this game to sell chestnuts or something. But no, it's... Couldn't we? Mattel, are you interested? It is what the Vatican was like in Rome and the end...

Oh, wow. I mean, wow. Yeah. I mean, sexy times. The Pope was watching people have sex with prostitutes. and giving prizes. Yeah.

So he had sex. Yeah. And Raphael's coming into this environment. And the reason why he's really associated is because he does so many beautiful female nudes, a time when Michael Angela is doing female nudes that really were quite butch, for example. Yes. Leonardo was doing a few female nudes, but they're all a little bit creepy.

Tishin also has a reputation relating to his love of women. And he also does a lot of female needs. And so it's these guys, Raphael and Tishin together. He were associated with just having a lot of sex. But whether it's true or not, It's difficult to say, but you have to say, Raphael, the evidence suggests that it possibly is true, but also probably with the same person. What did he die of then, do you think? He died of, I don't know what he died of.

Not too much sex. But possibly, I mean, venereal disease? I mean, sythilis is really rife at this time. There's a lot of kind of different illnesses that you could get less exciting, but smallpox was really common. And people had heart attacks and strokes and things. And obviously people just couldn't diagnose it. And lead paint. Maybe he was licking his paintbrush too much.

I mean, yeah, all sorts of terrible. I mean, he could be looking his paintbrush or other people's paintbrushes. But all sorts of stuff that you could get. Remembering what you said earlier about paint brushes. Who knows what goes on with paintbrushes in Raphael's workshop. All sorts of stuff was going round in Rome. In a hide. He could have eaten something awful.

No one really knows. But it was a massive loss to Rome. and they had a massive, massive funeral. It was very unexpected and very sudden. The owner person who was probably pretty happy about it was Michelangelo. Everyone else was gut ticked. And they had a massive funeral procession and he was buried in the pantheon. So you can still see his grave today if you go to Rome in the pantheon.

Well, Jill, well defended, I think. I think we're going to have to let Raphael off the hook. I do. And can I say Raphael is great. He's a really good painter and people that look at it and people think, oh, my God, I'm so great. Ali and Adadaventia is so interesting. But Raphael is really, he's a little bit underappreciated nowadays, I think.

So go and see the Vatican Stanza and just be wowed by him. The Villafana Zina is amazing. So I am a massive fan, massive, Raphael fan and as everybody should be. I think I probably would have shagged him if I was around at the time. Honestly, without a doubt. Without a doubt. Yes, see, that's not being talented. I mean, I'm not talking about you, Kay.

He's a nice man He's a nice man and is talented and is yeah, definitely Okay, all right Raphael, you are off the hook Jill, you have been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

Well, I'm sticking around on the University of Edinburgh website for the foreseeable future. So you can look to be up there. You could read my book, How to Be a Renaissance Woman, which is mainly about cosmetics, but we do talk about women's nudity.

We talk about women's relationships in there as well. and I'm about to do a series of Get Ready With Me videos for the Science Museum. Amazing. Yeah, so if you want to know how to make Renaissance makeup and how to dress up like a Renaissance woman, they'll be via Instagram. Will you come back and tell us more about that?

Of course. Yes. Thank you. You have been wonderful. Thank you so much. Thanks, Kate. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Jill for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along whatever it is

that you get your podcasts. Coming up, we've got episodes on whether or not Alexander the Great had mummy issues, with none other than Tristan Hughes from our sister podcast, The Ancients, and the next installment of History's worst fuckboys with none other than the Roman Emperor Nero. Boo! Or maybe hurrah, I'm not sure yet. But if you wanted us to explore a subject, or maybe if you just wanted to say hello, then you can now email us at betwixt at history hit.com.

This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart. Beckwith, the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the Sheets History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.