Transfiguration

Above, Christ rises in light on the mountain. Below, a crowd struggles around a possessed boy. Raphael was still working on this double vision when he died in 1520, and for centuries it was called the most famous oil painting in the world.

The story behind the painting

The Transfiguration is Raphael's last painting. Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, later Pope Clement VII, commissioned it by December 1517 as an altarpiece for Narbonne Cathedral in France, together with The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo, for which Michelangelo supplied drawings. The cardinal was rekindling the old rivalry between Raphael and Michelangelo. The Raising of Lazarus was unofficially on view by October 1518, when Raphael had barely begun, and there is considerable evidence that he worked feverishly to compete, adding a second theme and nineteen figures. When Pope Leo X inspected Sebastiano's picture on 11 December 1519, The Transfiguration was still unfinished.

What to look for

The painting, about 410 by 279 cm, joins two Gospel episodes, which is unusual. In the upper part Christ is transfigured on the mountain. In the lower part the following episode unfolds: the healing of a possessed boy. Early designs show the change of plan. A modello by Giulio Romano showed only Christ on Mount Tabor with Moses and Elijah floating toward him, John and James kneeling and Peter on the left, under God the Father and angels; a later one, a workshop copy by Gianfrancesco Penni now in the Louvre, already shows two scenes. Examination of the finished work revealed more than sixteen incomplete areas and alterations.

Meaning and intent

One important theory links the double subject to the Apocalypsis Nova, writings of Blessed Amadeo Menes da Silva, a friar, healer and visionary, which describe the Transfiguration and the possessed boy one after the other. Pope Leo X and Cardinal Giulio knew the text. In this reading, the Transfiguration prefigures the Last Judgment and the final defeat of the Devil. Another interpretation holds that the boy has been cured, linking the divinity of Christ with his power to heal. Either way, the painting sets heavenly radiance against human confusion in one frame, and it is seen as the culmination of Raphael's career.

Legacy

Raphael died on 6 April 1520, and for a few days the painting stood at the head of his catafalque. Cleaning from 1972 to 1976 showed that assistants finished only some lower left figures. Rather than send it to France, the cardinal installed it in 1523 on the high altar of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome. In 1797 French troops took it to Paris, where it entered the city in triumph in July 1798 and became the centrepiece of the Louvre's Raphael exhibition; Turner and others came to study it. After Napoleon's fall, Antonio Canova helped bring it back in 1815, and it now hangs in the Pinacoteca Vaticana.