The son that does not shine in Raphael's Transfiguration

Abstract

Christ appears! That would seem to be the astounding gift that Raphael's Transfiguration, a work nearing completion at the time of the artist's premature death in 1520, delivered to its viewers (figure I). The highly accomplished artist appears to have applied all the tricks of the trade, all the sophisticated representational techniques perfected during the Italian Renaissance, to the task of rendering Christ present, in radiant glory.1 While all scholars agree that Raphael is solely responsible for the composition of the work, a number have argued that students executed significant sections of the panel, presumably after Raphael's death. Countering Jacob Burckhardt, who considered Raphael the author of the top half while pupils painted the lower half, Sydney Freedberg maintained that Raphael completed only the apostles at the lower left, while Giulio Romano finished the figures at lower right and Penni was responsible for the upper half. I am persuaded by Fabrizio Mancinelli, Curator for Medieval and Modern Art at the Vatican Museums, who concluded, following a thorough cleaning and examination of the panel, that Raphael was its nearly exclusive author. Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny endorse Mancinelli's conclusions, while Konrad Oberhuber, by not discussing pupils and referring to Raphael throughout his account as the artist of the Transfiguration, implicitly concurs. In the end, however, this connoisseurial debate holds little weight in my argument; we can treat ‘Raphael’ as a convenient name for the creator of this work, however individuated or cooperate that entity might have been. Jacob Burckhardt, The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy, trans. A. H. Glough (London: T. Werner Laurie, [1918; Ger. edn 1855]), p. 145; S[ydney]. J. Freedberg, Painting if the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), vol. I, p.357; Fabrizio Mancinelli, A Masterpiece Close-up: the Transfiguration by Raphael, trans. Ilaria Caputi, Iain Gilmour, Antonio Giua, Linda Graham and Allan Verch (Vatican City: Vatican Museums and Galleries, [1979J), p. 48; Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 235-8; Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999), pp. 223-9. Backed by a cloud of bluish white and robed in bleached garments, the highlighted figure of Jesus rises. He rises three times, in fact. First, thematically: the artist embellishes the event described midway through each of the synoptic gospels, where Jesus only glows, by having Christ physically float above the mountain top to which he has led his three favored apostles and where for the first time he makes visually manifest his transcendent nature. Second, compositionally: by placing the portrayal of the Transfiguration above a depiction of the episode in which the apostles left behind fail to cure a demonically possessed boy — the telling of which immediately follows the Transfiguration in each gospel account — Raphael has Christ ascend above the earthbound crowd below. And third, in relation to the viewers: because the painting itself stands at over four meters, this Jesus at life scale soars far over the heads of anyone who approaches the base of the picture.