The Transfiguration

The contrast is deliberate. Above, everything is calm, symmetrical and bathed in light; below, everything is dark, crowded and agitated. Raphael used the strongest colours of his career here, a deep blue night sky, orange and green draperies, and the pale, almost luminous flesh of the transfigured Christ. Look at the kneeling woman in the foreground who turns her back to us and twists to point at the boy: she is the hinge of the whole composition. The panel was Raphael's answer to a rival commission given to Sebastiano del Piombo, whose work was designed with help from Michelangelo.

Cardinal Giulio de' Medici ordered the painting for the cathedral of Narbonne in France, but it never went there. Raphael died on Good Friday fifteen twenty at the age of thirty seven, and the unfinished panel was displayed at the head of his coffin. Giorgio Vasari called it his most beautiful and most divine work. It hung in the church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome until Napoleon's troops took it to Paris in seventeen ninety seven; it returned in eighteen sixteen and entered the Vatican. In the Pinacoteca it is shown with Raphael's tapestry designs, so you can see how the last painting of his life sums up everything he had learned.

Did You Know? The painting stood at the head of Raphael's bier at his funeral in the Pantheon, and mourners wept at the sight of the unfinished masterpiece beside the dead artist.