Raphael's Transfiguration as visio-devotional program Christian K. Kleinbub Even to his contemporaries, Raphael's Transfiguration (ca. 1518-20) must have seemed both beautiful and strange (Fig. 1). Combining two distinct narrative subjects with anachronistic witnesses in a single setting, it had few equivalents for sheer complexity among altarpieces of its period, being marvelous not only for its diversity of elements but also for the harmony of their integration. For today's viewer, the complexity of the altarpiece remains one aspect of its fascination, for despite the considerable progress made toward understanding the work, no definitive interpretation has emerged that convincingly explains its unusual features in terms of a cohesive program or meaning. (1) In supplying the program that is lacking, I argue that Raphael created an unprecedented hybrid: a marriage between the new style of the historiated altarpiece and the spiritual functions of traditional sacred images communicated through a complex iconography of physical and spiritual vision. Sacred images had long been defined by their ability to arouse contemplative attitudes in their beholders. Medieval thinkers often defined the devotional function of the sacred image as its ability to channel the response of the viewer from sensible surfaces to contemplation of divine things: the viewer was enjoined to perceive the image with the eyes, recall its subject from memory, and then meditate on its spiritual meaning. (2) Approached in the proper way, the image served as a vehicle or physical sign--rather than a self-sufficient object--referring beyond representation to the Deity. (3) These established attitudes about the function of images survived well into the early modern period, enjoying continued respect even as late medieval and Renaissance artists increasingly embraced the visceral, physical power of more naturalistic imagery, thereby further complicating the traditional contemplative functions of their works. (4) Indeed, these artists continued to create prominent religious images that promoted the shift from what was called corporeal to incorporeal vision, and whose ultimate goal, in theory if not always in practice, was to inspire a state of imageless contemplation. (5) The viewer's elevation from corporeal to incorporeal visual experience in front of the devotional image indicates that the period's visuality--the totality of its concepts about vision--differed from our own. (6) According to the classic formulation of Saint Augustine in On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, vision could be divided into three classes: physical, imaginative, and intellectual. Whereas physical vision referred to the sensible perception of the world through the bodily eyes, imaginative and intellectual vision described "spiritual," "incorporeal," or "internal" visual processes. Imaginative vision perceived images recalled or evoked in the imagination, the organ of Aristotelian faculty psychology that roughly corresponds with what today is called the memory; intellectual vision was used to behold abstract concepts that had no physical corollaries in images at all. (7) The three modalities of vision were related in terms of a functional hierarchy. The person who hoped to understand God would pass sequentially from the perceptions of physical vision through the increasingly immaterial images of the imaginative and intellectual kinds. Augustine's analysis of the modalities of vision arose from the necessity of explaining Paradise as portrayed in Genesis, but he concentrated the main part of his analysis on 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, in which Paul tells of his vision of the Third Heaven. In examining the enigma of Paul's experience, Augustine demonstrated that intellectual vision, being altogether detached from the corporeal images used in physical and imaginative vision, was to be considered the loftiest of all visual modalities, the means by which the blessed saw God's very essence in the beatific vision. (8)

Theological discussion of vision reached a high point during the Middle Ages when the Scholastics debated, resolved, and codified the central ideas about the varieties and operations of bodily and spiritual vision. (9) Especially impressive for its detailed analyses of visual and visionary phenomena, Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologica served as a compendium on numerous vision issues in later centuries. This was never truer than in Renaissance Rome, where Aquinas's theology enjoyed a virtually unrivaled prestige among the members of the curial establishment who were the patrons and advisers of much of the art produced there in this period. (10) Theologians were not the only Renaissance people aware of the mechanics of spiritual vision. Whereas theologians knew their Augustine and Aquinas, laymen could rely on vernacular texts as diverse as Dante's Divine Comedy, Girolamo Savonarola's sermons, and Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier to understand vision and visionary issues. (11) Given the wide variety of sources that inculcated both general and arcane aspects of vision theory, it should be assumed that literate artists had a fair grasp of the topic, with some attaining to real sophistication. Just as we can adduce a long line of Renaissance artists who were deeply invested in issues of physical vision--a topic not as far removed from problems of spiritual perception as one might think--we have, in the poetry of Michelangelo, rich documentation of at least one artist's incessant ruminations on the mental and spiritual potentials of vision in relation to his art. (12) It it probable that Raphael, like his sophisticated peers and predecessors, was sufficiently saturated with information on these matters as to engage vision issues on a relatively complex level, supplementing what he did not know of specifics by discussing the problem with theological advisers. Raphael may have received the foundations of his education in the theological issues of vision early on from Fra Bartolommeo, the Dominican painter with whom he exchanged artistic knowledge and probably some particulars of Dominican theology while living in Florence. (13) That there was a theological exchange between the two artists is suggested by Raphael's use of cloud putti in works like the Disputa, Madonna di Foligno (Fig. 2), and Sistine Madonna. Although Raphael's source for his cloud putti has been heretofore uncertain, it can be shown that the device descends from examples in Bartolommeo's so-called Lucca Altarpiece (Fig. 3) and other Dominican contexts. (14) This fact becomes important when it is realized that these cloud putti probably ultimately derive from Aquinas's theory of the physical visionary, his theory proposing that some apparitions are really angelic simulacra shaped from the air in a process resembling the condensation of clouds. (15) [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] Examples of Raphael's exposure to the theology of vision could be multiplied, and his knowledge of the topic undoubtedly grew once he began his Roman career and had contact with such important theologians as the general of the Augustinian order, Egidio da Viterbo. (16) The point remains that Raphael had obtained at a relatively early age a substantial foundation for thinking about the visionary in independent terms. It is perhaps enough to add that there is some indication of Raphael's theological sophistication in one of the few texts that survive from his own hand. In a fragmentary poem, Raphael compares his amorous rapture to that of Paul's visionary ecstasy: Como non podde dir d'arcana Dei Paul como dis[c]eso fu dal cello cosi el mi[o] cor d'uno amoroso vello a ricoperto tuti i penser mei

(Just as Paul could not speak of the hidden God, once descended from heaven, so my heart with a lovely veil covered all my thoughts) (17) Considered alongside the numerous theological references in Raphael's Roman-period works, these lines have been taken as evidence of the artist's considerable knowledge of theology. (18) It is relevant here to note that the poem would have been largely meaningless without a basic understanding of theological discussions about Paul's vision of the Third Heaven, and visionary phenomena more generally. [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] If Renaissance artists like Raphael paid special attention to theories of spiritual vision, it was at least partly because they registered an artistic problem within the contemporary theory and practice of painting. For one thing, Renaissance theories of painting--theories articulated by the likes of Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci--did not explicitly acknowledge the potential for visionary experience in painted works. Instead, theory proclaimed that painting's immediate imperative was to present the optical sensations of the world as known to the physical eyes and as rendered by means of perspective, a device based in the presumed geometries of corporeal seeing. (19) But if naturalism and illusionism might become problematic in the context of religious art, sometimes seeming to lead to the exclusion of higher orders of vision from painting's province, the growing prestige and popularity of the figural narrative, or istoria, raised important concerns as well. (20) In particular, the early cinquecento proliferation of narrative subject matter in devotional contexts complicated the traditional spiritual goals of more iconic religious images. (21) Encouraging the deployment of dramatic movement, asymmetry, and contextual detail, the historicization of devotional works could detract from the contemplative aims traditionally served by the stillness, axial symmetry, and idealization common in earlier periods. (22) The consequences of this development for altarpieces became especially apparent over time. Whereas quattrocento altarpieces with narrative subjects typically preserved the frontality, iconic focus, and ambiance of timelessness of traditional sacre conversazioni, privileging the spiritual dignity of the actors over the plot of the event itself, the more common cinquecento examples frequently placed more weight on the specific temporal circumstances of the drama, while dispersing focus across the pictorial field. (23) The very immediacy of naturalistic narrative painting could thus undermine the impetus toward abstraction necessary for the highest forms of devotion, making action and illusionism competitive with contemplation. (24) There is abundant evidence to suggest that artists were aware of how the transformation of the altarpiece might affect devotional function. Indeed, no better proof of the consequences of narrative for the altarpiece can be given than the trouble taken by certain artists to protect the genre's devotional functions. It has been shown, for example, that Michelangelo deliberately crafted his own historiated altar-pieces to highlight the devotional centrality of the body of Christ, emphasizing the iconic nature of Christ in the altar-piece despite or, rather, in addition to its new, narrational presentation. (25) Moreover, sixteenth-century Venetian artists deployed Byzantinizing elements and even sculpture in their altarpieces as a reassertion of traditional iconic appearance and devotional ideals in the face of the radical transformation of the genre. (26)

Yet no artist could be said to illustrate the stresses inherent in the transition, or the possibilities of potential resolution, better than Raphael himself. (27) This is because Raphael managed to develop in his work a unique iconography that allowed him to depict, more clearly than any of his peers or predecessors, the desired devotional movement from corporeal to spiritual visual experience by means of pictorial devices indicating the visual "register" of particular aspects of his image. As we shall see, Raphael's more systematic exploitation of visual categories in his religious paintings had the effect of making them more distinctly and legibly multivalent, superimposing representations of spiritual vision over the physical kind, so that he might literalize in historical form the very process of finding spiritual significance in the devotional work. Raphael's Transfiguration works precisely in this way, en-compassing more than the events surrounding its eponymous subject in the Gospels by encoding acts of visual and visionary experience in a figuration of the devotional movement from corporeal to spiritual seeing. It is an image in which the goal of knowing God through faith is rendered metaphorically as the choice between external and internal vision. Faith, defined as belief in unseen things, is equated here with internal vision; faithlessness, in contrast, is associated with the delusions of the bodily eyes paired with disorderly, and materially inclined, imagination. In the contest of internal and external vision, portrayed in the altarpiece as the struggle of the apostles to heal the possessed boy, the prize is the vision of the transfigured Christ on the mountain, a vision believed to anticipate the beatific vision of the divine essence. Through this unprecedented program of metaphoric vision imagery, Raphael offers a statement on the relation between vision and spiritual knowledge, using the depiction of historical incident to figure the ascent of the eyes and mind to God. The Painting The Transfiguration was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the future Clement VII, sometime in 1516 or early 1517, as an altarpiece for the seat of his new bishopric, the cathedral of St-Juste in Narbonne. To encourage the best results from Raphael, the cardinal commissioned a companion piece, The Raising of Lazarus (Fig. 4), from Sebastiano del Piombo, the protege of Michelangelo, Raphael's great rival. (28) It was said that Sebastiano followed Michelangelo's drawings, hoping to match Raphael's skill in coloring by the efforts of his own brush while availing himself of Michelangelo's in-comparable genius in design. (29) Despite the formidable talents ranged against him, Raphael produced by the time of his death in 1520 an altarpiece of such originality and sophistication that it transcends simple comparison. Immediately recognized as Raphael's masterpiece and deemed too good for Narbonne, the Transfiguration was first placed above Raphael's bier and then installed in S. Pietro in Montorio in Rome, where it was exalted by generations of artists and connoisseurs as the world's greatest painting. (30) [FIGURE 4 OMITTED] Raphael's Transfiguration represents two Gospel episodes, one portrayed above the other. In the upper half of the altarpiece, the artist shows the climactic moment of the Transfiguration itself, when Jesus, having brought Peter, James, and John with him to the top of Mount Tabor, manifests himself in glory before the apostles (Matt. 17:1-9, Mark 9:1-8, Luke 9:28-36). Flanked by Moses and Elias, Christ floats in gleaming white garments as a bright cloud appears over the summit. From the cloud booms the voice of God the Father, who proclaims the identity of Christ: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him" (Matt. 17:5). (31) The three apostles cower below Christ on the mountaintop, shielding their faces from the overwhelming light of his

glory. On the left kneel two deacons. These figures possibly represent Justus and Pastor, martyred patron saints of Narbonne. (32) In the lower half of the painting, Raphael depicts the story in which the nine apostles who did not climb Tabor with Christ failed to heal a demon-possessed boy brought to them by his kin (Matt. 17:14-21, Mark 9:14-29, Luke 9:37-45). The meaning of the story is partially explained by what occurs afterward: when Christ descends from Tabor with the three to rejoin the nine, he heals the boy and tells the boy's party that their faith had been wanting, exclaiming, "You faithless and perverse generation" (Matt. 17:17). When the nine apostles ask why they could not cast out the demon themselves, Christ answers: "Because of your little faith." And he continues, "If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you" (Matt. 17:20-21). Although the two scenes share the same setting, the top and middle of a mountain in a landscape, they are clearly differentiated, making their relation hard to explain. The two stories of the altarpiece are separate narratives occurring in different places at approximately the same time. Moreover, the figures of the two scenes do not interact; no figure in the bottom half of the composition looks directly at the mountain with his eyes, and no figure on the mountaintop acknowledges the figures below. Because of their apparent disassociation, the upper and lower scenarios have sometimes seemed to lack a common theme, as though they were two elements joined for the sake of appearances rather than meaning. (33) Noting the compositional similarities between the lower section of Raphael's altarpiece and Sebastiano's Raising of Lazarus, some scholars have explained Raphael's combination of the two subjects as a competitive reaction to Sebastiano's work. Originally, Sebastiano's numerous active figures would have contrasted mightily with Raphael's less populous scene, for, as we shall see, Raphael's first idea for the altarpiece (which was actually begun after his rival's) was a relatively subdued drama treating only the Transfiguration event itself. Indeed, the finished altarpieces utilized similar gestural and compositional devices, such as the pointing hands of the protagonists and the cutting diagonals used to bisect crowds, which may well indicate that Raphael, when he came to add the second subject, borrowed some of Sebastiano's compositional ideas. (34) But while similarities between the two altarpieces exist, suggesting that Raphael joined his two scenes in order to match Sebastiano's dramatic composition, it is likely that the juxtaposition was also justified on theological grounds--though these are grounds that have yet to be identified. One reason for the difficulty in determining the theological program of Raphael's Transfiguration is that there is no precedent in theological or pictorial tradition for the combination of the two scenes. Earlier portrayals of the Transfiguration subject, such as Giovanni Bellini's naturalistic interpretation and Pietro Perugino's more conventional one, focused exclusively on the Transfiguration event itself (Figs. 5, 6); no Renaissance painter before Raphael depicted the failure of the apostles to heal the possessed boy. (35) [FIGURE 5 OMITTED] [FIGURE 6 OMITTED] In the absence of clear precedents, some critics have proposed that each scene stands for larger, paradigmatic values rather than those contained in the words of the Gospel accounts themselves. Beginning with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the painting's two halves were

acknowledged as being different but as having complementary, allegorical meanings: "What is the point then of separating the upper section from the lower? Both are one. Below are those who are suffering and need help: above is the active power that gives succour: both are inseparably related in their interaction." (36) Rejecting cliches about the disunity of the painting and its disjointed presentation of two unrelated themes, Goethe saw a struggle between the active and passive principles of man's being, the spiritual bifurcation of the world resolved in a thematically cohesive painting. Goethe's celebration of the purposeful harmonization of contrary forces in the Transfiguration strongly influenced the opinions of later interpreters. Friedrich Nietzsche read the lower zone as showing "primal pain" contrasted with an illusory realm where all enjoy "wide-eyed contemplation" in an event entirely invisible to the inhabitants of the lower zone. (37) Jacob Burckhardt wrote excitedly of the "monstrous" juxtaposition of the two scenes whose effect enhanced the visionary quality of the Transfiguration itself. He affirmed the strange harmony of the whole in much the same terms as Goethe, adding that its integration "exists only in the mind of the spectator." (38) Most interpreters have followed in the wake of these classic assessments, generally affirming that the two Gospel scenarios have no literal, historical unity inside the painting. Like Burckhardt, they see a harmony of opposites in the altarpiece, whose thematic and pictorial links can be appreciated in their totality only by the viewer. (39) Some have even proposed that Christ's Transfiguration, in the upper portion of the painting, far from representing the historical incident is a vision, a vision beheld by the viewer through his surrogates, Justus and Pastor, on the mountaintop. This vision, however, is not available to those of "little faith," and thus the nine apostles below Tabor's summit fail to see Christ above the mountain. (40) It is fair to ask, though, as few scholars have done, whether it is absolutely certain that none of the apostles has the power to see Christ in glory above Tabor: Despite the apparent division in the altarpiece, might there be a way for the halves to communicate with one another? (41) In his later works, such as The Vision of Ezekiel (Fig. 7), Raphael tended to portray visionary experiences, which earlier he had shown as being continuous with the physical world, as incompatible with the world of sense, even distorted in terms of magnitude and scale. (42) The division between the visible and the invisible is not obvious, though, in the landscape setting of the Transfiguration. Tabor's topography, in fact, would appear to unite rather than divide the two halves of the painting. To accommodate the story of the failure of the apostles to heal, Raphael created an area somewhere between the base and summit of the mountain, which serves as the setting for the lower half of the altarpiece. The upper section of the altarpiece is occupied by a small, flattened Tabor that looks like a circular stage. On this stage are gathered Peter, James, and John. To the right of the summit opens a view of a valley seen from above. On the left, the inconspicuous deacon saints kneel just below the mountaintop. In the foreground, the apostles and the party of the possessed boy occupy an area between the valley floor on the right and the summit accessed, one assumes, on the left. The boy's party arrives in the foreground from the valley below, and members of the party can be seen climbing a graded path on the right. They have come partway up the mountain to ask the apostles for help. [FIGURE 7 OMITTED] In many ways, Tabor functions in the Transfiguration like a Christological Parnassus. (43) Raphael may have thought of his fresco Parnassus when designing the Transfiguration (Fig. 8). The topography in his altarpiece recalls not only the setting of Parnassus but also some of the details

of its figuration. Christ's upturned head, eyes, and flowing hair in the Transfiguration are reminiscent of Apollo in Parnassus, in which the god of poetry, wearing an expression of inspiration, looks upward toward a still loftier divinity. (44) Furthermore, the face of the prophet Elias in the altarpiece, who gazes at Christ, resembles that of the Muse Erato, who sits holding her lyre on Apollo's mountain. While these similarities strongly imply a connection between the Transfiguration and Parnassus, they also make clear an important difference. Whereas the physical bodies of poets are seen to scale Parnassus, no mortal is shown climbing the uppermost slopes of Tabor. The physical pathway to the summit, which would presumably appear on the left, is purposefully hidden from view. [FIGURE 8 OMITTED] Just as Tabor's slopes present an apparent impasse to physical bodies, another barrier, a band of shadow, divides the mountaintop from the lower scene. This shadowy band falls across the upper slopes of the mountain below its summit, separating the bright upper zone from the dark lower one just above the heads of the apostles. Only one element in the entire picture, the pointing hand of the apostle in red on the left, breaks across this dark strip, and it is key to reading the whole painting (Fig. 9). The apostle's pointing hand stands out against the dark boundary, showing the one way to access the upper part of the altarpiece from below. While no figure turns to look at the mountain, the meaning of the signaling hand is clear. The red apostle shuts his eyes, pressing his right hand to his heart as he points with his left. He does not observe the transfigured Christ on the mountain by corporeal vision but by internal, spiritual perception. (45) Thus, although Raphael divided the visible and the invisible in the painting, he also represents an alternative route that connects them. By the introspective rejection of the sensible world, a spiritual connection is formed, making the vision of Christ on the mountain available to those below by means of internal vision. [FIGURE 9 OMITTED] Of course, not all of the figures in the lower scene have access to the true internal vision of Christ. The red apostle and his eight companions on the left are divided from the possessed boy and his kin on the right by a diagonal gap resembling a trough of shadow. Like warring factions, the two groups are ranged against the other as if involved in a confrontation, their faces and gestures describing the nature of their clashing positions. In considering these figures in this way, the viewer may move from reading the scene as a more-or-less literal illustration of Scripture, one highlighting the spiritual failure of the entire group, to acknowledging the spiritual struggle that can lead beyond the impasse depicted there. The party of the possessed boy on the right is hysterical. With glaring eyes that seem to question the apostles, the boy's father places with his hands the hard evidence of his problem before them in the person of his tormented son. The women of his group point frantically at the miserable child, attempting to redirect the attention of the apostles; they are unsuccessful. The father's glare on the right answers the closed eyes of the pointing apostle on the left. The contrast between their open and closed eyes suggests divergent visual approaches to the problem at hand. The gulf that divides the red apostle and the father is elaborated by their companions. From a drawing, we know that the red apostle and his blond companion were conceived as working together, two bodies melded as a unit, like those of the wide-eyed father and his writhing son (Fig. 10). The young blond apostle leans forward to explain his companion's inner seeing to the

possessed boy's mother across the divide. He presses his two hands against his breast, indicating that the red apostle's sight is located not in his eyes but in his heart. Together, these apostles display the spiritual alternative, a counterdemonstration, to the father's wideeyed desperation, an exhortation to the possessed boy's party to direct its attention away from external manifestations of evil and inward into themselves. As such, these apostles proffer spiritual insights that stand against the collective imperfection of faith that results in the failure to heal the boy. [FIGURE 10 OMITTED] Other figures join the red apostle in the proper contemplation of spiritual things. Behind the apostle with a book in the lower left is a group of three others who have witnessed the vision of Christ internally. Turned away from the viewer, an apostle on a log addresses the two apostles in blue who stand facing him. He points fervently toward Christ above the mountain. The standing apostle on the right looks downward, as if withdrawn in contemplation of Christ in his heart, his manner reminiscent of Saint Paul in the early Coronation of the Virgin (Fig. 11). The apostle on the left opens his hands in a gesture of speechless wonderment. His solemn expression tells of the sublimity of the vision. (46) [FIGURE 11 OMITTED] Yet even as many of the apostles are engaged in internal seeing, others are distracted by the external, visual world. The two bearded apostles standing at the center of the scene engage the problem with their bodily eyes. While the younger of the two points toward the boy, the older one looks down his nose to inspect the scene. In the older figure's frown and rumpled face, we may discern the features of Judas, a connoisseur of evil, who recognizes the demon in the child. (47) Meanwhile, in the lower left corner, the apostle with a book seated on a log turns in surprise to look at the boy. He has consulted texts but has found nothing there to address the current situation. This apostle's error has been to seek in a work of merely human wisdom the answer to a larger, spiritual problem. His consultation of texts is like that of the elderly man on the far left of the Disputa who turns away from the altar to consult a book (Fig. 12). Both figures are embodiments of the materialistic disposition of some human minds: they signify men who put earthly wisdom above the spiritual kind. (48) [FIGURE 12 OMITTED] Just as there are incidents of external vision among the apostles on the left, there are examples of internal sight among the members of the possessed boy's party on the right. Notably, we see a face in shadow beyond the head of the possessed boy's father and under the arm of the man in red. This figure's head tilts backward with eyes closed, as if to acknowledge the figure of Christ floating above. The face speaks to visionary ecstasy, as does its owner's hand, which opens as if to receive the unseen light of internal illumination. Raphael's lower scene in the Transfiguration is more easily recognized as a contest of visions once it is perceived as a creative adaptation of Raphael's own Blinding of Elymas (Fig. 13), wherein the battle of spiritual vision and physical blindness is figured in the confrontation of Elymas with the prophetic Paul. (49) The Transfiguration bears several compositional and figural similarities to the tapestry, including its chiastic composition and its figuration describing a vision-related event. The red apostle pointing toward the transfigured Christ can be compared to the Paul of the shaded visage on the left in The Blinding of Elymas in both his apparent

withdrawal from external sight and the authority of his pointing gesture. Moreover, the figures of the father and the boy ultimately descend jointly from that of Elymas, who, like them, is spiritually blind. The boy matches the magician in the unbalanced quality of his legs, as does the father in his hunched-over posture and his strained expression. The central group of the scene might be associated with the proconsul and his aides. The seated figure of a bearded apostle at the center with hands held up as if in surprise may derive directly from the figure of Sergius Paulus himself. These parallels suggest that the figural situation in the lower scene of the Transfiguration is a battle between two worldviews: a confrontation between the empirically minded, who are bent on external explanations, and those of higher spiritual wisdom, who reject the material world of the senses. Through the dialectical struggle of internal and external vision in the work, we see the path from one zone of the painting to the other: in the Transfiguration the horizontal composition of the tapestry has given way to a vertical one where we see the vision of Christ, the object of internal sight. [FIGURE 13 OMITTED] The contest of visions in the altarpiece is not, however, simply a struggle of internal and external seeing as emblematized by the juxtaposition of the red apostle and the wideeyed father of the possessed boy; the situation is far more complex. The father, who presents his writhing son as external evidence of affliction, fails to see the nature of the boy's plight as an internal discorder of the mind and soul. It is not that the boy's body is not expressive of his inner state, for the very instability of his contorted contrapposto makes his internal struggle clear (Fig. 14). While the boy's left foot is brought forward with the leg, his right is planted perpendicular to the other. The instability of the figure is such that it needs support from behind, and thus, in a peculiar pas de deux, the father's bulk supports the precarious body of the boy. The boy's left hip and buttock, clad in blue, is swung unnaturally forward, his chest turned back again toward the viewer. As if in contrast to the left hip, the left shoulder is dramatically lowered, countered on the right by the hand extending dramatically upward. By means of gestures and expressions exceeding even the expressive effects of the marble Laocoon, the boy reveals that he suffers something more harrowing than physical pain. [FIGURE 14 OMITTED] It is the boy's face that conveys the nature of the inner turmoil that lies beneath his skin. With his mouth open in anguish, the boy's eyes are turned in different directions. His right eye follows a natural path, shooting upward in the direction of his uplifted hand, which opens in the direction of Christ, showing that the boy--or the demon that possesses him--is conscious of Christ above the mountain. Meanwhile, his left eye wanders back toward the top of his head. It is this left eye that alludes to the boy's affliction; at the same time, it joins his left arm in its movement away from Christ. This literally and figuratively "sinister" hand splays itself in an unnatural way. The boy is rent in two by opposing forces, pulled toward earth on his left, where the unnatural distortions converge, and toward heaven on his right, as if anxious for his own cure. The boy's prominent visual infirmity, namely, his walleyed state, has an important precedent in Raphael's portrayal of the illustrious humanist Tommaso Inghirami, in which Raphael turns a similar visual defect to the purpose of describing the nature of his sitter's inspiration (Fig. 15). With pen poised above blank page, the walleyed Inghirami of Raphael's portrait is in the midst of his evocation of God or the Muses before the act of writing. Another book placed on the right

indicates that Inghirami is not inventing an independent work, but rather is in the act of interpreting another text. The work under way could be his unpublished commentary on Horace's Art of Poetry, which begins with a comparison of poetic inspiration and the unveiling of prophecies to the seer. (50) Here and elsewhere in Raphael's work, defects of sight point to access to realms of spiritual revelation. Like the blind Homer in Parnassus who tilts his head backward as if to "see" heaven through closed eyes, Inghirami perceives his lofty goal despite the impairment of his eyes. Such a pose shows Inghirami as akin to those figures in devotional painting who lower spectacles or lenses from the object of their spiritual attention as irrelevant to higher, spiritual seeing. (51) Not unlike a prophet or evangelist, the poet thus receives inspiration through spiritual vision, his lofty insight focused and enhanced by the presence of optical impediments. [FIGURE 15 OMITTED] In the case of the Transfiguration, the walleyed countenance obviously does not speak to a state of divine inspiration. Nevertheless, it signals the boy's disengagement of his external senses and his exercise of imaginative vision. Imaginative vision--the internal vision involved with images in the memory also known in the Renaissance as fantasia or by its Latin name, imaginatio--held an intermediary place between intellect and senses, or the mind and the eye, in Renaissance faculty psychology and was the chief organ of inspiration, benign or otherwise. (52) As Gianfrancesco Pico della Miran-dola put it in On the Imagination of 1501, fantasia "coincides with sense in that, like sense, it perceives the particular, corporeal, and present; it is superior to sense in that, with no external stimulus, it yet produces images, not only present, but also past and future, and even such as cannot be brought to light by nature." (53) Fantasia served as the clearinghouse of images for the soul, receiving sensible images from the physical eyes and simultaneously serving as the seat of the imagination's reworking of these images into new forms. Fantasia was also the place where soul and body were thought to meet and to be brought into conjunction: Since man is constituted of the rational soul and body, and is, so to speak, a conjunction of the two; and since the substance of the spiritual soul is very different from the earthly structure of the body; it naturally followed that the extremes were joined by a suitable mean, which in some way should partake of the nature of each, and through which the soul, even when united to the body, should perform its own functions. (54) It is fantasia, therefore, where the "spiritual eye, joined to the body, makes use of images to contemplate truth, as the eye of dull vision uses glass lenses to gaze at a sensible object." (55) As such, fantasia was the faculty where divine inspirations were implanted in prophets, where revelation was "disclosed to them by imaginative vision." (56) As Raphael's painting makes clear, divine inspiration was not the only kind of inspiration that could make use of fantasia. Malignant and evil spirits could also plant images before the eyes of the fantasia. Indeed, as a result of this danger, Pico viewed imaginative vision with considerable trepidation. Not unlike bodily sight, imaginative vision could be distorted: "Influenced by [the] humors in the act of cognizing, the spiritual eye of the soul, the intellect, changes and is deceived, just as the bodily eye experiences illusions through tinted, parti-colored lenses." (57) Because of these tendencies, Pico thought purer and simpler imaginative images more wholesome for spiritual well-being and argued that one should not succumb to either too few or too many imaginative images in order that the imaginative faculty does not work itself too

narrowly or widely and thereby go astray. The truly devout, moreover, should focus the eyes of their imag- ination on the image of the beatific vision of the essence of God, the ultimate goal of spiritual life as enjoyed by the blessed in Paradise. (58) In doing so, the faithful would find imaginative vision essential both to achieving eternal bliss and avoiding damnation. If imaginative vision could enhance or endanger spiritual life, it also played a central role in Renaissance discussions about art. We need only recall the first lines of Horace's influential treatise the Art of Poetry and their popularity in the Renaissance to understand how some cinquecento critics might approach artworks displaying the extravagances of artistic imagination: (59) Imagine a painter who wanted to combine a horse's neck with a human head, and then clothe a miscellaneous collection of limbs with various kinds of feathers, so that what started out at the top as a beautiful woman ended in a hideously ugly fish. If you were invited, as friends, to the private view, could you help laughing? (60) Commentators like Gabriele Paleotti, who wrote that artistic imagination should not get in the way of the accurate retelling of a religious story, argued that some painters cultivated obscurity deliberately so as to look "grand and marvelous, since they do not speak or paint of trivial things, but rather sublime ideas that come from the third heaven." (61) The danger was that the willful and arrogant artist might confuse the fruits of artistic imagination with spiritual prophecy and legitimate visionary experience. Although Raphael was obviously capable of high invenzione, Renaissance criticism did not associate him with the type of the willfully obscure and extravagantly imaginative artist mocked by Horace and his followers. (62) Just as Raphael's posthumous admirers saw him as the foremost master of clear and graceful exposition, an artist who submitted his artistic ego to the requirements of his subject matter, they often attacked the living Michelangelo for the very opposite tendencies. For them, Michelangelo was the artist who most frequently gave way to the extremes of his fantasia and did so, they claimed, at the expense of legibility, literal truth, and even public decency. Michelangelo's oversize fantasia was often juxtaposed to Raphael's artistic moderation in order to demonstrate Raphael's superiority as an artist. (63) In considering Renaissance opinion on artistic fantasia, it is useful to listen to Michelangelo's proponents as well, for these writers thought fantasia the ultimate value of art. They did not doubt that Michelangelo gave the highest demonstration of fantasia in his work, investing, as Nino Sernini wrote to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, "the main of his force into creating imaginative figures in diverse poses." (64) Like Sernini, many commentators saw Michelangelo's imagination as primarily expressed in the inventiveness and difficulta of his figures. Thus, in his life of the artist, Giorgio Vasari argued that Michelangelo concentrated on the human body because it was the highest subject matter of all, conveying with the fullest profundity the "passions and joys of the soul." (65) According to Vasari's account, Raphael himself understood Michelangelo's superiority in rendering the nude and resolved that, since he could not better Michelangelo in this way, he would better him in the "wider field of painting," including landscapes, costumes, and atmospheric effects: the very descriptive minutiae disdained by Michelangelo in Netherlandish art. (66) Commenting on Raphael's tactical retreat from the nude, Vasari says that Raphael made an admirable decision under the circumstances by pursuing the things that he does best. But Vasari does not fail to reveal his conviction that Raphael, in abandoning the nude to Michelangelo, had distanced himself from the loftiest standard, the imaginative manipulation of human form, by which the final glory of art was judged.

Although these comparisons of Raphael and Michelangelo belong to authors writing long after Raphael's death, they may nevertheless elaborate ideas held among his advocates during his lifetime, when the rivalry between Raphael and Michelangelo was most intense. Given the agonistic circumstances of the commission, one cannot help but think that the relative merit of the two artists was already a matter of heated theoretical debate, even a subject to be addressed in their respective commissions. It appears reasonable to wonder whether Raphael's Transfiguration was an image about not only the problematics of spiritual imagination but also the predicament of fantasia in the realm of art itself. Might the picture's apparent discourse on the nature of good and bad imagination be an opportunity for Raphael to make some demonstration of his own position on art? In pursuit of this thought, we may ask whether Raphael's possessed boy might be an attempt to show through an extreme dislocation of the body an envisioning of artistic imagination taken in the wrong direction. The boy's portrayal calls out for comparison, after all, with that of Christ hovering over the mountaintop, whose perfect contrapposto and balanced arms prove an admirable demonstration of graceful figuration. The boy's strange contrapposto, seen in comparison with the natural pose of Christ, might intentionally evoke an extreme example of the difficulta of Michelangelo's figures, not to mention the imaginative freedom for which that artist was later frequently criticized. (67) Although Vasari says Raphael strategically conceded the human figure to Michelangelo, perhaps things did not happen in this way. Raphael's juxtaposition of the tormented body of the boy with the perfectly poised figure of the floating Christ speaks to Raphael's command, when context demanded, of both extreme difficulta and perfect grace, and even the superiority of the one when confronted with the other. (68) After all, no Renaissance viewer could have easily ignored the fact that Raphael's possessed boy is supported by a figure that, beyond its resemblance to Raphael's own Elymas, is surely meant to recall the pose and facial expression of Michelangelo's outrageously animated Ezekiel for the vault of the Sistine Chapel, whose determined, though nearsighted, gaze is pressed up to the face of an angel (Fig. 16). It is plausible, though not provable, that Raphael's exploration of fantasia thus served in part as an insider's manifesto on both the universal range of its author and the deficiencies of his artistic rival, with the closed-eyed apostle and the internal vision of Christ he beholds set up as an answer to Michelangelo's staring prophet. [FIGURE 16 OMITTED] Other important aspects of Raphael's Transfiguration reveal the artist's intensive desire to outdo his competitors and claim superiority to Michelangelo. Whether or not we believe that Raphael conceded inferiority to Michelangelo in rendering the human form, it is nevertheless true that Raphael embraced a more comprehensive approach to, depicting the natural world in his work. It is similarly true that the expansive character of Raphael's painting was not unlike that of Leonardo, whose ever-growing influence on Raphael reached its climax in the Transfiguration. (69) Leonardo called Michelangelo "wooden" and believed he obsessed about anatomy at the expense of the other aspects of painting. To Leonardo's mind, Michelangelo's specific talent did not contain all the excellencies of his own brand of "universal painting" in which the physical world might be comprehensively surveyed and recorded. (70) Raphael may have been aware of Leonardo's criticisms and perhaps learned from them, for by engaging the "wider field" of painting in his works, Raphael followed in Leonardo's footsteps. Raphael's adoption of Leonardo's dramatic chiaroscuro effects in his later paintings, especially the Transfiguration, perhaps indicates the degree to which Raphael came to associate the alternative to Michelangelo with Leonardo's artistic style. (71)

If Raphael's emulation of Leonardo's style grew from his desire to claim a place in the artistic firmament of early cinquecento Rome, this is not to diminish the devotional innovations he produced in the Transfiguration. Naturally, he did not make use of Leonardo's "dark manner" merely to serve his competitive artistic aspirations but because it enhanced his treatment of the vision themes already described as figured in the lower half of the altarpiece. Whereas the upper half of the picture is more forcefully illuminated by the radiant figure of the transfigured Christ, darkness reigns among the nine apostles further down the mountain. While this darkness betokens the benightedness of the fallen world that lives without Christ, it simultaneously engulfs the faces of those who would block the fallen world out so as to pursue Christ internally. (72) It will be noticed, for instance, that the red apostle's face is conspicuously shadowed, but that of the possessed boy's father is illuminated. These contrasts of light and dark contribute to our sense of the opposition between ways of seeing and relate to external and internal vision respectively. (73) Raphael's significant use of chiaroscuro in the Transfiguration leads us, moreover, to a passage from Peter's second epistle. (74) In this epistle, Peter exhorts his hearers to numerous virtues, including faith (2 Peter 1:5-7). He explains that their religion is not one of empty promises, founded on "cunningly devised fables," but rather a faith based in the accounts of those like himself who "were eyewitnesses to [Christ's] majesty" in the Transfiguration (2 Peter 1:16): For [Christ] received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory. "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount. Peter goes on to assure his readers that "we have also a more sure word of prophecy," saying, "whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts" (2 Peter 1:17-19). (75) The luminous imagery of these epistolary passages is relevant to reading Raphael's painting. As has been pointed out by others, Peter's text helps to explain Raphael's dramatic shadows. (76) The glorious radiance of the transfigured Christ, after all, appears like the "light that shineth in a dark place" within the shadowy world of the altarpiece. In accordance with Peter's text, we also see dawn breaking over the distant hills of Jerusalem on the right. (77) The brittle light that illuminates the figures below the mountain is not, however, the radiance of Christ but rather a light from an unseen source on the left. This light, which contrasts with the dawn, is perhaps that of the setting moon, whose pale rays highlight particular passages in the lower scene, for instance, the shoulders of the kneeling woman in blue and pink in the foreground. (78) Peter's text is most important, however, insofar as it connects the idea of faith to the Transfiguration: "we have also a more sure word of prophecy, whereunto ye do well that ye take heed." (79) Peter believes that the Transfiguration is the surest proof of the righteousness of his faith in Christ. The Transfiguration itself serves as the beacon of that faith, being like "unto a light that shineth in a dark place." Within the darkness of Raphael's Transfiguration, Christ provides that light to those who struggle toward faith "until the day dawn." The theme of faith, so prominently connected to the Transfiguration in Peter's epistle, obviously relates to the failure of the nine apostles to heal the possessed boy in the lower half of the altarpiece. Indeed, the struggle of visions that we have described is itself a thematization of the contest of faith and faithlessness. After all, the most definitive of all biblical definitions of faith connects it directly to bodily sight: in Hebrews we read that "faith is the evidence of things not seen" and that the "things which are seen were not made of things which do appear" (Hebrews

11:1, 3). (80) The issue of faith, as Augustine pointed out, was a matter of believing in the invisible. (81) Thus, when Peter exhorts his audience to remain filled with faith until the "day star arise in your hearts," we do well to understand this internal dawn as a sight seen by internal vision. Although the connection between the use of "hearts" and "eyes" is not made in Peter's epistle, it is brought up in exegetical texts on the Transfiguration that elaborate on Peter's ideas. These texts can teach us a great deal about why Raphael made use of portrayals of internal vision in his altarpiece. (82) One of the most prominent of these exegetical texts is by Origen, who is quoted by Thomas Aquinas in his Catena aurea. Origen first explains that Christ takes the three apostles with him to the top of Tabor after six days "because in six days this whole visible world was made; so he who is above all things of this world, may ascend into the high mountain, and there see the glory of the Word of God." (83) Origen then enjoins his readers to follow in the footsteps of the apostles, moving beyond the visible world in order to have a spiritual view of the transfigured Christ on the mountain: When any one has passed the six days according as we have said, he beholds Jesus transfigured before the eyes of the heart. For the Word of God has various forms, appearing to each man according as He knows that it will be expedient for him; and He shews Himself to none in a manner beyond his capacity; whence he says not simply, He was transfigured, but, before them. For Jesus, in the Gospels, is merely understood by those who do not mount by means of exalting works and words upon the high mountain of wisdom; but to them that do mount up thus, He is no longer known according to the flesh, but is understood to be God the Word. Before these then Jesus is transfigured . . . and He is shewn to them as the Sun of righteousness. (84) Origen here turns his analysis of the Gospel text into something resembling a devotional program or exercise, calling on his readers to contemplate Christ abstractly, by way of the "eyes of the heart." Writing about the Transfiguration in this way, Origen bridges the gap between the historical and the visionary aspects of the Transfiguration, just as Raphael does in his altarpiece by highlighting vision and visionary issues. Indeed, Origen's description of the "high mountain of wisdom" may have inspired Raphael's Christological Parnassus in the painting. The spiritual journey, which is one of internal vision, culminates in a vision seen with the "eyes of the heart." Not unlike Origen, Raphael's painting calls on the viewer to acknowledge the spiritual meaning of the transfigured Christ above and beyond the "works and words" of the Gospel account by showing the Transfiguration both as a historical event and a spiritual vision. Just as Origen proposes that the Transfiguration is manifested differently to each one of his auditors ("appearing to each man according as He knows that it will be expedient for him" and not "in a manner beyond his capacity"), Raphael's intended viewer would be inspired by the spiritual program in the altarpiece to turn inward and find his own Christ according to his own capacity. Another likely source of Raphael's imagery of the "eyes of the heart" is to be found in Augustine. In his sermon on Matthew, chapter 17, Augustine recalls that before his ascent up the mountain Christ promised the apostles that some of them would not die until they had seen the "Son of man in his kingdom." (85) Augustine then demonstrates that the Transfiguration itself must be the vision promised by Christ in fulfillment of his word. But how can it be, Augustine asks, that the apostles see the Kingdom of Heaven before death? Here Augustine returns to the meaning of the Transfiguration. The kingdom is found in the Church, and the Church is to be associated, allegorically, with the white garments of the transfigured Christ. Thus, in the garments of Christ,

the apostles see the Church, the kingdom, and the promise of resurrection. In his glory on the mountain, Christ is the light "that enlightens every person coming into this world." Christ is like the sun, Augustine continues, and "what this sun is to the eyes of the body, He is to the eyes of the heart [oculis cordis]; what this is to bodies, He is to hearts." (86) Like Origen, Augustine proposes that the Transfiguration story has a spiritual importance for Christians that extends beyond the retelling of its historical circumstances. Christ's white garments, which symbolize the kingdom of saints, are meant as a vision of a future beatitude, a vision that, as Augustine writes in the City of God, will be experienced not only with the eyes of the beatified body but also with the "eyes of the heart," that is, spiritually. (87) It is to the beatific vision that Raphael's red apostle clearly refers. Regarding Christ with the "eyes of his heart," the apostle signifies a spiritual meaning beyond the physical trappings of history. (88) The Vision of the Transfigured Christ inside and outside History Although the imagery of the eyes of the heart allowed Raphael to bridge the gap between the lower and upper zones of the altarpiece, the historical event of the Transfiguration as told in the Gospels was not altogether subordinated to its rendering as a vision. Raphael's Transfiguration began, after all, as a careful retelling of the historical Transfiguration alone. At the beginning of the work's long gestation, Raphael had not yet arrived at the idea of a visionary program. Judging from a drawing thought to reflect his original modello, Raphael's first idea for the altarpiece was to picture the moment just before the story's climax (Fig. 17). Pointing to Moses and Elias, Peter enthusiastically proposes the erection of three tabernacles for Jesus and the prophets (Matt. 17:4). Christ looks in Peter's direction, opening his arms in benediction, while God the Father prepares to make his announcement. Boldly conceived in anticipation of the high point of the historical event, Raphael's idea at this early stage is for a work with active figures rehearsing their roles in a dramatic, narrative altarpiece. (89) [FIGURE 17 OMITTED] Yet, as we have seen, Raphael's finished altarpiece portrays both the Transfiguration and the failure of the apostles to heal. What is more, Raphael changed the event depicted in the upper portion of the altarpiece, choosing the moment of the Father's announcement over the anticipatory one in his first modello. The finished altarpiece therefore assumes the character of a paradigmatic and iconic event, though its subject is undeniably based on the historical episode. Peter, James, and John see the transfigured Christ not as a contemplative object inside their minds but as a real-life abundance of natural light that overwhelms their mortal eyes. In addition to its presentation as an object of spiritual vision, Raphael's Transfiguration takes place as an actual event on the historical Tabor, witnessed by three apostles in its physical and temporal dimensions. In choosing to display the transfigured Christ as the object of internal and external vision simultaneously, Raphael set himself a difficult task. It was especially so because the Transfiguration was generally defined as a physical event, not as a vision. Whatever theologians thought of the contemplative dimensions of the Transfiguration, they all agreed that the historical manifestation of the Transfiguration, though miraculous, was a fully visual phenomenon. No one questioned that the Christ of the historical Transfiguration was of the same substance as the man. Quoting Jerome, Thomas Aquinas affirmed that no one should "suppose that Christ,

though being said to be transfigured, laid aside His natural shape and countenance, or substituted an imaginary or aerial body for His real body." (90) Where the Gospel declares, "His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as snow" (Matt. 17:2), Aquinas says these things "argue not a change of substance, but a putting on of glory." (91) Aquinas defines the precise nature of Christ's transfiguration in visual terms that even a Renaissance art theoretician like Alberti could appreciate: Figure is seen in the outline of a body, for it is that which is enclosed by one or more boundaries. Therefore whatever has to do with the outline of a body seems to pertain to the figure. Now the clarity, just as the color, of a non-transparent body is seen on its surface, and consequently the assumption of clarity is called transfiguration. (92) For Aquinas, the appearance of the transfigured Christ is explained according to norms of the figure, a transformation not of basic outlines or shapes but of the reflection of colors and lights on surfaces. (93) It was out of these ideas that Raphael crafted his paradigmatic figure of Christ in his painting. Like a cutout set against a neutral background, Raphael's Christ is shown in contrapposto, emphasizing his "figural" status, with his outline clearly delineated. Subtle blues and grays describe the shadows and modulate the white surfaces of his garments. (94) Raphael's interest in the physicality of the historical Transfiguration appears to have extended to the atmosphere surrounding Christ's figure. Aquinas had used the imagery of air and light to evoke the miraculous physical and visual mechanics that brought about Christ's transfiguration in the body: But in Christ's transfiguration clarity overflowed from His Godhead and from His soul into His body, not as an immanent quality affecting His very body, but rather after the manner of a transient passion, as when the air is lit up by the sun. Consequently the refulgence, which appeared in Christ's body then, was miraculous. (95) Perhaps aware of Aquinas's sophisticated theological metaphors, Raphael shows a divine light falling on Christ's open face like the glory "overflow [ing] from His Godhead," the outpouring of clarity "from His soul into His body," causing his cheeks to redden "after the manner of a transient passion." It is just possible, moreover, that Raphael made use of Aquinas's meteorological imagery, for while the cloud's periphery is as blue and insubstantial as the air, it glows a brilliant white at its center where the light falls. This air is "transfigured," changed in the blush of the cloud. (96) Raphael had to adjust his physical image of the Christ of the Gospel to make it serve equally well as an object of inner contemplation, the object of the "eyes of the heart" of the figures in the lower scene. In order to accomplish this, Raphael did two things: he elevated Christ from the ground, and he made Christ disproportionately larger than the other figures around him. By detaching Christ from the ground, Raphael signaled Christ's partial disengagement from the historical context of the Gospel event. Although there were historical precedents for the floating Christ of the Transfiguration, Raphael had not used them in his earlier designs leading up to the finished painting. (97) Judging from both the modello and a copy after a later compositional drawing (Fig. 18), it would seem that it was only as Raphael developed his last idea for the altarpiece with its visionary intentions that the artist decided to lift the figure in the air. (98) Christ's floating figure is at the center of the cloud and is flanked by the two prophets. Functioning to display the dispensation of glory from above in its physical form like the "bright

cloud" of Matthew's Gospel (Matt. 17:5), the cloud sets Christ apart from the others as if he were a visionary apparition, like Jehovah's cloud in The Vision of Ezekiel. [FIGURE 18 OMITTED] The figure of the transfigured Christ, scaled much larger than the two prophets and the three apostles below him, sets him in direct variance with the three-dimensional order of the work as a whole while establishing a new unity of planar surface geometries. (99) For this reason, we are left to wonder why Vasari described Raphael's Christ as foreshortened in a clear or radiant light ("diminuito in una aria lucida"), which might imply that the figure was accurately proportioned according to perspective. (100) Taking Vasari to indicate the use of perspective here, some scholars view the mountaintop as a surface tipped slightly forward with the floating figures of Christ and the prophets occupying a tilting plane that rises perpendicularly from Tabor's inclined summit. Seen in this way, Christ and the prophets hover somewhat closer to the foreground than the three apostles on top of Tabor, making the former appear larger than the latter. (101) If we accept the idea that the three airborne figures are tipped forward with the mountain, there may be a way to understand the spatial device in scriptural terms. Perhaps, for the faithful who would see Christ internally, the mountain has indeed moved. If this is what Raphael intended, the truth of Christ's words to the faithless apostles (Matt. 17:20-21) is reified in concrete visual terms that correspond to the painting's contemplative ends. Christ appears to the apostles who would see him by the eyes of their hearts as larger than life, an image expanding in the foreground of their imaginations. (102) What Christ Sees Christ is the focal point of the painting, but the composition suggests something beyond its boundaries: Raphael's Christ looks heavenward and visually engages a still loftier object unseen above him (Fig. 19). Our eyes are not greeted by Christ's gaze but are urged to follow his own. As has been mentioned already, Christ's upturned face would appear to relate to the model of the head of Apollo in Parnassus--or, more proximately, the head of Saint Cecilia in the Saint Cecilia Altarpiece (Fig. 20). (103) Like the eyes of these visionaries, the eyes of Christ, the climax of Raphael's altarpiece, gaze on something beyond the frame, and thus beyond representation. [FIGURE 19 OMITTED] The iconographic explanation for Christ's upturned gaze is to be found in Vasari's life of Raphael. In it, Vasari discusses the Transfiguration at length, reading it from bottom to top in a way that indicates that he understands its significantly contemplative aims. On reaching the figure of Christ, Vasari's admiration mounts to an enthusiasm bordering on religious ecstasy: Clothed in snow-white garments, Christ himself extends his arms and raises his head, and seems to reveal the Essence and Godhead of all three Persons of the Trinity, fused in him by the perfect art of Raphael. And Raphael seems to have summoned up all his powers to demonstrate the strength and genius of his art in Christ's countenance; for having finished this ... he died without taking up the brush again. (104) Vasari here speaks about Raphael's Christ in a remarkable fashion, wielding language that stresses abstract theological ideas invisible to the viewer. In Vasari's view, Raphael could go no further, dying at a moment of pictorial revelation.

In the passage, Vasari describes what he sees in Christ's face as the essence and the Trinity of the Godhead, concepts relating to the idea of the vision of the divine essence enjoyed by the blessed in Paradise (105) In seeing the divine essence, the beatified person would see simultaneously the unity and individuality of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The vision itself was the highest visionary experience possible in the cosmos, the seeing of the divine essence being equivalent to seeing God's very nature and existence: "Since God then is not composed of matter and form, He must be His own Godhead, His own Life, and whatever else is thus predicated to Him." (106) God's essence was often expressed in terms of vision. The Deity knew himself by a perpetual looking-upon himself: "So we say that God sees Himself in Himself, because He sees Himself through His essence; and He sees other things not in themselves, but in Himself; inasmuch as His essence contains the similitude of things other than Himself." (107) The reciprocal acts of seeing that define the Godhead's triune unity are recorded in many places. (108) They appear prominently in Nicholas of Cusa's On the Vision of God, where an all-seeing icon of Christ is portrayed as imparting knowledge of his essence by means of his vision. Envisioning Christ in terms of the divine essence as absolute sight, even as "an eye," Cusa exclaims that "you thus observe all things in yourself." (109) Elsewhere he writes, "Your sight, Lord, is your essence." (110) Only the souls of the blessed could see the divine essence in Paradise because this vision was beyond the capacity of living men: "God cannot be seen in His essence by a mere human being, except he be separated from this mortal life." (111) Only the blessed could see the divine essence because the supreme intelligibility of God was absolute and therefore overwhelmed the intellectual capacity of mortal beings: "what is supremely knowable in itself, may not be knowable to a particular intellect, on account of the excess of the intelligible object above the intellect; as, for example, the sun, which is supremely visible, cannot be seen by the bat by reason of its excess of light." (112) God's absolute intelligibility thus rendered the divine essence visible only by means of intellectual vision, a fact of which Raphael's contemporaries were well aware. In his Commentary on the Sentences, for example, Egidio da Viterbo classified access to God in three stages ascending from contemplation of the vestiges, to that of images, to the experience of the divine essentia, a threefold journey that parallels Augustine's division of sight into corporeal, imaginary, and intellectual species in The Literal Meaning of Genesis. (113) The divine essence, the essentia in Egidio's scheme, thus could be fully seen not by means of the bodily eyes or the images in the fantasia, but only by means of intellectual vision. Because of its absolute intelligibility, God's essence was frequently associated with divine light. When Dante celebrates the "Light Eternal [luce etterna]" in his final vision in the Paradiso, he is celebrating the light of God's all-knowing mind: O Light Eternal, who alone abidest in Thyself, alone knowest Thyself, and, known to Thyself and knowing, love.st and smilest on Thyself! (114) To see the divine essence, therefore, was to see by the divine light of the Godhead; indeed, this is why intellectual vision was defined by Aquinas as a vision of the divine light itself. (115) Dante's vision of the "Light Eternal" of the Godhead is facilitated by means of the "divine light" or the "light of glory," which acted on the created intellect to expand its scope to see God. Dante

expressed his experience of it as "my sight, becoming pure, was entering more and more through the beam of the lofty Light which in Itself is true." (116) But within the seemingly invisible territory of discussions of the divine essence, there lies an important paradox. While the divine essence was generally discussed in abstract terms, theologians agreed that Christ's glorified body would always be discernible during the beatific vision as a participant in the Trinity. Therefore, even at the climax of his beatific vision of the three interreflecting colored circles of God's triune essence, Dante sees the corporeal image of Christ emerge within the vision: That circling which, thus begotten, appeared in Thee as reflected light, when my eyes had dwelt on it for a time, seemed to me depicted with our image within itself and in its own color, wherefore my sight was entirely set upon it. (117) Being both divine and human, the glorified body of Christ cannot be separated from this, the loftiest image of the Godhead. If considered in this way, Christ's glorified body could even serve as an image of the entire divine essence because of the Trinity's self-reflexive seeing. As Cusa formulates it, "In the absolute Son I see the absolute Father, for the son cannot be seen as son unless the father is seen. (118)" Forever gazing inward on his Father, who is part of himself, Cusa's Christ alludes to his overall essence through his eyes. After all, Christ's image was perfect, for, as Cusa says, "just as an image between its exemplar and which a more perfect image cannot mediate subsists most closely in the truth of which it is the image, so I see your [Christ's] human nature subsisting in the divine nature." (119) Christ's physical self refers most directly to the Godhead, its divine exemplar. (120) Given the essentiality of Christ's glorified body to the divine essence, it is no wonder that theologians considered the Transfiguration a premonition or image of the beatific vision in the life to come. As we have seen, Augustine had called the transfigured Christ a representation of the "Son of man in his kingdom." (121) And Thomas Aquinas had said that the transfigured Christ was "a kind of image representing that perfection of glory," meaning the Transfiguration was an image of the glorified body of Christ as it would appear in the Trinity of the beatific vision. (122) Therefore, to visualize man's approach to the divine essence, a theologian could do no better than portray it in terms of an aspirational journey from corporeal to imaginative and finally intellectual images of God, leading directly through the image of the transfigured Christ. In his Journey of the Mind to God, Saint Bonaventure does just that. (123) In his first six chapters, which contain exercises that are explicitly compared to the six days leading up to the Transfiguration on Tabor, (124) Bonaventure gives an account of a contemplative journey that moves through the three types of vision, from external evidence of God to internal images and then, finally, to intellectual images of him. (125) In the last stages of intellectual vision, Bonaventure's readers are asked to contemplate the unity of both the divine essence and the Trinity by the light of the mind. At the work's conclusion, Bonaventure relates one further step that can be taken only after the completion of the others: After our mind has beheld God outside itself through and in vestiges of Him, and within itself through and in an image of Him, and above itself through the similitude of the divine Light shining above us and the divine Light itself in so far as it is possible in our state as wayfarer and

by the effort of our own mind, and when at last the mind has reached the sixth step, where it can behold . . . Jesus Christ ... it must still, in beholding these things, transcend and pass over, not only the visible world, but even itself. In this passing over, Christ is the way and the door; Christ is the ladder and the vehicle, being, as it were, the Mercy-Seat above the Ark of God and the mystery which has been hidden from eternity. (126) Here, as elsewhere, the beatific vision of God, though almost accessible through contemplation of the figure of Christ, ultimately requires leaving behind the state of the wayfarer. God's essence could only be truly experienced after death. (127) [FIGURE 20 OMITTED] In anticipating the beatific vision through the image of Christ, the stages of Bonaventure's Journey share a great deal in common with Vasari's account of Raphael's Transfiguration. In each, a vision of Christ reflects both the divine essence and the Trinity. Moreover, each shares the idea that the fullest vision of God is possible only in death. While I do not mean to imply Bonaventure's direct influence here, Vasari's theological imagery reflects the aspirational tone and progressive nature of Bonaventure's contemplative journey in a way that suggests the widespread nature of these ideas about contemplation in the culture. It was thus natural for Vasari to imagine Raphael taking part in a spiritual exercise that moved the artist so close to the actual beatific vision that he, in fact, completed it by dying. Like Dante, Vasari's Raphael had attained the lofty vision for himself, but having revealed it to his fellow men in his greatest painting, he passed back over to the beyond. Vasari's description, in fact, goes far toward explaining aspects of Raphael's Transfiguration. After all, Raphael's altar-piece does lead the viewer on the course of a spiritual journey. The painting explicitly addresses the three varieties of vision that arise repeatedly in discussions of the contemplation of God. In the lower zone of the composition, we witness the struggle of external (corporeal) and internal (imaginary) vision in the confrontation of the apostles and the possessed boy's party, while above on Tabor we have the historical and imaginary vision of Christ himself, who satisfies the internal vision of the apostles below and also points beyond it. As the beatified souls of Justus and Pastor look on, light falls on Christ's face from beyond the frame: it is the divine light of intellectual vision, the "luce etterna" of the Godhead. Indeed, Raphael's Christ looks upward at his Father, and in contemplating himself, he carries through the act of self-reflexive seeing that defines his triune essence. All these things invite us to imagine the Transfiguration as sharing the same spiritual goal as a work like the Journey of the Mind to God in attempting to elevate the mind of the devout viewer to contemplation of God through a series of steps visually culminating in the figure of Christ--a Christ like Bonaventure's, whose open-ended gesture and gaze show us by their example the way beyond vision and representation. It is through this Christ that we understand that Raphael's Transfiguration takes up and then surpasses the theme of Sebastiano's Raising of Lazarus, pointing beyond the resurrection of the dead in this life to the lofty reward that follows it in heaven. Like Cusa, writing of his experience of the all-seeing icon of Christ, any Renaissance viewer of religious pictures might exclaim before an image of the Savior: "I stand before this image of your face, my God, which I observe with the eyes of sense, and I attempt with inward eyes to behold the truth that is designated in the picture." (128) Although Cusa's words are presumably addressed to an icon of the Holy Face, a type of image popularized in the later Middle Ages, they could just as easily have been uttered in sight of the face of Christ at the climactic apex of Raphael's Transfiguration, which, given its sense of stillness, symmetrical setting, and iconic

aspect, may well refer to traditional iconic images. The Renaissance viewer might even assume that the prominence of Christ's face carried a meaning like those more traditional works, referring like a symbol to the vision of the invisible God. (129) This was, after all, what Vasari had done. But between Raphael's Transfiguration and almost all other Renaissance religious images lies an important difference, for Raphael's altarpiece does not simply invite but describes the process by which the mind might be turned to internal vision of God. It directly engages the problem of how the icon can be used spiritually by deploying its actors so that they do not merely play out their narrational roles but rather enact or figure the very activity of contemplation in gestural terms. This devotional aspiration of Raphael's Transfiguration is remarkable in an age in which altarpieces were shedding some of the outward trappings of their more contemplative functions. As we have seen, iconic altarpieces--where devotion of the kind described by Cusa might be centered and anticipated by static, hierarchical forms--came to be replaced by altarpieces whose main subject matter were istorie depicting energetic narrative scenes. (130) Raphael, in fact, was one of the leaders of this movement, creating one of the first fully historiated altarpieces of the Renaissance in his Entombment. (131) Narrative altarpieces like this one, although sometimes adapted to reflect their contemplative function, generally fostered devotion by rendering affective scenarios from the lives of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. Predicated on dramatic subject matter, the new narrative altarpieces, like Titian's Death of Saint Peter Martyr of 1530 (Fig. 21), presented more circumstantial meanings than the iconic altarpieces that came before them. (132) [FIGURE 21 OMITTED] Even beyond providing a unique figural enactment of the devotional process, Raphael's Transfiguration is singular among Italian Renaissance works of its time in its effort to rationalize the very visual multivalency inherent in the devotional project. It illustrates an instance in the history of early modern painting when the dialectical estrangement of the empirical and spiritual aspects of images is anticipated by the artist's rigorous differentiation of the visual and the visionary within the same pictorial surface. (133) With the Transfiguration, one might say, the visuality in Renaissance painting is the subject of the work, and that Raphael here came to understand the problem of faith and the problem of religious painting as being closely related in the accommodation of the unseen. It is no wonder, therefore, that traditional iconographic analyses cannot fully explain the altarpiece: without attention to the very premises of representation in the Renaissance, its full character remains just beyond our own abilities to see and comprehend. In reading Raphael's Transfiguration, visuality precedes iconography, and understanding depends on the whole of the early modern epistemology of seeing. In the history of Renaissance painting, Raphael's Transfiguration stands out as a unique and noteworthy event, an attempt at devotional efficacy like no other. The Transfiguration harmonized both narrative and iconic aspects of contemporary altarpieces, offering a marriage of the historia, and all that the historia stood for, to the spiritual function of the altarpiece through an unprecedented thematization of the stages of contemplative seeing. This profoundly original visio-devotional program thus presents an innovative solution to the challenge of religious painting in the early cinquecento, attempting an ingenious reconciliation of divergent devotional ideals in a single work, and thereby preserving intact the impetus toward imageless contemplation. Being the culmination of Raphael's lifework, the very summa of visuality in Italian

Renaissance painting, Raphael's Transfiguration remains an incomparable document of its moment and the sophisticated thinking of its maker. Notes This paper was begun as a research project in 2002. An early version of it was presented as a Frick Talk at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York in 2004 and was subsequently developed as a chapter in my dissertation, "Vision and the Visionary in Raphael" (RhD diss., Columbia University, 2006). Among the numerous, generous scholars who have contributed in significant ways to my thinking about the Transfiguration, David Rosand deserves my special thanks for his extraordinary insight and support. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. (1.) Important scholarship on the Transfiguration includes Aldo Bertini, "La Trasfigurazione e l'ultima evoluzione della pittura di Raffaello," Critica d'Arte 44 (1961): 1-19; S.J. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), vol. 1, 356-62; Konrad Oberhuber, "Vorzeichnungen zu Raffaels Transfiguration," Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 4 (1962): 116-49; H. von Einem, "Die Verklarung Christi and die Heilung des Besessenen von Raffael," Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften and der Lileralur in Mainz 5 91966): 3-33; John Pope-Hennessy, Raphael (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 71-78; Luitpold Dussler, Raphael: A Critical Catalogue of His Pictures, Wall-Paintings, and Tapestries (London: Phaidon, 1971), 52-55; Kathlenn W. G. Posner, Leonardo and Central Italian Art: 1515-1550 (New York: New York University Press, 1974), 1-28, 43-47; Fabrizio Mancinelli et al., Primo Piano di un capolavoro: La Trasfigurazione di Raffaello (Vatican City: Vatican City Art Museums and Galleries, 1979); Ernst Gombrich, "The Ecclesiastical Significance of Raphael's Transfiguration," in Ars Auro Prior: Studia Ioanni Bilostocki sexagenario dicata, ed. Julius Chruscicki (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawn Nawk, 1981), 241-43; Catherine King, "The Liturgical and Commemorative Allusions in Raphael's Transfiguration and Failure to Heal," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 148-59; Oberhuber, Raphaels "Transfiguration": Stil und Bedeutung (Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1982); Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 235-39; Maurizio Calvesi, "Raffaello: La Trasfigurazione," in Oltre Raffaello: Aspetti della cultura figurative del cinquecento romano, ed. Luciano Cassanelli and Sergio Rossi (Rome: Multigrafica, 1984), 33-41; C. Gardner Teuffel, "Sebastiano del Piombo, Raphael, and Narbonne: New Evidence," Burlinglon Magazine 126 (1984): 765-66; David Alan Brown, "Leonardo and Raphael's Transfiguration," in Raffaello a Roma, ed. Christoph Luitpold Frommel and Matthias Winner (Rome: Edizioni d'Elefante, 1986), 237-43; Rudolf Preimesberger, "Tragische Motive in Raffaels Transfiguration," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 50 (1987): 88-115; Patricia Rubin, "II contributo di Raffaello allo sviluppo della pala d'altare rinascimentale," Arte Cristiana 78 (1990): 169-82; Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings (Munich: Prestel, 1999), 223-29; Susanne Schroer-Trambowsky, "'Refa'el-Heil von Gott.': Das Vermachtnis von Raphaels 'Transfiguration'; Heilungswirkung durch Malerei," in Festschrift fur Konrad Oberhuber, ed. Achim Gnann, Heinz Widauer et al. (Milan: Electa, 2000), 43-55; Jodi Cranston, "Tropes of Revelation in Raphael's Transfiguration," Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 1-25; Manfred Kruger, Die Verklarung auf dem Berg: Erkenntnis und Kunst (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2003), 197-235; Andreas Henning, Raffaels "Transfiguration," und der Wettstreit um die Farbe (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005); Jurg Meyer zur Capellen, The Roman Religious Paintings, ca. 1508-1520, vol. 2 of Raphael: A Critical Catalogue of the Paintings, trans. Stefan B. Polter (Lundshut: Arcos Verlag, 2005), 195-209; and Gregor Bernhart-Konigstein, Raffaels Weltverklarung: Das beruhmtesle Gemalde der Welt (Petersbeg: M. Inhof Verlag, 2007).

(2.) See the description of the visio-devotional process in Jeffrey F. Hamburger, "Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion," in Imagination und Wirklichkeit: Zum Verhaltnis von mentalen und realen Bildern in der Kunst der fruhen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Kruger and Alessandro Nova (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2000), 47. Another such description appears in Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-up in fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting 2nd ed. (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1984), 19. (3.) This is made clear by the so-called Nec Deus distich ("Nec Deus est nec homo, praesens quam cernis image,/Sed Deus est et homo, quem sacra figurat imago" [Neither God nor man is present image, which you perceive, / But God and man is he whom the sacred image figures]) that appeared on numerous medieval images to remind viewers of their purely referential intent; Jack M. Greenstein, "On Alberti's 'Sign': Vision and Composition in Quattrocento Painting," Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 675. On the "Nec Deus" in medieval art, see Christine Verzar Bornstein, Portals and Politics in the Early Italian Ci of Nicholaus in Context (Parma: Civilta Medievale, 1988), 104. (4.) Images in the later medieval period increasingly embraced the persuasive powers of physical description to help inspire the devout. On this, see Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 17-20 and passim; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Roathschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), esp. 162-67, where both popular and elite pressures causing the proliferation and acceptance of physical imagery are discussed; Cynthia Hahn, "Visio Dei: Changes in Medieval Visuality," in Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169-96; and idem, "Vision," in A Companion to Medieval Art, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 44-59. (5.) Later, Nicholas of Cusa will be discussed as a Renaissance example of this ideal. In the meantime, see Nicholas of Cusa, De visione Dei, vol. 6 of Nicolai de Cusa Opera omnia, ed. Adelaida Dorothea Riemann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000). The objective of imageless contemplation remained important even for late cinquecento art theorists. Gabriele Paleotti, for one, proclaimed that the works of the Christian artist must elevate the eyes of their viewers ("levando gli occhi in alto") beyond men and temporal things ("uomini e commodi temporali") so that they might repose in eternal ones ("the sta riposto nelle cose eterne"). Paleotti, "Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane," in Scritti d'arte del cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi, 3 vols. (Milan: Riccardo Rietiardi Editore, 1971-77), vol. 1, 908. Well into the Renaissance, actual altarpieces clearly promoted the engagement of spiritual vision, as did Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin Altarpiece in the Musee du Louvre, Paris. See Patricia Rubin, "Hierarchies of Vision: Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin from San Domenico, Fiesole," Oxford Art Journal 27 (2004): 137-51. The immense range of strategies deployed by Fra Angelico for figuring incorporeal truths in visual terms are described in Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra. Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For an example of similar ideals at work in the north, see Bret Rothstein, "Vision, Cognition, and Self-Reflection in Rogier van der Weyden's Bladelin Triptych," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichle 64 (2001): 37-55. A sustained introduction to these issues can be found in Patricia Rubin, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Of course, many descriptions of the visiodevotional process necessarily simplify the complexity of the historical situation. On this, see Sherry Lindquist, review of Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting by Bret Rothstein, Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 583-85.

(6.) "Visuality" has been defined as "the distinct historical manifestations of visual experience in all its possible mudci." See Manin Jav. Downcast Eyes: ll,i- Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 9. For an introduction to the historical evolution of conceptions of vision, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from AlKindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). For an art historical perspective and bibliography, see Robert S. Nelson, "Introduction: Descartes's Cow and Other Domestications of the Visual," in Nelson, Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance, 1-21. (7.) See Augustine, De genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, vol. 28 (sec. 3, pt. 2) of Corpus scriptorum e