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 ecclesiasticorum latinorum editum consilio et impensis academiae litterarum caesareae vindobonensis, ed. Joseph Zycha (Prague: F. Tempsky, 1894), 387-88 (12.7). On Augustine's understanding of vision, see Margaret Miles, "Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine's De trinitate and Confessions," Journal of Religion 63 (1983): 125-42. In Raphael's time, Augustine's tripartite scheme informed discussion of the visionary at the papal court, as in Egidio da Viterbo's "Sententiae ad mentem Platonis," MS, Vat. lat. 6325. A sermon ostensibly on Saint Stephen delivered before the papal court in the late fifteenth century made use of the tripartite Augustinian scheme of vision: Raynaldus Mons Aureus, Oratio de Visione Dei (n.p., after 1496), Hain incunabulum no. 11548. For context on this sermon and discussion of the tendency of the Renaissance orators of the papal court to dwell on visual and vision topics in their sermons, see John W. O'Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979), 130. For more on Augustine's tripartite vision scheme in Renaissance culture and his influence on Renaissance visuality, see Meredith J. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. 125-47. Late medieval visuality was deeply indebted to Augustine's ideas about vision, and it set the stage for Renaissance visuality as well. See Hahn, "Visio Dei: Changes in Medieval Visuality," 169-96. (8.) Augustine, De genesi ad litteram, 433-34 (12.36). (9.) So intense was the medieval discussion of vision that it sometimes became a matter of excommunication, as was the case of the controversy surrounding the problem of the beatific vision. See Jeffrey P. Hergan, St. Albert the Great's Theory of the Beatific Vision (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-11. Peter Lombard's widely influential Sentences may have played some role in encouraging ruminations on the visionary, too, for the numerous commentaries written on the Lombard often expanded on his own ideas, as Thomas Aquinas did in his Commentary on the Sentences. "The theological discourse on the visionary did not end in the Renaissance, although discussions tended to depend on patristic and Scholastic precedent. This is evidenced by the fourteenth-century treatise by Juan Lei, Tractatus Ioannis Lei O. P. "De visione beata," ed. Emmanuel Candal (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1963), which considers the issue of the beatific vision systematically, making extensive reference to Augustine's thoughts on Paul's vision of the Third Heaven, as was then traditional. Other texts known and read in Renaissance Italy explicitly deal with the relation between "spiritual vision" and painting: Bartholomew Rimbertinus's On the Sensible Delights of Heaven and Peter of Lamoges's On the Moral and Spiritual Eye. Both are discussed in Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 103-8. (10.) Ludiwig Pastor, Geschichte der Papste im Zeitalter der Renaissance von der Wahl Innocenz' VIII. bis zum Tode Julius' II., vol. of Geschichte der Papste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, 16 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1895), 780-81, 786-87, points to the centrality of Thomas

Aquinas in Raphael's work. On Aquinas's preeminent place in sixteenth-century Roman theology, see John W. O'Malley, "The Feast of Thomas Aquinas in Renaissance Rome: A Neglected Document and Its Import," in Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching, Rhetoric, Spirituality, and Reform (Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1993), 1-27. John Shearman's analysis of the sources behind Raphael's tapestry cartoons leaves no doubt of Aquinas's centrality; Shearman, Raphael's Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (London: Phaidon, 1972), 45-46 and passim. For more general scholarship on Roman Renaissance religion, see the whole of O'Malley, Praise and Blame; and Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 193-98, 245-54. (11.) In his Paradiso, Dante speaks continually about the mechanics of sight and how his sight is inadequate without the aid of grace to see the spiritual objects of heaven. For examples, see canto 33 of Dante, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, trans. and ed. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 370-81. Girolamo Savonarola discusses the technicalities of prophetic vision in his sermons: see Savonarola, Prediche sopra Ezekiele, ed. Roberto Ridolfi (Rome: Angelo Berlardetti Editore, 1955), vol. 1, 20. Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, 4.71, features conversation on the nature and scope of visionary experience. It is a documented fact that artists were familiar with these texts. For example, Ascanio Condivi writes about Michelangelo's deep knowledge of Dante, Petrarch, and Savonarola in his Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarotti, ed. Giovanni Nencioni (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1998), 6162. In addition, Michelangelo had probably read Castiglione, as demonstrated by David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 9, who also argues that the mature Michelangelo probably read Latin. Michelangelo might have learned about vision from Petrarch because Petrarch regularly turned his pen to discuss interior vision in Augustinian terms, as he did in his letter about his ascent of Ventoux. See Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance, 104. Generally speaking, scholars tend to underestimate the theological sophistication of Renaissance artists. For an appreciation of the intellectual aspirations of artists of the period, see Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). (12.) Michelangelo's poetic ruminations on the workings of spiritual vision are numerous. For examples, see nos. 105, 107 in Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rime, ed. Enzo N. Girardi (Bari: Gius, Laterza, e Figli, 1960), 60-01. Michelangelo's imagery of corporeal and incorporeal vision is explored in Summers. Michelangelo and the Language of Art, 415-17; and in Robert Clemens, "Eye, Mind, and Hand in Michelangelo's Poetry," PMIA 69 (1954): 324-36. (13.) According to Vasari, Raphael taught Bartolommeo perspective in return for the latter's instruction on his subtle blending of colors. See the 1550 text of Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de'piu eccellenli pillori scultori e architettori, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, 9 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1966), vol. 4, 163-64. On the relationship between Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael, see G. Fiocco, "Fra Bartolommeo e Raffaello," Rivista d'Arte 29 (1954): 43-53; and Ludovico Borgo, "Fra Bartolommeo e Raffaello: L'incontro romano del 1513," in Studi su Raffaello, ed. M. S. Hamoud and M. L. Strocchi (Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1987), 499-507. Dominicans were deeply concerned with problems of visulity in spiritual matters. On the emblematic nature of Dominican ideas about visuality on the eve of the Renaisance, see Dallas G. Denery II, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For more on the impact of Dominican theology on the work of a leading Renaissance artist, see Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, 114-18 and passim, where the author

discusses the impact of Saint Antoninus's Summa theologiae on Fra Angelico's depictions of the Annunciation. (14.) John Shearman was unsure of the origins of the cloud putto in Raphael's work but thought that the cloud putti of northern Italy were the most likely source. Like Andrea Mantegna in his Trivukio Madonna, Giovanni Bellini used small, discrete, tuftlike cloud putti around the Holy Spirit, in his Coronation of the Virgin at Pesaro. See Shearman, "Raphael's Clouds, and Correggio's," in Hamoud and Strocchi, Studi su Raffaello, 660. It should be added that cloud putti like those in Bellini's Coronation of the Virgin appear again, inconspicuously, around the mouth of the cave in Giorgione's Allendale Adoration (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Shearman seems, however, to have been unaware of another, more proximate tradition in central Italy. The cloud putto makes one of its earliest appearances in a Dominican church, that of S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome (ca. 1488-93). On the vaults of the Carafa Chapel there (a chapel dedicated, significantly, to the Virgin and Saim thomas Aquinas), the Florentine artist Filippino Lippi painted figures of sibyls floating on large clouds with cloud putti emerging from them. On his return to his home city, Filippino used these putti in the same fashion again for the clouds supporting the prophets on the vaults of his next big commission, the Strozzi Chapel of the main dominican churchin Florence, S. Maria Novella (ca. 1500). Even beyond these monumental fresco decorations, Filippino's concept of the cloud putto made its way into Florentine painting through one of his assistants in Rome, Raffaellino del Garbo, who incorporated cloud putti in one of his finest devotional paintings, the Virgin and Child (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Based on the visual similarities, including the greater continuity between putto and cloud in Bartolommeo's woek, it is probably this tradition that the latter tapped for the semicircle of cloud putti behind God the Father in his so-called Lucca Altarpiece, which I believe Raphael knew in some form before his departure for Rome in late 1508. It should be noted, however, that Raphael himself sketched the cloud putti on the ceiling of the Strozzi Chapel just before his departure, too. On Raphael's drawings after Filippino's Strozzi vaults, see Dominique Cordellier and Bernadette Py, Raphael, son atelier, ses copistes (Patis: Reunion des Musees Nationaux. 1992), 94-95, no. 83 (recto and verso). The drawings are mislabeled as copies after the vaults of the Carafa Chapel in S. Maria Minerva in Eckhart Knab et al., Raphael: Die Zeichnungen (Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1983), 581, nos. 276, 277. On Filippino's Carafa Chapel, see Gail L. Geiger, Fillippino Lippi's Carafa Chapel: Renaissance Art in Rome (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1986), esp. 55-72, where Geiger discusses the sibyls on clouds on the vaults (but does not discuss the cloud putti). (15.) On the physical mechanism behind the physical visionary, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. P. Caramello (Turin: Marietti, 1952), pt. 1, q. 51, art. 2. (16.) One of the major theological forces in Renaissance Rome, Egidio da Viterbo was the author of several important theological and historical works, including his still largely unpublished "Sententiae ad mentem Platonis," Vat. lat. 6325. Egidio's relationship with Raphael is considered in Heinrich Pfeiffer. Zur Ikonographie von- Raffaels Disputa: Egidio da Viterbo and die christlichplatonische Konzeption der Stanza della Segnatura (Rome: Gregoriana, 1975). On the wider context, see Egidio da Viterbo, O.S.A, e il suo tempo: Atti del V Convegno dell'Istituto Storico Agostiniano, Roma-Viterbo, 20-23 ottobre 1982 (Rome: Analecta Augustini-ana, 1983); and John W. O'Malley, Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform: A Study in Renaissance Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968).

(17.) Raphael, in John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources. 1483-1602 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), vol. 1, 132, doc. 1509-10/1, trans. mine. The poem is also published in Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa, 255. (18.) Using Raphael's sonnet, Shearman, Raphael's Cartoons, 90, makes the persuasive case that Raphael was not only capable of designing pictures of deep and even esoteric iconographic sophistication but also could do so with some degree of independence from professional theologians. (19.)In his treatise on painting, Leon Battista Alberti asserted, "No one will deny that things which are not visible do not concern the painter, for he strives to represent only the things that are seen"; Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, ed. Martin Kemp (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 37. For the Italian, "Delle cose quali non possiamo vedere, neuno nega nulla apartenersene al pittore. Solo studia il pittore fingere quello si vede," see Alberti, De pictura, in vol. 3 of Opere volgari, ed. Cecil Grayson (Bari: Gius. Laterza e Figli, 1973), 1.2. Greenstein, "On Alberti's 'Sign,'" 681-83, takes up the specific problem of "sensible surfaces" in Alberti's theory of painting. Toward the end of the quattrocento, Leonardo derided knowledge procured by means other than corporeal vision, reiterating Alberti's sentiments by declaring that "the scope of painting does not extend beyond the representation of the solid body or the shape of all the things that are visible"; Leonardo, On Painting, trans, and ed. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 15. For the Italian, "invero la pittura non s'astende piu oltra che la superfizie, per la quale si finge il corpo figura di qualonque cosa evidente," see Leonardo, Libro di pittura: Codice urbinate lat. 1270 nella Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ed. Carlo Pedretti and Carlo Vecce (Florence: Giunti, 1995), vol. 1, 133 (pt. 1, sec. 3, Urb lv-2r). (20.) For more on the problem of naturalism in fourteenth-century religious painting, see DidiHuberman, Fra Angelico, esp. 1-10. Of course, even Alberti, the first writer to theorize the istoria in a substantial way, acknowledged that paintings ought to engage the mind of the viewer (De Pictura 2.42, 3.52) and that many naturalistic images aimed at furthering larger intellectual and spiritual missions. For studies devoted to the nonliteral (that is, allegorical and metaphoric) meanings standing behind Renaissance istorie, see Leo Steinberg, Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper (New York: Zone Books, 2001); and Jules Lubbock, Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). (21.) The classic discussion of the movement toward narrative in late medieval and Renaissance devotional works remains Sixten Ringbom's Icon to Narrative. The changing nature of the Italian altarpiece in the early cinquecento is noted in Jacob Burckhardt, The Altarpiec in Renaissance Italy, ed. Peter Humfrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 128-45. It should be noted that the tension between iconic and narrative presentation of religious subject matter in Renaissance altarpieces is merely the latest manifestation of a long-standing issue in Christian art, as shown in Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God's Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). (22.) See Peter Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 79-85; Alexander Nagel, review of The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice, by Humfrey, Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 139-42; and idem, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. "The Altarpiece in the Age of History Painting," 113-40. On the general taxonomy and function of altarpieces, with special consideration of Raphael, see David Rosand, "'Divinita di cosa dipinta': Pictorial Structure and the

Legibility of the Altarpiece'" in The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, ed. Peter Humfrey and Martin Kemp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 143-64. (23.) Humfrey, The Altarpiec in Renaissance Venice, 80. (24.) Ibid., 225. As Humfrey points out elsewhere (85), a concern for the aesthetic power of an altarpiece could rival devotional aims in this period. For more on these matters, see Patricia Rubin, "Commission and Design in Central Italian Altarpiece c. 1450-1550," in Italian Altarpieces 1250-1550: Function and Design, ed. Eve Borsook and Fiorella S. Gioffredi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 201-11. (25.) Nagel, Michelangelo, 83-90, discusses Michelangelo's unusual and focused use of the Man of Sorrows motif in his London Entombment as part of wider thinking about the altarpiece in about 1500. He also adduces Jacopo da Pontormo's Deposition for S. Felicita, Florence (ca. 1528) as an example of an altarpiece that deliberately preserves aspects of traditional altarpiece function and design (139-40). (26.) Nagel, review of Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice, 141. The issue of media in devotional art is explored at length in idem, Michelangelo, 188-215. (27.) For a sensitive reading of Raphael's deeply meditated assimilation of modern "history painting" with the traditional altarpiece, see Nagel, Michelangelo, 113-40. (28.) Raphael probably received his commission for the Transifiguration be fore Sebastiano received his. This appears to be the implication of a letter from Leonardo Sellaio (early 1517) in Rome to Michelangelo that explains that Raphael was doing everything in his power to prevent the competition ("Ora mi pare che Rafaello metta sotosopra el mondo perche lui non lla fac.[i]a, per non venire a paraghoni"). Of course, the letter demonstrates Michelangelo's deep interest in the competition. Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, vol. 1, 280 81, doc. 1517/2. On the issue of the competition itself, see Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo's Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 246-47. (29.) For an extensive analysis of Michelangelo and Sebastiano's competitive strategies during the making of the Transfiguration and other paintings, see Goffen, Renaissance: Rivals, 243-64. On Sebastiano's coloristic contributions to the commission, see Costanza Barbieri, "The Competition between Raphael and Michelangelo and Sebastiano's Role in It," in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2005), 14164. The respective roles of Sebastiano and Michelangelo in works like The Raising of Lazarus are clearly articulated in Ludovico Dolce's Dialogue on Painting. See Mark W. Roskill, Dolce's "Aretino" and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 95ff. (30.) See Vasari's description of Raphael's death in Le vite, vol. 4, 210. On the Transfiguration's unparalleled fame in the seventeeth century and the legacy of its reputation through the beginning of the nineteenth century, see the history provided in Elizabeth Cropper, The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation, and. Theft in Seventeenth-Century Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 1-21. (31.) This and all subsequent quotations come from the King James Version of the Bible.

(32.) The most common identification of the saints with Justus and Pastor derives from the fact that they are the patron saints of Narbonne whose patronal festival fell on the same day as that of the Transfiguration. This identification, however, is by no means definite. Among the other saints that have been proposed as possibilities are Agapitus and Felicissimus, deacon saints who served under Sixtus II and who are commemorated as martyrs in the missal on the Feast of the Transfiguration. For more on the historiography of this issue, see King, "The Liturgical and Commemorative Allusions," 150. (33.) Eighteenth-century critics found the work to be historically (and thus aesthetically; disjointed. In his Italian Journey, Johann Worfgang von Goethe mentions the idea of the total disunity of the two halves as being both unintelligent and outmoded. See Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Penguin, 1970), 433. Also, on the transformation of the reputation of the painting wrought by Goethe, see Oberhuber, Raphael's "Transfiguration," 12. It should be noted that Raphael's altarpiece stands apart from other twotiered altarpieces of the period, such as representations of the Coronation of the Virgin, where the dramatic and thematic connections between upper and lower scenes were tightly coordinated. (34.) For a representative declaration on this matter, see Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance, vol. 1, 358. (35.) Ibid., 357: "The subject of the whole picture, as it is painted here, has no precedent." See also Dussler, Raphael: A Critical Catalogue, 53. (36.) Goethe, Italian Journey, . (37.) Fiedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and other Writings, trans,and ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26 (38.) Jacob Burckhardt, The Cicerone: An Art Guide to painting in Italy for the Use of Travelers and Students, trans. A. H. Clough (New York: Scribner, 1908), 145. We might add Heinrich Wolfflin to this tradition of reading juxtaposed opposites in the altarpiece. He saw in it "contrast, a marked counterpoint," depending on the integration of the two halves: "in the upper part, peace, solemnity, celestial beauty; in the lower, the noisy throng and earthly wretchedness"; Wolfflin, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance, trans. Peter Murray and Linda Murray (London: Phaidon, 1994), 137. In more recent times, Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance, vol. 1, 357, was adamant about the irreconcilability of the two parts of the Transfiguration. (39.) For example, Daniel Arasse, "Extases et visions beatifiques a Fapogee de la Renaissance: Quatre images de Raphael," Melanges de l'Ecole Francaise de Rome: Moyen Age, Temps Modernes 84 1972): 465-66. This classic essay has been reprinted with modifications in Les visions de Raphael (Paris: Liana Levi, 2003). See also Cranston, "Tropes of Revelation," 1-25. (40.) Cranston, "Tropes of Revelation," 18, argues that the apostles fail to "interpret" the possessed boy because they "look past" the pointing and kneeling woman. "Their inability to see the figure [of the woman] emphasizes their corresponding inability to view the body as more significant than a sick child, to discover and imagine more than is apparent to the eye." If one sees the prominence of this figure's pointing hands as being contrasted with the gesture of the apostle in red, who points toward Christ on Tabor, one might assume that the latter gesture

should take precedence over the former, if only because Christ is the obvious key to the boy's healing. (41.) Konrad Oberhuber repeatedly advanced the idea that the two halves are interconnected in this way, but without providing an exegetical explanation. For example, see Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings, 226. (42.) This is a reading of the trajectory of Raphael's visionary works that differs in important ways from that articulated in Arasse, "Extases et visions beatifiques," 403-92. (43.) On the meaning and literary associations of Mount Parnassus in the Renaissance, see Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 115-16. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 26, implicitly made the connection between Tabor and Parnassus in his discussion of Raphael's Christ as an Apollo figure. (44.) Nor is this similarity surprising considering the fact that Apollo himself was frequently linked to Christ. Examples may be found in Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology,trans, and ed. Michael Allen et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: 1 Tatti, 2001), vol. 1, 255-29 (4.1.6-28). (45.) The idea that this apostle might see the Transfiguration inwardly was first advanced in Oberhuber, "Vorzeichnungen zu Raffaels Transfiguration," 142. Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings, 226, acknowledges but does not thoroughly discuss what is here described as the "visual contest" in the lower section of the altarpiece. Kruger, Die Verklarung aufdem Berg, 22324, agrees with Oberhuber's position, although he associates the red apostle with John the Baptist. The figure has been identified as James the Lesser by Preimesberger, "Tragische Motive in Raffaels Transfiguration," 103-5, and, less convincingly, as Jesus himself in BernhartKonigstein, Raffaels Weltverklarung, 128-30. (46.) The gesture is comparable to several others in Raphael's work. There is the figure of Leo X, posing as Leo IV in the Battle of Ostia in the Stanza dell'Incendio, who thanks the heavens for his glorious victory over the Saracens. Alternatively, we find the newly englightened figure of Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by the words of Saint Paul, listening in the right foreground of Paul in Athens. It also resembles the gesture of the foremost deacon saint in the earliest surviving modello for the Transfiguration itself (Albertina, Vienna). In all these cases, the gesture is one of awe or thanksgiving, normally addressing a visionary or miraculous happening. Here it shows that the two figures in blue, having turned inward, are already party to the vision of faith on the mountain. By opening his hands before him, the blue apostle on the far left acknowledges the vision of faith that he has experienced internally. (47.)Oskar Fischel was the first to associate Judas with this figure. See Fischel, Raphael, trans. Bernard Rackham (London: Spring Books, 1964), 282. Fischel's opinion is shared by Oberhuber, Raphael's "Transfiguration," 26. (48.) Cranston, "Tropes of Revelation," 20, makes this comparison, too. (49.) It should be borne in mind that the Blinding of Elymas itself depends on the example of Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi. Much has been made of the compositional similarities between Leonardo's unfinished altarpiece and the Transfiguration, especially in Posner, Leonardo and Central Italian Art, 5-7. See also Oberhuber, Raphael's "Transfiguration," 17. Brown, "Leonardo

and Raphael's Transfiguration," 238, has argued that Raphael was even deliberately asserting his debt to Leonardo in the Transfiguration so as to identify himself with the older master and his painting. Like myself, Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance, 359, has acknowledged general compositional similarities between the lower part of the Transfigiration and the Sistine tapestries. (50.) Tommaso Inghirami, Commentaria in artem poeticam, Vat. lat. 2742, fol. Ir. For more on Inghirami, see Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance, 151-57. See also Joost-Gaugier, Raphael's Stanza della Segnartura, 22-42, where Inghirami, Julius II's librarian, i.s credited with devising the program of the Stanza della Segnatura. (51.) Among other places, the symbolic removal of spectacles appears in Joss van Cleve's Madonna and Child with Donor (ca. 1510) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as discussed in Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 474-75. (52.) The best and most extensive discussion of fantasia in the artistic context is found in Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, 103-43. For views on the problem fantasia and the visual arts of the cinquecento after the death of Raphael, see Stephen J. Campbell, "Fare una Cosa Morta Parer Viva': Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un) Divinity of Art," Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 596-620. (53.) Gianfranceso Pico della Mirandola, On the Imagination (De imaginatione), ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 30-31 (chap. 3): "Cum sensu coit quia et particularia, quemadmodum ille, et corporea et praesentia percipit: praestat illi quia, nullo etiam movente, prodit imagines, nec, praesentes modo, verum et practeritas er futuras, et quae et practeritas et futuras, et quae etiam promi a natura in lucem nequeunt." (54.) Ibid., 40-41 (chap. 6): "Cum enim ex rationali anima et corpore constituatur quasique compagineture homo, differatque plurimum a terrena mole corporis spiritalis animae substantia, ex re fuit ut extrema medio opportuno conjungerentur, quod utriusque quodam (55.) Ibid., 50-51 (chap. 8): "Utitur namquam illis corpori junctus ad veritaterm contemplandam, veluti hebeti visu oculus specillis vitreis adrem sensilem intuendam, ecoque pacto quo et oculus ipse decipitur." (56.) Ibid., 56-57 (chap. 8): "visione phantastica patefacta sunt." (57.) Ibid., 50-51 (chap. 8): "Quem ad modum sanguine, pituia, bile rubra aut atra abundat quispiam, sic et eius imaginatio philosophorum medicorumque testimonip huius modi naturam sectatur, ut proeorum diversitate ad diversas imagines--hilares, torpida, truculentas, maestasexstimuleture, a quidbus non secus intellectus, spiritalis animae oculus, in cognoscendo variat atque decipitur ac corporeus depictis variegatisquye specillis hallucinature." (58.) Ibid., 80-81 (chap. 11): "Quo fit ut qui huic intellegendi modo propior est [that is, in the manner of God contemplating his own essence], eo sit a casu atque errore distantior." (59.) In Ludovico Dolce's Dialogue on Painting, Aretino is made to compare the inappropriate use of imagination with the painter parodied in Horace's Ars poetica. The ultimate target of Aretino's criticism here is Michelangelo, who Aretino later describes as misusing his imagination. See

Roskill, Dolce's "Aretino," 123-25. These lines make another appearance in Gabriele Paleotti's extensive discourse on the propriety of grotesques in his "Discorso intorno alle imagini." See Barocchi, Scritti d'arte del cinquecento, vol. 3, 2656-57. For an expensive analysis of the Horatian tradition in relation to Renaissance art theory and particularly the work of Michelangelo, see Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, 129-43. (60.) Horace, Ars Poetica 1.1-5, in The Epistles of Horace, trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 151. (61.) Bernadine Barnes, Michlangelo's "Last Judgment": The Renaissance Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 99. (62.) Among other things, Raphael famously contributed to the rebirth of grottesche. On Raphael's grottesche made in collaboration with Giovanni da Udine for the Loggia of Leo X, see Nicole Davos, Le logge di Raffaello, 2nd ed. (Rome: Instituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato. 1986), 31-37. (63.) Dolce makes these comaprisons throughtout his Dialogue. For examples, see Roskill, Dolce's "Aretino," 173-77. (64.) Trans. adopted from Barnes, Michelangelo's "Last Judgement," 78, where the letter's context is described. For a transcription of Sernini's letter, which specifically addresses the contemporary reception of Michelangelo's Last Judgment, see Ludwig Pastor, Geschichte der Papst Pauls III., vol. 5 of Geschichte der Papste (1909), 843: "tutto is suo saforzo ha messo in fare figure bizzare et in atti diversi. . . ." Barnes's translation of Sernini's Italian "bizarre" as the English "imaginative" is accepted. (65.) Vasaru, Le vite, vol. 6, 69: "passioni e contentezze dell' animo." (66.) Vasari, Le vite, vol. 4, 206: "Ma conoscendo nondimeno che non poteva in questa parte arrivare alla perfezzione di Michelagnolo, comeuomu di grandissimo giudizio considero che la pittura non consiste solamente in fare uomini nudi, ma che ell'ha il campo largo. ... " Va-sari goes on to describe the universe of particulars to which Raphael devoted himself thereafter, including such things as "la varieta e stravaganza delle prospettive, de casamenti e de' paesi, il leggiadro modo di vestire le figure, il fare che elle si perdino alcuna volta nello scuro et alcuna volta venghino innanzi col chiaro, il fare vive e belle le teste delle femmine, de' putti, de' giovani de de' vecchi, e dar loro secondo il bisogno movenza e bravura." Raphael did precisely as the Netherlandish artists had done: he spread his painterly attentions widely. Michelangelo famously criticized this approach as it appeared in Netherlandish painting: "And I do not speak so ill of Flemish painting because it is all bad but because it attempts to do so many things well (each one of which would suffice for greatness) that it does none well," in Francesco de Hollanda, Four Dialogues on Painting, trans. Aubrey F. G. Bell (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1979), 15-16. (67.) This is not to suggest that Raphael's other figures, like the woman pointing toward the boy with both hands, were not demonstrative of a certain difficulta derived in part from Michelangelo's example (in this case, directly from Michelangelo's Doni Tondo and Libyan Sibyl), but that Raphael, in imagining the possessed boy, wanted to point to a most extreme example to which Michelangelo's aesthetic might be taken. Whether admired or chastised, the difficulta ascribed to Michelangelo's nudes and other figures was seen as a product of frenzied imagination: they were, as Nini Sernini wrote, "imaginative figures" (Barnes, Michelangelo's "Last

Judgment." 78). Michelangelo's pictorial inventions were thus criticized when it was thought that they pushed poetic intentions beyond the literal telling of a story or the natural appearance of things. Among these critics, perhaps the most interesting is Dolce, who, in his dialogue on painting called the Aretino, writes that Michelangelo's painting is both extreme and obscure and claims that he has allowed art to overwhelm decorum and even religion in his Last Judgment. Most important, Dolce judges Michelangelo unfavorably against Raphael, comparing the former's use of strange figural poses to Dante's learned and convoluted poetic figures, while seeing the latter as related to the sweet and varied style of Petrarch. In comparison to such comeliness, Dolce finds Michelangelo's work ugly and incomprehensible. See Roskill, Dolce's "Aretino," 273ff. On Dolce's dialogue and its comparison of Michelangelo and Raphael, see Barnes, Michelangelo's "Last Judgment," 94. (68.) After all, Vasari though that Raphael was the most graceful of all artists, both in terms of his behavior and his art, calling him "il graziosis-simo" (Le vite, vol. 4, 8). For more on grace in Raphael, see David Rosand, "Una Linea Sola non Stentata: Castiglione, Raphael, and the Aesthetics of Grace," in Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 454-79. See also Daniel Arasse, "Raffaello senza venusta e l' eredita della grazia," in Hamound and Strocchi, Studi su Raffaello, 703-14. (69.) Posner, Leonardo and Central Italian Art, 5-7 and passim. (70.) Although Leonardo does not name him in the passage, his intention to criticize Michelangelo is clear. Leonardo, Libro di pittura, vol. 1, 199 (125, Urb 48r): "O pittore notomista, guarda che-lla troppa notizia delli ossi, corde e muscoli non sieno causa di farti un pittore legnoso, col volere che li tuoi ignudi mostrino tutti li sentimenti loro." For more on Leonardo's criticism of the unnamed "anatomical painter" who can be associated with Michelangelo, see Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 337-38. (71.)It has been argued that Raphael, being in competition with the sculptor Michelangelo, chose the chiaroscuro mode in order to prove his prowess in rendering rilievo. See Posner, Leonardo and Central Italian Art, 15. (72.) On chiaroscuro and verisimilitude, see ibid., 13. (73.) On the meaning of shaded faces (and sfumato) as an indicator of subjective consciousness, see Alexander Nagel, "Leonardo and Sfumato," Res 24 (1993): 7-20. Paolo Alei also argues that veils and shadows allowed poets and painters to convey unstated meanings to the "spectator's eyes of the mind"; Alei, "'Intelligitur plus Semper quam Pingitur: The Renaissance Heritage of Timanthes' Veil" (PhD diss., Oxford University, 2002), 177-86. (74.) Peter's epistle figured in the liturgy of the Mass on the Feast of the Transfiguration. See Posner, Leonardo and Central Italian Art, 44. (75.) Emphasis added. (76.) Einem, "Die Verklarung Christi," 303.

(77.) I take Posner's view, Leonardo and Central Italian Art, 83 n. 4, that the picture shows dawn, given the connection between the Transfiguration and Peter's epistle. For the contrary view, that the sky and light represent sunset, see Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings, 224, where Oberhuber compares the light of the "inner sun" (that is, Christ) to that of the setting "outer sun" shown over Jerusalem. (78.) It will be noticed that a similar combination of lights is used in the background and foreground of Raphael's Lo spasimo, which also takes place in the early morning. (79.) As also noted by Posner, Leonardo and Central Italian Art, 44. (80.) For another interpretation of the relevance of these passages, see Cranston, "Tropes of Revelation," 19. (81.) On these matters, see Augustine, De fide rerum quae non videntur, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini hipponensis episcopi opera omnia post lovaniensium theologorum recensionem, ed. the Benedictine Order, Congregation of S. Mauri, and J.-P. Migne, vol. 6 (Paris: Venti apud Editorem in Vico Dicto Montrouge, 1841), 171. (82.) On major themes in the exegesis of the Transfiguration in the early Church Fathers, see John Anthoy McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition (Lewiston, N.Y. Edwin Mellen Press, 1986). (83.) Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Cenitmeuian Out of the Worhs of the Fathers trans. Mark Pattison (New York: Preserving Christian Publications, 2000), 599-600 (Matt. 17:1-4), Catena aurea in quatuor Evangelia, ed. Angelico Guarienti (Turin: Marietti, 1953), vol. 1, 258-59: "Vel quia in sex diebus totus factus est visibilis mundus; qui transcendit omnes res mundi, potest ascendere super montem excelsum, et gloriam aspicere Verbi Dei." (84.) Aquinas, Catena Aurea, trans. Pattison, 601 (Matt. 17:1-4), Catena aurea, ed. Guarienti, vol. 1, 258-59: "Mystice autem, cum aliquis transcenderit sex dies, secundum quod diximus, vidct transfiguratum Ie-sum ante oculos cordis sui. Diversas enim habet Verbum Dei formas; apparens unicuique secundum quod videnti expedire cognoverit; et nemini supra quod capit, semetipsum ostendit: unde non dixit simpliciter transfiguratus est, sed coram eis. In Fvangeliis enim lesus simpliciter intelligitur ab eis qui non ascendunt per excitationem verborum spiritualium super excelsum sapientiae montem; eis autem qui ascendunt, iam non secundum carnem cognoscitur, sed Deus Verbum intelligitur. Coram his ergo transfiguratur Iesus, et non coram illis qui sunt deorsum in conversatione terrena viventes. Hi autem coram quibus transfiguratur, facti sunt filii Dei, et ostenditur eis sol cssc iustitiae [.]" (85.) Augustine, "Sermon 78," in Sermons on the New Testament, trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991), vol. 3, 340, in Sermones, vol. 5 of Sancti Aurelii Augustini ... opera omnia, 490. It should be noted here that this passage also refers to the Last Judgment, as expounded at length in Bernhart-Konigstein, Raffaels Weltverklarung. (86.) Augustine, "Sermon 78," in Sermons on the New Testament, 340 (emphasis added), Sermones, 490: "Dominus ipse Jesus resplenduit sicut sol; vestimenta ejus facta sunt candida sicut nix .... Ipse Jesus quidem, ipse splenduit sicut sol, se lumen esse significans quod illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hune mundum. Quod est iste sol oculis carnis, hoc ille oculis cordis: et quod iste carnibus, hoc ille cordibus."

(87.) Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1993), 862 (22.29), De civitate Dei, vol. 7 of Opera Omnia, 22.29.3, col. 799. The Latin here reads "oculum cordis." (88.) At least one other contemporary artist was seemingly aware of Augustine's discussion of the "eyes of the heart" in relation to the Transfiguration: Sandro Botticelli and his workshop produced a Transfiguration (ca. 1500), a triptych now in the Galleria Pallavicini in Rome, that depicts the eponymous event in the central panel as observed by Saints Jerome and Augustine from their studies in the lateral wings. Notably, Augustine gazes in the direction of the central panel while pointing to his heart. On this picture, see Manfred Kruger, Die Verklarung auf dem Berg, 177-95. (89.) The drawing is Giulio Romano's copy of Raphael's first modello. For a chronological survey of Raphael's development of the altarpiece, see Oberhuber, Raphael's "Transfiguration," 39ff. (90.) Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 4, 2255, Summa, ed. Caramello, pt. 3, q. 45, art. 1: "Hieronymus dicit, super Matth., nemo putet Christum per hoc quod transfiguratus dicitur, pristinam formam et faciem perdidisse, vel amisisse corporis veritatem et assumpsisse corpus spirituale vel aereum." (91.)Aquinas, Summa, trans. Dominican Fathers, vol 4, 2255, Summa, ed. Caramello, pt. 3, q. 45, art. 1: "Sed quomodo transformatus sit, Evangelista demonstrat, dicens: "Resplenduit facies eius sicut sol, vestimenta autem eius facta sunl alba sicul nix." Ubi splendor faciei ostenditur, et candor describitur vestium, non substantia tollitur, sed gloria commutatur." (92.) Aquinas, Summa, trans. Dominican Fathers, vol. 4, 2255, Summa, ed. Caramello, pt. 3, q. 45, art. 1: "Ad secundum dicendum quod figura circa extremitatem corporis consideratur: est enim figura quae termino vel terminis comprehenditur. Et ideo omnia illa quae circa estremitatem corporis considerantur, ad figuram quodammodo pertinere videntur. Sicut autem color, ita et claritas corporis non transparentis in eius superficie attenditur. Et ideo assumptio claritatis transfiguratio dicitur." (93.) Compare Aquinas's discussion of figure and surface in the transfigured Christ to Alberti's Latin description of circumscription (as pertains to figures) and colored surfaces, to which is added the idea of composition. See Alberti, De pictura, 2.30. That Augustine was a source for Alberti's emphasis on drawing and design has been posited by Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissane, 96. However, it would not be surprising if Alberti had not first learned of Augustinian ideas through Aquinas, especially as Aquinas quotes Augustine extensively. (94.) On the symbolism of the white color of Christ's garments, see Henning, Raffaels "Transfiguration," 65-70, 131, and passim. (95.) Aquinas, Summa, trans. Dominican Fathers, vol. 4, 2256, Summa, ed. Caramello, pt. 3, q. 45, art. 2: "Sed ad corpus Christi in transfiguratione derivata est claritas a divinitate et anima eius, non per modum qualitatis immanentis et afficientis ipsum corpus: sed magis per modum passionis transeuntis, sicut cum aer illuminatur a sole. Unde ille fulgor tunc in corpore Christi apparens miraculosus fuit: sicut et hoc ipsum quod ambulavit super undas maris." (96.) Raphael's technique also matched the requirements of the theological metaphor. As Marcia B. Hall has observed, the upper regions of the altarpiece are thinly painted in a delicate unione

mode, utilizing fine glazes and cangiantismo to produce otherworldly effects in translucent layers. Not only do these subtle coloristic effects set themselves off from the chiaroscuro mode of the lower half of the altarpiece, but they may also potentially express the subtleties of light passing through transparent substance, as is appropriate to the theological explanation of the subject. For more on these matters, see Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 135-36; and also Henning, Raffaels "Transfiguration," 131-46. More general information on color in the Renaissance can be found in Hall, ed., Color and Technique in Renaisance Painting: Italy and the North (Locust Valley, N.Y.: J.J. Augustin, 1987); and Mosche Barasch, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1978). (97.) For example, consider Perugino's Transfiguration at the Collegio del Cambio in Perugia (Fig. 6). See Fiorenzo Canuti, II Perugino (Foligno: Editoriale Umbra, 1983), vol. I, 134-37. (98.) After designing the composition known from the Albertina drawing (Fig. 17), Raphael decided on the two-tier composition known from a copy of his modello by Giovanni Penni now in the Louvre (Fig. 18). In the Penni drawing, Raphael appears to have developed many of the figural and compositional motifs that he would use later in the final altarpiece. In fact, the upper portion of the drawing already shows the climactic moment of the Transfiguration with the apostles cowering on the ground before the transfigured Christ. Yet the figure of Christ and the two prophets still stand with their feet firmly planted on the ground. On the evolution of Raphael's design as reflected in the penni drawing, see Oberhuber, Raphaels "Transfiguration," 44-45. (99.) On tension between the two- and three-dimensional schemes in the painting, see Oberhuber, Raphaels "Transfiguration," 19ff. (100.) This phrase is used in both editions of Vasari's Lives. See Vasari, Le vite, vol. 4, 204. There is, however, yet another way to understand Vasari's words. Vasari's "diminuito in una aria lucida" need not be translates as the figure of Christ shown "in clear midair in perspective," as some would have it, but rather as "foreshortened in a clear air," that is, proportioned according to the rules of atmospheric perspective. Since "clarity overflowed" from his Godhead, it is possible that this clarity also affected the visibility of Christ, making him more apparent as a result of the divine light's removal of the general interference between visible object and eye. (101.) For more on the spatial relations here, see Renato Angeli and Renato Zini, "La prospettiva: Invenzione o scoperta?" in La prospettiva rinascimentale: Codificazioni e trasgressioni, ed. Marisa Dalai Emiliani (Florence: Centro Di, 1980), vol. 1, 132-36. (102.) Note that Augustine held that corporeal and incorporeal vision always acted together, even when one mode was dominant and active. On this, see Miles, "Vision," 139. Augustine's acceptance of the combined nature of visual categories may explain some of the ambiguity in Raphael's presentation of Christ in the painting. (103.) On the history and iconography of the heaven-directed gaze, see Andrea Henning, "Der himmelnde Blick": Zur Geschichte eines Bildmotivos von Raffael bis Rotari (Emsdetten: Imorde, 1998). (104.) Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1987), 315, Le vite, vol.4, 204: "Cristo ... vestito di colore di neve, pare che aprendo le braccia et alzando la

testa mostri la essenza e la deita di tutte tre le Persone, unitamente ristrette nella perfezzi-one dell' arte di Raffaello; il quake pare che tanto si restrignesse insieme con la virtu sua per mostrare lo sforzo ed il valor dell' arte nel volto di Cristo, che finitolo, come ultima cosa che a fare avesse, non tocco piu pennelli, sopragiungnendoli la morte." Vasari had originally stated (1550 edition) that Christ looks up toward God the Father ("al Padre"), and not the divine essence ("essenza"), suggesting a refinement in his own understanding of the painting. (105.) On the nature and origins of the problem concerning the visuality of the beatific vision of God's essence, see the whole of Hergan, St. Albert the Creat's Theory of the Beatific Vision. (106.) Aquinas, Summa, trans. Dominican Fathers, vol. 1, 16, Summa, ed. Caramello, pt. 1, q. 3, art. 3: "Et sic, cum Deus non sit compositus ex materia et forma, ut ostensum est, oportet quod Deus sit sua deitas, sua vita, et quidquid aliud sic de Deo praedicatur." Additional information on the theology of the beatific vision can be found in H.-F. Dondaine, "L'objet et le 'medium' de la vision beatifique chez les theologiens du XIIIe siecle," Recherches de Theologie Ancienne et Medievale 19 (1952): 60-129. for more on the imagery of the beatific vision in medieval art, see Lucy Freeman Sandler, "Face to Face with God: A Pictorial Image of the Beatific Image," in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985 Hartaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 1986), 224-35; and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), esp. "Images and the Imago Der Vision and the Theology of Deification," 185-201. (107.) Aquinas, Summa, trans. Dominican Fathers, vol. 1, 76. Summa, ed. Caramello, pt. 1, q. 14, art. 5: "Sic igitur dicendum est quod Deus seipsum videt in seipso, quia seipsum videt per essentiam suam. Alla autem a se videt non in ipsis, sed in seipso, inquantum essentia sua continet similitudinem aliorum ab ipso." (108.) See, for instancek, Hamburger's discussion of the Cistercian William of St. Thierry in St. John the Divine, 190-91. (109.) Cusa, "On the Vision of God," in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 249, De visione Dei, ed. Riemann, 8.30: "Domine, tu vides et habes oculos. Es igitur oculus, quia habere tuum est esse; ob hoc in te ipso omnia specularis." (110.) Cusa, "On the Vision of God," 250, De visione Dei, ed. Riemann, 9.32: "Visus tuus, domine, est essentia tua." (111.) Aquinas, Summa, trans. Dominican Fathers, vol. 1, 57, Summa, ed. Carmello, pt. 1, q. 12, art. 11: "Deus videri per essentiam non potest, nisi ab hac vita mortali separetur." (112.) Aquinas, Summa, trans. Dominican Fathers, vol. 1, 49, Summa, ed. Caramello, pt. 1, q. 12, art. 1: "Sed quod est maxime cognoscibile in se, alicui intellectui cognoscibile non est, propter excessum intelligibilis supra intellectum: sicut sol, qui est maxime visibilis, videri non potest a vespertilione, propter excessum luminis." (113.) See n. 7 above. (114.) Dante, Paradiso, trans. Singleton, 378-79 (canto 33, lines 124-26): "O luce etterna che sola in te sidi, / sola t' intendi, e da te intelletta, / e intendente te ami e arridi!" On Dante's

understanding of optics, spiritual vision, and the beatific vision, see Robert Podgurski, "Where Optics and Visionary Metaphysics Converge in Dante's Novella Vista," Italian Quarterly 35 (1998): 29-38; and Richard Kay, "Dante's Empyrean and the Eye of God," Specutum 78 (2003): 37-65. (115.) Aquinas, Summa, trans. Dominican Fathers, vol. 1, 50, Summa, ed. Caramello, pt. 1, q. 12, art 2: "Dicendum ergo quod ad videndum Dei essentiam requiritur aliqua similitudo ex parte visivae potentiae, scilicet lumen gloriae, confortans intellectum ad videndum Deum: de quo dicitur in Psalmo [35, 10]: in lumine tuo videbimus lumen. Non autem per aliquam similitudinem creatam Dei essentia videri potest. quae ipsam divinam essentiam repraesentet ut in se est." (116.) Dante, Paradiso, 374-75 (canto 33, lines 52-54): "che la mia vista, venendo sincera, / e piu e piu intrava per lo raggio / de I' alta luce che da se e vera." For a discussion of light imagery in Raphael's work based on the example of Dante's Paradiso, see Martin Kemp, "In the Light of Dante: Meditations on Natural and Divine Light in Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Michelangelo," in Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift fur Matthias Winner zum 11. Marz 1996, ed. Victoria v. Flemming and Sebastian Schutze (Mainz: Phillip von Zabern, 1996), 162-70. (117.) Dante, Paradiso, 378-79 (canto 33, lines 127-32): "Quella circulazion che si concetta / pareva in te come lume reflesso, / da li occhi miei alquanto circunspetta, / dentro da se, del suo colore stesso, / mi parve pinta de la nostra effige: / per che 'I mio viso in lei tutto era messo." (118.) Cusa, "On the Vision of God," 275, De visione Dei, ed. Riemann, 20.88: "Video in filio absoluto patrem absolutum; filius enim non potest ut filius videri, nisi pater videatur." (119.) Cusa, "On the Vision of God," 275, De visione Die, ed, Riemann, 20.88: "Sed similitudo est sine medio iuncta exemplari, ita quod magis similis nec esse nec cogitari potest in natura humana seu rationali." (120.) For more on Christ as the unequaled image of the Father, see Hamburger, St. John the Divine, 185. (121.) See n. 85 above. (122.) Aquinas, Summa, trans. Dominican Fathers, vol. 4, 2256, Summa, ed. Caramello, pt. 3, q. 45, art. 2: "quaedam imago repraesentans illam gloriae perfectionem secundum quam corpus erit gloriosum." (123.) Bonaventure's Journey of the Mind to God even had a lay audience, judging from the fact that it was translated and published in Italian during the Renaissance. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Printed Italian Vernacular Religious Books 1465-1550: A Finding List (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1983), 99. The full entry for this item reads: Bonaventura, St. "Dialogo di quatro mentali exercitii con uno altro suo chiamato Itinerario" Venezia: Albertino Rossi, 1502. (124.) Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, in Opera omnia ed. studio et cura Patrum collegii a S. Bonaventura ad plurimus codices mss. Emendata, anecdotis aucta, prolegomenis scholiis notisque illustrate (Quaracchi: College of S. Bonaventure, 1991), vol. 5, 297 (1.5); Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind to God, trans. Philotheus Boehner, ed. Stephen F. Brown (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 1.5, 6.

(125.) Bonaventure, Journey, 28: "It is possible to contemplate God not only outside us and within us but also above us: outside, through vestiges of Him; within, through His image; and above, through the light that shines upon our mind:" Itinerarium, 308 (5.1): "Quoniam autem contingit contemplari Deum non solum extra nos et intra nos, verum etiam supra nos: extra per vestigium, intra per imaginem et supra per lumen, quod est signatum supra mentem nostram, quod est lumen Veritatis aeternae. ..." (126.) Bonaventure, Journey, 37, Itinerarium, 312 (7.1): "postquam mens nostra contuita est Deum extra se per vestiga et in vestigiis, intra se per imaginem et in imagine, supra se per divinae lucis similitudinem super nos relucentem et in ipsa luce, secundum quod possibile est secundum statum viae et exercitium mentis nostrae; cum tandem in sexto gradu ad hoc pervenerit, ut speculetur in principio primo et summo et mendiatore Dei et hominum, Iesu Christo ea quorum similia in creaturis nullatenus reperiri possunt, et quae omnem perspicacitatem humani intellectus excedunt: restat, ut haec speculando transcendat et transeat non solum mundum istum sensibilem, verum etiam semetipsam; in quo transitu Christus est via et ositum, Christus est scala et vehiculum tanquam propitiatorium super arcam Dei collocatum et sacramentum a saeculis absconditum." (127.) Bonaventure, Itinerarium, 313 (7.6): "Qui quidem ignis Deus est, et huius caminus est in Jerusalem, et Christus hunc accendit in fervore suae ardentissimae passionis, quem solus ille vere percipit, qui dicit: Suspendium elegil anima mea, et mortem ossa mea. Quam mortem qui diligit videre potest Deum, quia indubitanter verum est: Non videbit me homo et vivet." Here Bonaventure differentiates himself from Aquinas's discussion of the vision of the divine essence in his Summa by underlining the idea that the fullest vision of the divine essence is available only in death through the image of Christ, preferably of Christ crucified. One should note that the Christ in Raphael's Transfiguration holds up his hands and face in a way that clearly anticipates his Crucifixion and thus our salvation through those means. The body language of Christ in the Transfiguration again matches the description of the Christ in the final vision in Bonaventure's Journey. Bonaventure's words also show the growing acceptability in the later Middle Ages of using visual images to evoke the beatific vision,even the invisibility of God. See Hamburger, St. John the Divine, 189. (128.) Cusa, "On the Vision of God," 252, De visione Dei, 10.38: "Sto coram imagine faciei tuae, deus meus, quam oculis sensibilibus respicio, et nitor oculis interioribus intueri veritatem, quae in pictura signatur." It should be stated that although the "sublimation" of corporeal vision into more spiritual categories was the ideal for theologians, the tendency in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance was also to develop devotion as a matter of sustaining physical ocular interest per se, as discussed in Suzannah Biernoff, Sight. and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). (129.) For more on the meaning of Holy Face icons, including their status as divinely wrought objects with contemplative purposes, see Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, eds., The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from the Colloquium Held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, and the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996 (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1998). See also Hamburger, St. John the Divine, 185. Raphael's altarpiece may have purposefully adopted features of medieval iconography (for example, hierarchical scaling) to make his altarpiece's contemplative function clear. (130.) For an excellent discussion of altarpiece painting in Raphael's Rome, see Eva-Bettina Krems, Raffaels Romische Altarbilder: Kontext, Ikonographie, Erzahlkonzept; Die Madonna del

Pesce and Lo Spasimo di Sicilia (Munich: Akademischer Verlag, 2002), 33-47. Krems also identifies and discusses the special characteristics of Raphael's narrative altarpieces and the rich exegetical meanings they carry (280). (131.) For more on the genesis of this painting, see Nagel, Michelangelo, 113-40. Some have even said that Raphael's Entombment was the first narrational altarpiece of the Renaissance. For discussion of this problem, see Krems, Raffaels Romische Altarbilder, 45. For more specifics, see Hubert Locher, Raffael und das Altarbild der Renaissance: Die "Pala Baglioni" als Kunstwerk in sakralen Kontext (Berlin: Akademic Verlag, 1994). (132.) On Titian's destroyed altarpiece in relation to Raphael's Transfiguration and other works, see Patricia Meilman, Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 94-100. (133.) The classic account of the separation of the visionary from the visual is found in Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 70-72. On cinquecento and Baroque incidents in which a detente between the visionary and the visual is achieved, see Klaus Kruger, "Malerei als Poesie der Ferne im Cinquecento," in Kruger and Nova, Imagination and Wirklichkeit, 99-121; and Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1995).