The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Raphael · the one panel, its two zones scored as one work · oil on a single upright wooden panel · Christ transfigured on the mount above, the apostles who stayed below and the possessed boy beneath · begun 1516 to 1517 for the cathedral of Narbonne and left not wholly finished at the painter’s death on 6 April 1520 · completed within the campaign by his workshop · Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City
Mode
Altarpiece as two episodes in one field; the Gospel’s sequence shown at one instant, divided by a mountain and joined by gesture
Mythos
The mountain and the plain: the body filled with glory above the body seized by a spirit; revelation on the height, affliction below it
Phase
One instant holding two events the Gospel narrates in sequence; begun 1516 to 1517, left not wholly finished at the painter’s death in April 1520
Presentation
Oil on a single upright wooden panel; two zones of about equal height along the slope of the mount, the upper figures small and far, the lower near life size at the front
Register
Transport above, terror and agitation below, the contact between them the height
Scale
Two zones, two laws of light, one mountain and one afflicted household
Governing Proposition
On the summit a man is lifted free of the ground in a light that comes from his own body, and the three who came up with him are thrown flat by it. On the plain below, his followers stand over a boy in convulsion and cannot heal him, and they look at each other, not up. The wager of the panel is that glory and affliction can be shown in one field at one instant, and that the distance between them, which only the viewer can see across, is the meaning.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, who would become Pope Clement VII, held the see of Narbonne, and he commissioned two altarpieces for its cathedral. One went to Sebastiano del Piombo, a Raising of Lazarus, for which Michelangelo supplied drawings; it is now in London. The other went to Raphael. The two were set against each other in Rome, and the contest was public: two painters, with Michelangelo behind one of them, working for the same patron on panels meant for the same church.
Raphael began the panel in 1516 or 1517, in oil, on a single upright piece of wood, and he did not wholly finish it. He died on 6 April 1520, and the completion fell to his workshop. The panel is scored here as one work: the upper zone and the lower zone together, and the completion within the campaign as part of the work, credited or charged to the work and never to one name. Later hands, a restoration of the 1970s among them, are charged under The Imperishable only.
His answer to the contest was to give up what he was famous for. The altarpieces that had made his name held one scene in a calm and centred symmetry, under one unifying light, with figures placed in a measured space. This panel holds two scenes, one above the other, divided by a mountain; it runs two lights, one radiant and one raking over deep shadow; and it throws its lower figures into opposing diagonals. He made that turn at the height of his fame, in a public contest.
Movement II
The upper zone is the Transfiguration as the Synoptic Gospels tell it, in Matthew 17, Mark 9 and Luke 9: Christ taken up a mountain with Peter, James and John, and changed before them in light, with Moses and Elijah appearing beside him. The painter lifts Christ free of the ground. His arms are opened, his garments blown white into the light, and the prophets on either side are drawn up toward him as if by one wind. The radiance makes a sphere of the cloud, and the figures within it are lit from inside it.
That light has one source, and the source is Christ himself. The garments are painted as radiance rather than cloth, and the cloud and the prophets take their light from him. Below him, on the summit, the three apostles who came up with him are thrown flat on the rock. They are the human response at the top of the picture: they can see the light, and it strikes them down. They are blinded where the figures below them are only blind.
The figures of this zone are small and far, on a scale much smaller than those of the plain, so that the summit is distant and the event remote from the viewer. At its left edge kneel two deacon saints. They belong to the commission rather than to the Gospel, and they are the weakest part of the panel: drawn perfunctorily, crowding the summit’s edge, outside both its laws of light. They could go without loss.
Movement III
In the Gospels the healing of the possessed boy follows the descent from the mountain: a father brings his son to the disciples who stayed below, and they cannot cast out the spirit. The panel shows both events at once. On the plain, in a raking light from the left over deep shadow, the apostles stand at the left. Several point at the boy; one points upward, toward the summit. They turn to each other, and the gaze of none of them, save perhaps one, reaches the light above.
At the right the family has brought the boy, and a crowd of relatives and onlookers presses behind. His father holds him by the chest. The boy’s eyes are rolled up, his arms rigid and locked at different angles. He is the second centre of the picture, the possessed body against the glorified one, and of all the figures on the plain the one whose eyes are turned toward Christ is the boy whom the spirit has seized. He cannot see what he faces.
Between the two groups, at the centre front, a woman kneels with her back to the viewer, her body twisted, the light hard on her shoulders. She is a still axis between two agitated crowds, and the whole lower front turns on her. Who she is has stayed open: a mother, a figure of the church, a figure of faith. The composition requires her whatever she means. The apostles have the authority and the gestures of teaching, and what could heal is above them and out of their sight.
Movement IV
The panel is divided along the slope of the mount into two zones of about equal height, and it is read from below, over an altar. The eye climbs from the dark crowd to the light, which is the act the figures on the plain cannot perform, and the arm that points upward points the viewer where the apostles do not look. The two scales do the same work: near life size at the front of the plain, small and far on the summit, so that the affliction is present and the glory remote.
The objection is as old as the panel’s fame: that it is two pictures. It was argued in the eighteenth century, and Goethe in Rome answered it, defending the unity of the two zones. The objection has force in the gap between the upper zone’s calm radial symmetry and the lower zone’s scattered diagonals, and in the two regimes of light and scale. But the division is the argument. The figures below cannot see what the viewer sees, and only one panel can show that. Painted as two panels, or as a frieze in sequence, the simultaneity of glory and suffering would be lost.
The figure drawing of the lower zone is documented in the painter’s own studies, the heads and hands of the apostles drawn separately, with great force, each a different reaction to the same failure. How much of the painting the workshop did, Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni chiefly in the lower right group, is argued. That group is harder and more metallic in modelling than the rest, and the work answers for it: where the lower right becomes crowd, the form weakens.
Movement V
Vasari tells that the panel stood at the painter’s bier in April 1520. It never went to Narbonne. It was kept in Rome and set over the high altar of San Pietro in Montorio, and there it stayed until 1797, when it was taken to Paris under the Treaty of Tolentino. It came back in 1815 and 1816, and it has been in the Vatican collections since. For nearly all its life it has been on view in Rome.
Its reach began in the painter’s own school. Giulio Romano and the Roman workshop carried its figure types and its chiaroscuro into Mannerism; Rubens copied and adapted its lower zone; for about three centuries the academies held it, by repute, as the greatest painting in the world and taught from it; and a mosaic copy put it over an altar in Saint Peter’s. In 1848 the young painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, by Holman Hunt’s account, took their name from rejecting this picture above all. The desk’s order departs from that long consensus: The School of Athens, at 9.1, stands above it as the more unified work and the more consequential.
The image is whole. No figure that carries the meaning is lost, and the panel was restored in the 1970s. What has changed is the dark: the shadows of the lower zone are reported to have darkened, and they take some of the drama the plain was built on. The light at the top has not changed. Christ is still lifted free of the mount in a light of his own, the three apostles still lie flat beneath it, and on the plain the boy’s eyes are still turned toward it while the men who were meant to heal him look at each other.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged figure by figure. Christ cannot go: he is the light of the whole upper zone. Moses and Elijah, drawn into his orbit, make the event the Transfiguration and not an ascension. The three apostles thrown on the rock are the human response at the top, blinded where those below are only blind. The boy cannot go: his rolled eyes and rigid arms make the second centre, the possessed body against the glorified one. The father and the apostle pointing upward are the hinges between the zones; the kneeling woman is a still axis between two agitated groups. What yields: the two deacon saints at the summit’s left edge, who could go without loss, and the back ranks of both lower crowds.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated. The apostles below are the church without its Lord: they have the authority and the gestures of teaching, and they cannot heal, because what can heal is above them and out of their sight. Suffering is shown at the same instant as glory and in the same field, and the two meet only by gesture: the sufferers cannot see the remedy, and the ones who can see it are struck down by it. The condition disclosed is dependence, and the failure of mediation when the mediators look at each other instead of up. It holds outside the Rome of its making. Held below the top because the meaning is the Gospel’s before it is the picture’s: it is stated with great force, not taken further.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is high, of two kinds, and it recurs. Above: Christ floating free of the ground, arms opened, garments blown white into the light, the prophets drawn up toward him as by one wind, the radiance making a sphere of the cloud. This is transport, and the classical altarpiece rarely reaches it so completely. Below: terror and agitation, the boy’s convulsion, the father’s strain, hands thrown out across the dark. The sublime is in their contact, the glory above a tumult it does not yet touch, and the light and the dark recur across the field. Held at 9.0, below The Starry Night at 9.2: the lower zone is in places theatrical rather than awful, and its darkened shadows take some height from it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Built, and load-bearing: the composition is the archetype. Above and below, light and dark, the possessed and the transfigured, the body seized by a spirit and the body filled with glory, the mountain and the plain: the oldest vertical order of the world, made the structure of the panel rather than its atmosphere. The boy and Christ answer each other as two states of the human body under spirit, one rigid and convulsed, the other weightless and open. The mount is every mountain of revelation, Sinai behind Moses and Carmel behind Elijah. The particulars stay particular: a father’s grip on his son’s chest, a woman’s twisted back, a foot on a rock. Held below the top because the structure is the Gospel’s, received rather than built anew.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the High Renaissance altarpiece, the painter’s own above all: one scene, a calm and centred symmetry, a single unifying light, figures in a measured space. The departure is in three things: two episodes in one field, divided and joined, in an altarpiece; a night of strong chiaroscuro below, a raking light over deep shadow that looks forward to Caravaggio and the Baroque; and agitation, the lower figures thrown into opposing diagonals, gesture made the medium of the drama. The stake was real: a public contest with Sebastiano and Michelangelo for the same patron, answered by abandoning the harmony that was his signature at the height of his fame. Held below 9.0 because the turn is within his own practice and the Roman school, and its parts had precedents.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Substitute a different form and the work stops being able to say most of what it knows. The tall panel, read from below over an altar, makes the eye climb from the dark crowd to the light, which is the act the lower figures cannot perform; the arm that points upward points the viewer where the apostles do not look. The two scales, near life size below and small and far above, make the summit distant and the affliction present. The slope of the mount divides the zones and joins them, so that the panel is one picture with two laws of light. As two panels, or as a frieze in sequence, the simultaneity of glory and suffering, which is the argument, is lost. Held below the top by the weaker lower right, where form becomes crowd.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise: five centuries, and a reception that rose, fell and rose. Vasari’s account of the panel at the painter’s bier, the academies’ long esteem, Goethe in Rome defending the unity of the two zones against those who saw two pictures, its removal to Paris, the Pre-Raphaelites naming themselves against it, and the scholarship since on the hands, the contest and the theology. The open questions are questions of meaning: whether the zones are one event or two; who the kneeling woman is; what the deacon saints are doing at the summit’s edge; whether the lower zone indicts the apostles or shows the church in the world. Held below the top because some of the yield is reception and attribution, and once seen as one the zones do not keep opening as Las Meninas’ room does.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The work is public, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Roman and Italian painting of the 1510s and 1520s. The intrinsic force is high: it reorganised what an altarpiece could hold, two times and two spaces in one dramatic field, and moved the High Renaissance toward the agitated composition and dark light of the following generations. The discount: its first reach ran through the painter’s school and the academy rather than a new idea of painting, and others carried the lower zone’s force further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Giulio Romano and the Roman workshop carried its figure types and chiaroscuro into Mannerism; Rubens copied and adapted its lower zone; for about three centuries the academies held it, by repute, as the greatest painting in the world and taught from it; a mosaic copy stands over an altar in Saint Peter’s; and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of 1848, by Holman Hunt’s account, took its name from rejecting this picture above all.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at five centuries. Form: whole. The image is the image the campaign made, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: continuous and central, from the bier in 1520 to San Pietro in Montorio, to Paris after 1797, and to the Vatican since its return; it has been on view in Rome for nearly all its life. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the lower zone’s shadows are reported to have darkened, which takes some of the drama the lower zone was built on, and a restoration of the 1970s is charged lightly. The surface is fixed to its moment in costume and gesture, and none of it stands between the work and a viewer: a boy in convulsion and a light beyond reach need no court.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged as command of oil on a large panel, to the anchors of every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The figure drawing is the painter’s at its height: the apostles’ heads and hands, studied separately in drawings of great force, each a different reaction to the same failure; the boy’s body, arms locked at different angles, eyes rolled up; the father’s hold; the kneeling woman’s twist, a contrapposto turned away from us that anchors the whole lower front. The upper light is made from within the figure of Christ, the white garments painted as radiance rather than cloth. The lower light is one strong raking source held across a crowd without loss of legibility. Charged: the lower right group is harder and more metallic in modelling than the rest, the deacon saints are perfunctory, and the dark has darkened.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the transfigured Christ at the top centre and the kneeling woman at the bottom front, her back turned. Do they obey one law? The law the panel states is the vertical order of light: everything is ranked by its relation to the light above, toward which it points or from which it turns. By that law the woman, lit hard on her shoulders, and the boy, his eyes turned up, belong to the same physics as Christ. But the panel runs two regimes of light and scale, and the case that it is two pictures has force in the gap between the upper zone’s calm radial symmetry and the lower zone’s scattered diagonals. The two deacon saints stand outside both laws. One law, held across a wide range, with seams.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held: the sacred, at the top and as the measure of the whole; the natural order, a mountain; the family, a father, his son and the women of the household; illness, the body under a power it cannot command; the institution, the apostles as the church, with its gestures, failing; consciousness, in the range of response from blindness to dazzlement; and history, in Moses and Elijah, law and prophecy drawn into the event. They are integrated by the vertical, each in its place in the climb from affliction to glory. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no state, no labour, no history of its own time but the patronage at the summit’s edge; one event, one mountain, one afflicted household. Below The School of Athens at 8.5, above The Assumption of the Virgin at 7.6.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3 and The Made at 9.2, with The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Living Form at 9.0. An image whole after five centuries and on view in Rome for nearly all of them; a figure drawing at the painter’s height and a light made from within the figure it comes from; an elevation of two kinds whose height is in their contact; the oldest vertical order of the world made the structure of the panel; and a form in which the viewer’s eye climbs to the light that the figures below cannot see.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.4: the sacred, a mountain, a family, illness, the church, consciousness and law and prophecy are held in the climb from affliction to glory, with no state, no labour and no history of its own time; one event, one mountain, one afflicted household. Next, The Inevitable at 8.5: the deacon saints and the back ranks of the lower crowds yield. Then The Unconcealment at 8.6, a disclosure the Gospel made first, and The Inner Law at 8.7, one law of light held across two regimes, with seams.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.3, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clears it by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Inevitable at 8.5, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 106.3, an average of 8.86 that displays 8.9, a tenth short of 9.0; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the panel as an image and as a history (its composition, figures, gestures and light, its commission, the contest with Sebastiano del Piombo and its later reception), scored as the one panel: The Transfiguration, by Raphael, oil on a single upright wooden panel, begun 1516 to 1517 for the cathedral of Narbonne on the commission of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and left not wholly finished at the painter’s death on 6 April 1520; now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. The upper zone and the lower zone are one work. Completion within the campaign by the workshop, Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni chiefly in the lower right group by the argued division, is part of the work, credited or charged to it on every axis and never to one name; the exact division of hands is argued and is not settled here. Later hands, among them a restoration of the 1970s, and the reported darkening of the lower zone’s shadows, which is known by report rather than measured, bear on The Imperishable only. The panel’s present surface is known thinly. Sebastiano’s Raising of Lazarus, Michelangelo’s drawings for it, the preparatory drawings in the painter’s hand, the mosaic copy in Saint Peter’s and the works of Rubens and the Roman workshop enter as the contest, the evidence of the making and the reach, and are not scored. The Gospel sequence is cited by chapter; nothing on this page is quoted. Vasari, Goethe and Holman Hunt are paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the panel’s exact dimensions, the year it was set over the altar of San Pietro in Montorio, the year the restoration was completed, the identity of the two deacon saints, the number of figures in the lower crowds, the books and gestures of particular apostles, the landscape at the left edge, the places where the drawings are kept, and which of Rubens’s works adapt the lower zone.