Transfiguration (Raphael) - Iconography

Iconography

Raphael's painting depicts two consecutive, but distinct, biblical narratives from the Gospel of Matthew, also related in the Gospel of Mark. In the first, the Transfiguration of Christ itself, Moses and Elijah appear before the transfigured Christ with Peter, James and John looking on (Matthew 17:1-9; Mark 9:2-13). In the second, the Apostles fail to cure a boy from demons and await the return of Christ (Matthew 17:14-21; Mark 9:14). The upper register of the painting shows the Transfiguration itself (on Mount Tabor, according to tradition), with the transfigured Christ floating in front of illuminated clouds, between the prophets Moses, on the right, and Elijah, on the left with whom he is conversing (Matthew 17:3). The two figures kneeling on the left are commonly identified as Justus and Pastor who shared August 6th as a feast day with the Feast of the Transfiguration. These saints were the patrons of Medici's archbishopric and the cathedral for which the painting was intended. It has also been proposed that the figures might represent the martyrs Saint Felicissimus and Saint Agapitus who are commemorated in the missal on the feast of the Transfiguration.

The upper register of the painting includes, from left to right, James, Peter and John, traditionally read as symbols of faith, hope and love; hence the symbolic colours of blue-yellow, green and red for their robes.

In the lower register, Raphael depicts the Apostles attempting, unsuccessfully, to free the possessed boy of his demonic possession. They are unable to cure the sick child until the arrival of the recently-transfigured Christ, who performs a miracle. According to Goethe: "The two are one: below suffering, need, above, effective power, succour. Each bearing on the other, both interacting with one another."

The man lower left is the apostle-evangelist Matthew, some would says St. Andrew, depicted at eye-level and serving as interlocutor with the viewer. The function of figures like the bottom left was best described by Leon Battista Alberti almost a century earlier in 1435.

I like there to be someone in the 'historia', who tells the spectators what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to look, or with ferocious expression and forbidding glance challenges them not to come near, as if he wished their business to be secret, or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture, or by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them. —Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (1435)

Matthew (or Andrew) gestures to the viewer to wait, his gaze focused on a kneeling woman in the lower foreground. She is ostensibly a part of the family group, but on closer examination, is set apart from either group. She is a mirror image of comparable figure in Raphael's The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple (1512). Giorgio Vasari, Raphael's biographer, the woman as "the principal figure in that panel." She kneels in a contrapposto pose, forming a compositional bridge between the family group on the right and the nine apostles on the left. Raphael also renders her in cooler tones and drapes her in sunlit pink, while he renders the other participants, apart from Matthew, oblivious to her presence. The woman's contrapposto pose is more specifically called a figura serpentinata or serpent's pose, in which the shoulders and the hips move in opposition; one of the earliest examples being Leonardo da Vinci's Leda (c. 1504), which Raphael had copied while in Florence.

In the centre are four apostles of different ages. The blonde youth appears to echo the apostle Philip from The Last Supper. The seated older man is Andrew. Simon is the older man behind Andrew. Judas Thaddeus is looking at Simon and pointing towards the boy.

The apostle on the far left is widely considered to be Judas Escariot He was the subject of one of only six surviving so-called auxiliary cartoons, first described by Oskar Fischel in 1937.