Raphael Transfigured

When Raphael suddenly died in 1520 at the age of 37, his last work, the Transfiguration, was acclaimed as a masterpiece by the file of Cardinals and connoisseurs who trooped past his bier and saw the painting near by. The strong, graceful figures, the supple, continuous modeling, the ecstatic vision of a gravity-free Christ rising into the air above Mount Tabor--these struck Raphael's admirers not only as the quintessence of his style but as a climax of the entire Renaissance system of ideal figure painting.

At Napoleon's orders, the Transfiguration was taken off to the Louvre, and in 1802 it was heavily varnished for protection. The varnish gradually darkened to an ocher soup, contributing to the traditional idea that Raphael, a draftsman without peer, was a mediocre colorist. The change also raised the suspicion in some specialists' minds that the lower and darker half of the painting, depicting the cure of a boy's madness by divine grace, had actually been done by Raphael's pupil Giulio Romano.

In 1972 Professor Deoclecio Redig de Campos, the Vatican's director-general of pontifical monuments, decided to clean the Transfiguration. The results, newly unveiled in Rome, are spectacular: the familiar dirty greens of the sky have given way to a deep, dazzling blue; the dead areas of tone sparkle with lost nuances of color; and the modeling of flesh has acquired a high, suave fullness that had been submerged in the murk. What stood revealed, said Redig de Campos, was "a Raphael who, in his last work, had dared to show himself comparable to the greatest colorists of the time, that is to say, the Venetians. We have been given back a new Raphael, a transfigured Transfiguration."

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