Transfiguration

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Mark 9:2-9

The Transfiguration

RAPHAEL

1518-1520

Pinacoteca Apostolica

Vatican, Rome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfiguration_(Raphael)

St. Peter and St. John, auxiliary cartoon in black chalk and white heightening over pouncing, 499 x 364 mm

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,^[11] 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).^[3] 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.^[1] 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.^[1]