"The Transfiguration"

Raphael was not an artistic innovator but has been praised as the ideal High Renaissance painter for the past five centuries. This is because in his art, Raphael portrayed noble and ideal individuals who move with dignity and grace through an intelligible and ordered world.  He achieved this by unifying the movements of his figures and the spaces he created for them into integrated, harmonious compositions.

The Transfiguration is oil tempera on wood and measures 410 cm × 279 cm (160 in × 110 in). The first descriptions of the painting after Raphael's death in 1520 called it a masterpiece, and this status evolved until the end of the 16th century. In his notes of a travel to Rome in 1577, the Spanish humanist Pablo de Céspedes called it the most famous oil painting in the world for the first time. The painting would preserve this authority for more than 300 years.  Later criticism was that the composition was divided into an upper and a lower half that would not correspond to each other. Also the lower half would draw too much attention instead of the upper half, while the full attention of the viewer should be paid to the figure of Christ alone.

In the early 20th century, the fame of the painting rapidly diminished and soon The Transfiguration lost its denomination as the most famous painting in the world.  While the complexity of the composition had been an argument to praise the painting until the end of the 19th century, viewers were now repelled by it. The painting was felt to be too crowded, the figures to be too dramatic and the whole setting to be too artificial.