chapter 12 In Abscondito: Visuality and Testimony in Raphael’s Transfiguration Xavier Vert When* dealing with Christian history, painting is confronted with the duplicity of places, things, and events, what Erich Auerbach and Jean Daniélou taught us to recognize as figure.1 Whether it be a question of flowers in a meadow, a feat, or a miraculous healing, large or small, these things, gestures, or events, situated in time, take on certain aspects, present themselves in a certain way: they are disguised and driven by a dynamic that turns them into temporary enigmas. This figurative duplicity, also recognizable as the very process of history, brings together what has happened with what has not yet happened and, by the anteriority of a future, looks at what is from the horizon of what will be, as its sign or testimony. A figure in the Christian sense of the word is an enigma that inverts and contracts time but also an enigma dispelled at the moment of its fulfilment. Such a secret disposition is deduced from the visual structure enunciated by Paul, and often, if not always, recalled within the exegetical tradition of the divine mysteries, as in 1 Cor. 13:12: ‘For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror [per speculum in enigmate]; then we shall see face to face’. Thanks to its singular plasticity, the figure allows us to settle the mystery into the visible. In other words, the infinite network of figures woven into the Christian vision of history organises the visible according to the economy of mystery. It thus follows that a mystery, a mysterium-sacramentum, is figuratively adduced – if not accessible only by figures – and implies that the representation of its historical manifestation depends on the enigmatic arrangement or distribution of the visible;2 in that respect, both visual and exegetical, the image – the pictorial mimesis – may be considered as a place * For their generous insights and feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, I would like to thank warmly Walter S. Melion, Michel Weemans, and Giovanni Careri. My gratitude for their as- sistance to Véronique Eme-Martinez and Peter Briggs. 1 E. Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern: 1946); J. Daniélou, Sacramentum futuri: essai sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris: 1950). 2 On the difficulty of determining in the patristic and exegetical tradition, after Paul, a stable semantic distinction between mystery-mysterium and mystery-sacramentum, cf. E. Schillebeeckx, L’économie sacramentelle du salut (De sacramentele Heilseconomie), trans. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432260_014 430 Vert of passage for figures, a polarised field, or a medium.3 Following on from this approach, this essay attempts to provide a comparative perspective on mys- tery and visuality, secrecy and temporality, through the last and most famous painting of Raphael Urbino: The Transfiguration (1516–1520) [Fig. 12.1]. Indeed, since Vasari’s time, the altarpiece commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici for Narbonne Cathedral – neither the tavola nor the copy made on purpose by Raphael’s workshop has been sent to France4 – is considered as Raphael’s artistic and spiritual testament, albeit no single interpretation has received general recognition.5 Y. van der Have (Fribourg: 2004); R. Stefaniak, “Replicating Mysteries of the Passion: Rosso’s Dead Christ with Angels”, Renaissance Quarterly 45, 4 (1992) 677–738. 3 On this conception of medium, mediality, and image, see H. Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology”, Critical Inquiry 31, 2 (2005) 302–319. In an essay close to the questions discussed here, Marsha Libina presents and examines the medial status of the image in a theological and political context where images have been specifically involved in the debate on biblical hermeneutics: ‘In the early decades of the 1500s, religious images entered into a way of thinking that was fundamental to how Catholic exegetes at this mo- ment conceived of the biblical text: as figurative and referential in nature, in other words, as a “mediated truth.” Image-makers thus took to their own pictorial medium to reflect on the unresolved questions of prophecy and scriptural exegesis. The theological debate and the [Lateran] council’s conflicted position on the mediation of scripture, in particular, prompted new ways of thinking about the figuration of divinity that were specific to questions concern- ing the hermeneutics of the man-made image and the medial status of art when representing the divine’. “‘False Prophecies,’ Scripture, and the Crisis of Mediation in Early Modern Rome: Sebastiano del Piombo’s Borgherini Chapel in San Pietro in Montorio”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 11, 1 (2018) 67–104, 78. 4 The panel of almost equal size (396 × 263 cm), dated ca. 1520–28, later became part of the collections of the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. See T. Henry and P. Joannides, Raphaël: Les dernières années (Paris: 2012) 174–177. 5 The modern literature on Raphael’s Transfiguration is endless; only the studies cited through- out the text are indicated here. With respect to the incompleteness of the painting, upon the artist’s death, cf. F. Mancinelli, “La Trasfigurazione e la Pala di Monteluce: Considerazioni sulla loro tecnica esecutiva alla luce dei recenti restauri”, in Shearman J. – Hall M.B. (eds.), The Princeton Raphael Symposium: Science in the Service of Art History (Princeton: 1990) 149–160. For a genetic and interpretive approach, cf. K. Oberhuber, “Vorzeichnungen zu Raffaels ‘Transfiguration’”, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 4 (1962) 116–149; H. Von Einem, Die “Verklärung Christi” und die “Heilung des Besessenen” von Raffael (Wiesbaden: 1966). On the figure of christus medicus, the discussion between Posner and Shearman remains essen- tial: K.W.G. Posner, “Raphael’s Transfiguration and the Legacy of Leonardo”, Art Quarterly 35, 4 (1972) 343–374; idem, Leonardo and Central Italian Art (1515–1550) (New York: 1974); J. Shearman, Raphael’s Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (London: 1972); idem, “Raphael’s Clouds, and Correggio’s”, in Sambucco Hamoud M. – Strocchi M.L. (eds.), Studi su Raffaello: Atti del congresso internazionale di studi. Urbino-Firenze, 6–14 avril 1984 (Urbino: 1987) 657–668; idem, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 1483–1602 (New Haven – London: 2003). Also see E.H. Gombrich, “The Ecclesiastical .