Vision and the Visionary in Raphael

“With a rare combination of precise and probing visual analysis and searching historical and textual scholarship, Christian Kleinbub opens entirely new prospects on the artist who personifies our concept of High Renaissance. Vision and the Visionary in Raphael demonstrates the fuller dimensions of a profound pictorial intelligence. The very notion of seeing, in its several aspects, is at the core of this study, which includes not only the spectator/worshipper before an altarpiece, but also the spectator/witness in the istoria and the vision of the seer/prophet. While focusing on Raphael, it inevitably involves the full Renaissance tradition, from Alberti’s articulation of the viewer to Renaissance responses to and commentaries on the visionary in theological literature from antiquity to Ficino and Savonarola, as well as theological commentary in a particularly Pauline tradition. Kleinbub discovers new and deeper aspects of Raphael as a thinking artist.” —David Rosand, Columbia University

“This highly original and informative work shows how Raphael created a new mode of painting in 16th-century Rome when he combined Renaissance naturalism with the tradition of sacred imagery. Kleinbub provides insightful formal readings and thorough assessments of the iconography of Raphael's major frescoes, paintings, and tapestries that depicted the world, spiritual phenomena, and the divine as indisputably real. . . . As the author traces Raphael’s development that culminated in The Transfiguration of Christ, he makes a compelling case for viewing Raphael as one of the inventors of a new type of devotional image—one that seamlessly integrated images of heaven and representations of the divine with depictions of the physical world.” —D. H. Cibelli, Choice

“In an ambitious new study of Raphael’s religious imagery, Christian Kleinbub explores the representation of divine apparitions in his altarpieces, frescoes, and tapestry cartoons. . . . The new readings of Raphael’s imagery that emerge are fascinating, instructive, and often inspiring. Indeed, Kleinbub’s interpretation of the St. Cecilia Altarpiece is a tour-de-force. . . . Kleinbub analyzes a sequence of Raphael’s paintings in a fresh and penetrating way, and thereby furthers our understanding of the artist who was the most lauded of all in the West from the year of his death in 1520 until the revolution of abstraction in the early twentieth century.” —Cathleen Hoeniger, Renaissance Quarterly