Transfiguration

Raphael: Transfiguration (1516-1520)

"One of the great things about Hegel is that he did actually look at a lot of art. He frequented all the museums and he was always going around to all the private collections. He also had access to a lot of prints and reproductions. I mean he was a critic, an incredibly good critic. That’s the thing that amazes me about him. When you read Hegel on a painting it is overwhelming to see just how deeply he got into art, but Kant never gave me that feeling and Dewey didn’t either really and neither did Nietzsche. None of them had that first hand sense of reading a painting and seeing what holds it together and why it’s important to know about it. I later on got more out of Nietzsche but was never overwhelmed by him. I mean it wouldn’t have mattered whether he’d lived or not, as far as explaining a painting goes. But Hegel really did have a firm sense of what made a painting interesting and good. There’s a great painting by Raphael called Transfiguration. Christ is on top of a mountain with two of his disciples and there is a kid down below, a deeply disturbed looking boy, on a lower plane. People would always wonder what the two parts had to do with one another. Many people thought it was just a really bad painting, they thought that Raphael couldn’t handle it somehow, that he couldn’t get the two parts to work together. But Hegel said no, although Christ is showing himself to his disciples he is also with the disturbed boy. Hegel quotes from a prayer, which says: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them”. Christ is just showing himself to his disciples but the lower plane with the troubled boy is where he belongs and can be of help. Hegel worked it all out. He showed how the two parts connected and I thought that was so great and so thrilling. So I came to see Hegel as a really deep thinker on art." 

-Arthur C. Danto.

(Yes, The Transfiguration is something else than The Ascension, but it's worth reflecting on on Ascension Day).