Raphael's authorship in the 'Expulsion of Heliodorus.' - interpretation of court painter Raphael's mural

Michael Schwartz

The history of the essence of Western art corresponds to the change of the essence of truth. - Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art"(1)

Introduction: Toward a History of Artistic Intention

One of the intractable questions concerning the visual arts today is the relevance of the artist in determining the meaning or significance of his or her work. Debates continue about whether artistic intention matters. Some proclaim that the only information that can legitimately be brought to bear on interpreting a painting is what corresponds to the artist's fulfilled intentions. Others insist that reference to the maker's mental state is simply unnecessary for understanding an image.(2) It remains unclear not only to what degree we might escape the orbit of either/or thinking on the issue, but also why in the first place we have become so concerned with defending or decrying artistic intention.

This essay inaugurates a historical approach to the problem. It downplays contemporary epistemological issues in favor of concrete inquiry into the emergence of artistic intention in Western painting. It proposes that we investigate how historical viewing audiences have understood the production of images.

In principle there is no one way of understanding how images are produced. Yet some sense of origination always underlies one's engagement with an image. A change in this sense may alter not only the content but also, more profoundly, what the image is understood to be. Take the Mona Lisa. If we construe the painting as having originated via contractual agreement between Leonardo and a Florentine merchant to paint the latter's wife and then go on to discover preliminary drawings, we would see the Mona Lisa as a portrait. But if we conclude that there was no such model, that Leonardo painted an imaginary figure from his fantasia, that would bring about a categorial shift; the image would no longer be a portrait.(3) Or if we come to realize that the picture before us was produced in the twentieth century by a paint-emitting machine that duplicates the facture of paint layer by layer, then we would see the work as some kind of chilling simulation of a painting.

Changes in our sense of the production of an image are not, however, as willful as the above examples might suggest. There are deeply ingrained practices or habits of such ways of understanding, even if these may be plural or in flux at any given moment.(4) By taking account of the ways audiences have understood the production of images, we might get a clearer picture of what is at stake in seeking, ignoring, or rethinking "artistic intention." In order to initiate such a project, I shall be analyzing Raphael's Expulsion of Heliodorus as a particularly focused moment in the emergence of the painter as an artist who "intends" pictorial representation [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. My operative assumption is that with the advent of postmedieval pictorial practices, the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw considerable flux in understanding the production of paintings.(5) There was in fact such flexibility in grasping who was responsible (patron, artist, deity) and in what ways (as donor, maker, creator) that the pictures themselves often offer models of how to comprehend their own production. It is to such internal models that we shall be looking for guidance.

Why the Expulsion of Heliodorus? Because this mural occupies a prominent and pivotal place in the Renaissance emergence of painter as artist - as the human agent essentially responsible for the visualization of religious themes. The Heliodorus's array of self-referential models posits authorship as complex, divided between the patron and painter. The patron, Pope Julius II, authorizes his court painter Raphael to narrate sacred history, and the painter, in turn, shows us the Heliodorus tale. Moreover, the painter's act of showing transfigures the visual reality of what he shows. This transfiguration, I argue, indexes the workings of the artist's mind as the most immediate ground of the metaphysical truth of the narrative. The Expulsion of Heliodorus thus presents an early instance of the painter as a "creative" artist who has the "divine" capacity to represent ideal truth. This study delineates the precise contours of this artistic economy.

Personal Style

The Expulsion of Heliodorus is located in the Stanza d'Eliodoro on the third story of the Vatican palace [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. This room is part of a suite of apartments constructed in the quattrocento that, beginning no later than 1507, were remodeled and redecorated for private, ceremonial, and courtly functions.(6) Raphael began frescoing the Stanza d'Eliodoro in 1511; work continued after the death of Pope Julius II in 1513 and was completed in 1514 during the pontificate of Leo X.(7) One of the room's primary functions during the High Renaissance was as a papal audience chamber, although other rooms in the suite may have also served this purpose.(8) The early-sixteenth-century beholders of the frescoes would have been members of the papal court, along with a diplomatic corps of foreign ambassadors, a viewing audience undoubtedly among the most culturally elite and sophisticated in all of Europe.(9) We shall be concerned with how this courtly audience would have understood the Expulsion of Heliodorus as a visual narrative authored by Raphael - one where the terms of pictorial authorship are historically specific.

The primary literary pretext of the mural is 2 Macc. 3. King Seleucus of Asia, having learned of the great wealth in the treasury of the temple in Jerusalem, sent Heliodorus to remove this wealth. Even after learning from the high priest Onias that some of this money was destined for widows and orphans, Heliodorus announced that he would still follow his royal orders. On the day when he set out to take the riches, there was desperate prayer by the priests in the temple and by the people in the city. Their petition to the heavens was answered with the miraculous appearance of a horseman and two youths armed with whips, who fell upon Heliodorus and preserved the treasury.(10)

There are three basic groupings of figures in the Vatican mural. At the altar of the Sancta Sanctorum, Onias prays along with the other priests for Heliodorus's thwarting. At right, a moment later in time, the three divine avengers prohibit Heliodorus from stealing the monies. And at left, a mixture of historical and contemporary characters witness the historical action [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. These spectators include the widows and orphans, beneficiaries of the temple treasury, and a papal retinue, with Pope Julius II borne on the sedia gestatoria.(11)

The historical and contemporary figures in the group at left differ from one another in at least three ways. First, the clothing of the papal retinue is accurately of the period, that of the women and children less so.(12) Second, the contemporaries are relatively inactive and stationary, in contrast to the far more animated historical characters. Third, the papal group conveys a greater sense of immediacy than do the women and children.(13) This last distinction is generated in part through differences in modeling. The colors used for the historical spectators are paler, with modeling accomplished through broad areas of white highlights, the local garment colors in their most saturated state serving in many instances as shadow. In contradistinction, the contemporary figures have less bold areas of highlighting, darker shadows, a wider range of value contrasts, and hence deeper relief.(14) Yet despite different modes of modeling, the arrangement of lights and darks as well as the direction of cast shadows indicate that both groups share a common source of illumination.(15)

We need to discern the significance of the modeling modes. According to Leonardo's discussions on perspective, nearer objects are in general more detailed and distinctive than distant ones, often with stronger light-dark contrasts and hence bolder relief, whereas distant objects tend to be less plastic, bluer, and paler.(16) The respective modeling of the two groups of figures seems to correlate with these perspectival norms: the contemporary figures are darker in hue and fuller in relief, whereas the historical figures are somewhat less plastic, their paler and bluer coloration having associations with the sky view over the altar. I therefore would suggest that in the Heliodorus the modeling modes of the figures express a perspectival dimension such that the contemporaries are "closer" to us and the historical characters are "farther away." Spatial perspective becomes equated with temporal "distance." Although located next to each other at the same juncture in depth, the historical and contemporary groups are to be seen as not present to one another in time.(17)

Leonardo explained that the atmosphere intervening between eye and object helped cause the "distant" look of faraway objects(18) - and, indeed, the two classes of figures in the Heliodorus have their own "air" about them. The pictorial "airs" of the respective groups would have had a certain semantic resonance for the Vatican audience. In Italian Renaissance vocabularies of painting and poetics, aria was associated with maniera.(19) The two modeling modes in the Heliodorus would have been seen as differences in maniera. Some in the courtly audience were even in the practice of perusing drawings of a subject matter rendered in piu maniere (in several modes or styles); they would have been especially sensitive to this juxtaposition.(20)

It must be kept in mind that by the early sixteenth century maniera could take on some of the resonance of what today we speak of as personal style.(21) Style, however, is a slippery notion. Perhaps in its clearest usage the term signifies the array of features of an artifact that indexes some particular origin - whether that origin be geographical, national, historical, biographical, authorial, and so on. What counts as stylistic thus varies for a given artifact depending on the scope and direction of our questioning about origins.(22) Maniera, so understood as individual or personal style, indicates the human maker of a Renaissance painting or sculpture. In the Heliodorus, however, there is no single maniera, and hence no unequivocal personal style, but instead a juxtaposition of maniere. What we shall come to see is that this style contrast functions to index the painter Raphael as authorial "creator" of sacred history.(23)

Patron and Painter

The papal retinue is located at the far left of the image field. With the two foremost figures stationary, the entire group would seem to be at a complete standstill. Yet the back litter bearer steps rightward, his feet just visible behind those of his counterpart (note that the white clothing of his leg and foot blend into the off white of the pavement). With neck slightly bent, his entire body apparently enacts this rightward movement.

The other contemporaries also direct attention toward the historical action: the pope and the standing figure at far left both face rightward, and the foremost litter bearer, in his open stance and pose, also leads one toward the historical events. Yet this latter figure, for all his frontality and immediacy, does not quite look out to meet our eyes; he instead looks slightly to the left. Only the back litter bearer clearly and directly returns our gaze.

It would seem, then, that although he is the most inconspicuous of all the members of the papal retinue, the back litter bearer is of some special importance. The figure of Pope Julius indicates as much. Julius's right arm is pulled in toward his body, its hand grasping the end of the chair back. His left arm, however, is extended outward so that its hand is directly above the back litter bearer's head. With index finger extended slightly more than the others, which are half uncurled, Julius points straight down and unmistakably at the head of this figure. The pope thus singles out the back litter bearer from those among his retinue.

Designated by the pope himself, the back litter bearer looks out to the viewer and steps toward the historical action. He also carries on his shoulder a pole supporting the papal sedia, the end of which protrudes out beyond the rightmost contour of the papal entourage. With his hand holding this pole, he not only steps rightward but also "points" toward the historical scene. In a remarkably subtle and unobtrusive manner, he performs the same combination of acts as does the figure of Saint John the Baptist who in so many altarpieces boldly looks out and designates some feature of the image world.(24)

The face of the back litter bearer is seen in three-quarter presentation; he gazes out from over his right shoulder. This aspect is often associated with self-portraits, since in using a mirror to see one's features the painter or draughtsperson is restricted to a full-face or three-quarter view.(25) Although in reverse, the face of this figure is not so different in angle from the self-portrait of Raphael in the School of Athens [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. Given this figure's special importance, function in the painting, and facial aspect, we may identify the back litter bearer as Raphael.(26) The new growth of facial hair would even seem to anticipate the full-grown beard of the painter as depicted in the later Louvre double portrait [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED].

The Expulsion of Heliodorus thus contains portraits of both patron and painter, Pope Julius II and Raphael. The two interact. Raphael is in service to his lord, physically bearing the papal sedia, while Julius singles out his painter, who in turn addresses the courtly audience and points toward the historical action.

Portraits of patron and painter appear together in earlier central Italian paintings, with the relationship between the two variously laid out.(27) In Fra Filippo Lippi's altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin from the 1440s, originally for S. Ambrogio at Florence and now in the Uffizi, the donor Francesco Maringhi kneels in prayer at far right, under the pointing gesture of the Baptist, while in symmetrical counterposition at left the painter-monk Lippi, with hand supporting chin, looks out to us [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED].(28) Although the painter is on the right side of God the Father crowning the Virgin, he is in a more shadowy region than is the patron. Moreover, the donor receives a heavenly message from an angel bearing a banderole with words labeling Maringhi as the chief human agent responsible for this most perfect work in honor of God.(29) Whereas the painter looks out to make eye contact with the earthly audience, the praying donor appears to be in pious contemplation of higher beings.(30)

Some three decades later in date, Botticelli's small altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, today in the Uffizi, also seems to portray both patron and painter [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED].(31) They are the only figures on the right side who look out. The patron, Guasparre dal Lama, stands among members of the Magi retinue, which consists of several portraits of contemporary Florentines. He holds his garment in such a manner that he surreptitiously points to himself as if saying to the viewer: "me." The painter Botticelli, whose outward glance echoes that of his patron, stands in the right foreground outside the ring of the retinue. This altarpiece registers a notable shift in spirit from that of the Maringhi Coronation. The patron here, like the painter, looks out to encounter the contemporary audience. Instead of a pious gesture of heaven-directed prayer, he signals a modest self-designation of his own importance. The painter for his part stands not too far away from the Magi group, indicating that he is a sort of outside associate of the powerful and wealthy Florentines portrayed there. Lower in the image field than the patron and not actually part of the retinue, the painter is closer to the viewing audience.

The action in the Heliodorus, with the patron singling out the painter, who addresses the viewer and points toward the historical action, exhibits yet another complex of patron-painter self-presentation. In On Dialectical Invention, first published in 1515, Rodolphus Agricola defined the patron and painter as efficient causes of a painting but the patron alone as the final cause.(32) Although this text confirms that patron and painter could be understood by a courtly audience as the agents responsible for the coming-into-being of a painting, it is nevertheless too blunt for interpreting the patron-painter structure in the Heliodorus.

More to the point, the patron-painter complex in the Heliodorus, unlike the others we have surveyed, specifies that the human agents have a direct relationship with the religious narrative. For the patron designates the painter, who in turn shows the viewer the biblical tale. The patron-painter relationship here is a model for the fabrication of pictorial history - and, as such, self-referential for the Expulsion of Heliodorus itself. Moreover, since patron and painter are figured as responsible for the showing forth of the story of Heliodorus's defeat, the mode of fabrication is along the lines of authorship.

Authorship of the Image

By the locution "authorship of the image," I wish to evoke the Horatian trope of ut picture poesis, which emblematizes the dynamic interchange between pictorial and literary practices in elite Renaissance culture.(33) In the Parnassus in the Stanza della Segnatura, just next door to the Heliodorus, can perhaps be seen the face of Raphael among the epic poets [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 8 OMITTED]. Crowned with laurel, he follows Virgil's directing of Dante toward the poetic inspiration bodied forth in Apollo and the Muses. Here, the painter of the papal library has fashioned himself as noble poet.(34) Later in the century, Giorgio Vasari praised Raphael's invenzione as so excellent that the painter's histories were "just like writing" (simili alli scritti).(35) By speaking of the authorship of the Heliodorus, then, I hope to do justice to the mural's sixteenth-century culture.

Authorship is not straightforward and simple. Throughout the course of its historical inflections, authorship has never simply entailed the name of the human maker of an artifact or text.(36) That Julius II singles out Raphael to indicate the story suggests that the portrayed identities of these two specific people - rather than and in opposition to anyone else on the scene - matters for comprehending the pictorial narrative.(37) Who the author is makes some kind of essential difference about the significance, meaning, sense, content, or form of the artifact or text. This was not the case with a twelfth- or early-thirteenth-century Italian crucifix, even though one might read there "Giovanni made me."(38) If the name of the painter were different or even absent it would have changed nothing fundamental in the ecclesiastical functioning of the image as crucifix. Paramount was the triumphant figure of Christ the Lord, not Giovanni, a mere painter-craftsman. Christ's speaking of the name of the painter is a testimony of his own eternal life. The painter's identity made no essential difference for the church audience's spiritual grasp of the image. The painter Giovanni was in no way an author.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, authorship was structured through the categories of auctoritas (authority) and auctor (author). To be deemed an author of a sacred tale, a writer had to have a definite authority. And this authority was ultimately external to both writer and text: its source was God, the ultimate Auctor. Only if the content of a theological text originated in some way from the Divine Word and also was given efficient verbal expression was its writer deemed auctor.(39) By the time of Dante, however, the structure of the authorship of theological texts began to change. Authority became multiplied and disseminated: no longer only God but also the writer and other human agents were directly and indirectly evoked as authorizing origins.(40) This more dynamic and variable relationship between authority and author continued with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and subsequent Renaissance writers.(41)

I want to propose that authorship in the Heliodorus also emerges in the interplay between auctoritas and auctor. The principal source of auctoritas on the scene is the pope, who as head of the Roman Church is supreme spiritual authority. He singles out his court painter Raphael, already in his service bearing the sedia gestatoria. The pope's gesture - perhaps evocative of blessing or protective gestures like that of the Virgin in Mantegna's Madonna of the Victory [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED](42) - is finally one of authorization, transferring the requisite religious and institutional authority to the painter who can now legitimately author the story of Heliodorus.(43) This transfer of authority, this act of authorization sanctions the painter to address publicly the Vatican audience in order to show it the biblical tale. To begin explicating more carefully what it means for Raphael to be auctor of sacred history, we shall consider his compounded action of looking out to us and designating the historical events.

First of all, the act of looking out and the act of designating are distinct and separate ones as they appear in Renaissance pictures. When a figure looks out to the viewer, a figurative face-to-face encounter is initiated that opens up a variety of possible interpersonal identities.(44) On the other hand, when a figure points out something, whether the object or event is within the image or not, this commands a response of directed looking.(45) Designation, however, need not explicitly show something to a particular person, since it can be directed to oneself - comparable to monologue, where one is both speaker and listener - or to a more generalized collective.

When the act of looking out with focused gaze is conjoined to a gesture of showing, the designator assumes the status of "I" who addresses the viewer as "you." Moreover, since the designator calls on the viewer to see certain objects or events, the interaction is a kind of dialogue about the visual: what we might call a visual communication. This is the case in the Heliodorus, where Raphael confronts and addresses the viewer in pointing out the historical action.

The character in Italian Renaissance painting who most essentially embodies these two acts is Saint John the Baptist [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED].(46) He addresses the viewer and points out Christ while implicitly saying the words, "Behold the lamb of God," or he holds a banderole that states those words. Because the message of this gesture is prophetic, the designator must possess sufficient holy status to assert divine foreknowledge of the events.(47)

During the Middle Ages, in scenes of religious subject matter it had been customary for a sacred figure, not uncommonly an angel, to be the designator of divinity. By the fourteenth and especially the fifteenth century, saints like John the Baptist increasingly assumed this role in Italian painting. During the fifteenth, more profane figures also began to perform in this capacity. Fra Filippo Lippi's Prato Cathedral mural scene of Saint Stephen's Disputation in the Synagogue from the 1450s displays hints of a new class of designator of religious subject matter [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 11 OMITTED]. Two figures are separated from the religious figures by a parapet. One looks out at us, his face in three-quarter presentation with hand on his chin, recalling the self-portrait of Fra Filippo Lippi in the Coronation. Another figure in lost profile, also in contemporary garb, reaches over the parapet and, directly beneath the outward gaze of the painter Lippi, points into the religious scene.(48)

It was during the last quarter of the quattrocento that contemporary figures - but not yet painters - started to appear in pictures not merely as witnesses but as unequivocal designators of sacred events.(49) In the Sistine Chapel mural cycle of the early 1480s such contemporary figures unmistakably point out sacred incidences and personages. For example, in Perugino's Circumcision of the Son of Moses, the contemporary man in red cap and green cloak (second from left) stares out at us and with his fight hand, half hidden under his sleeve, gestures toward the historical event [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 12 OMITTED]. Socially elite contemporaries not only mingle with the historical characters, they also assume a role once befitting the likes of angels and saints.(50)

The trend of including elite contemporary designators in religious paintings continued into the sixteenth century, as with the Baptism of Constantine in the Sala di Costantino from the early 1520s [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED]. Yet here the contemporary at left who looks out to the viewer apparently points to another portrait face.(51) Such designators appear in altarpieces as well. Although the kneeling patron (Canon Ferry Carondelet) in Fra Bartolomeo's Besancon Altarpiece from about 1511 does not gaze out with decided focus to the viewer, he points in the general direction of the cloud-borne Madonna and Child.(52)

On the whole, patrons and elite contemporaries were portrayed in Italian paintings as explicit designators of the religious subject matter some two decades before the painters themselves made such an appearance.(53) In the Prato Saint Stephen, the painter does not himself point but is linked to an anonymous contemporary who does. A stronger identification of the painter with the act of designation is in Domenico Ghirlandaio's altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi for the Spedale degli Innocenti from 1488 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 14 OMITTED].(54) The Baptist, kneeling in the left foreground, looks out and points to a cup, perhaps one of the Magi gifts. Directly above the saint is a figure who looks out with the same facial aspect as the Baptist. This is the painter, Ghirlandaio, who in being so paralleled with the Baptist is implicated in the role of a subdesignator or designator-by-association.(55)

Perhaps the first manifest act in central Italian painting of the painter indicating the way into a religious scene is in the Orvieto Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist from about 1500 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED]. Here stand side by side at far left the two painters Luca Signorelli and Fra Angelico, their respective maniere distinguishable in the vault above. These two portrait figures virtually merge together into a single mass, with Signorelli looking out to the viewer and Angelico pointing rightward with left hand to the central historical action. As painters of the cycle, they together engage in visual communication with the viewer.(56)

In Saint Benedict Mends the Broken Cribble, a scene from the mural cycle of the saint's life in the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore from the first decade of the sixteenth century, the acts of looking and designating are combined in the figure of the painter, Il Sodoma [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 16 OMITTED].(57) The painter stands at center. At left is the saint's miraculous mending of the broken cribble (a flour sieve). At right spectators react to the miraculous repair. A man in this group points toward the scene at left. Yet his gesture of showing is itself designated by Sodoma. The painter thereby forms a "liaison between the spectators of the miracle and the spectator before the fresco,"(58) although Sodoma does not himself direct us to the miracle.

In the Expulsion of Heliodorus, the figure of Raphael not only combines in his own person the separable acts of looking out and pointing but also leads us to the religious events. The concentration in the figure of Raphael of all of these elements was, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented in central Italian painting. The painter thus assumes a role once reserved for saints, attesting to Raphael's status as the painter-auctor of the sacred history of Heliodorus's defeat in the temple.

Spectatorship

In the Expulsion of Heliodorus, Raphael engages the viewer by indicating the historical action. But is he in any literal sense pointing? And, if so, to what precisely does he point?

The act of pointing occurs just at the division between the two maniere. Because the historical figures have their own "air" about them, their "distance" from the figure of Raphael is equivocal. Although spatially right next to him, they are also temporally "far away." The use of the pole rather than the index finger to point renders the gesture of showing nonliteral and gives it a certain openness. Raphael's designation thus has a flexible scope, indicating both those figures most immediate to the pole and also the entire spectrum of historical figures who are temporally "distant."

The painter's act of pointing is aligned with the row of heads of three kneeling women (some of the widows for whom the treasury money was intended). These figures are among the most prominent historical spectators of the events of the fall of Heliodorus. The end of the painter's pole is next to the head of the woman whose face is turned inward and up. The position of her head repeats a beholder's pose in looking up to the fresco. This figure can be said, then, to thematize a bodily feature of beholding so as to perform within the picture itself the role of viewing. The women-spectators offer a model for the viewing of the historical action.

In On Painting Alberti writes:

In an istoria I like to see someone who admonishes and points out to us [insegni a noi] what is happening there; or beckons with his hand to see [chiami con la mano a vedere]; or menances with an angry face and with flashing eyes, so that no one should come near; or shows some danger or marvellous thing there; or invites us to weep or to laugh with them [te inviti a piagnere con loro insieme o a ridere].(59)

Such devices appear in Masaccio's Trinity [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 17 OMITTED]. The Virgin looks out - at least with her right eye, her left perhaps signaling an inner thought(60) - and gestures toward the Body of Christ. But the force of this gesture of designation continues through the Body, along the horizontals of the furniture on which the Father stands, and finds its terminus in the upturned face of Saint John the Evangelist, who, with clasped hands, contemplates the mystery of the Trinity. Not only does the Virgin address the viewer and designate the Crucified Christ, she also calls attention to the Evangelist, who himself gazes on the object to which she points. Saint John is here singled out as exemplum of the viewer's own affective comportment toward the Body and its mystery. The viewer as the addressee of the Virgin's designation finds a saintly model of the appropriate spiritual stance toward the Body.(61) In imitating the Evangelist, a beholder would become saintly. This enables one to take part in a collective affective response.(62) As Alberti - recalling Horace - puts it, "we weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, grieve with the grieving."(63) In Masaccio's Trinity, then, the gesture of designation is two-sided: (1) a pointing to the central religious motif of the Body; and (2) a calling attention to a model of the exemplary response toward this object.

The integration of the process of visual communication between sacred person and viewer into a saintly model of affective comportment underwent continual reworking in Italian painting during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in altarpieces. Although a narrative mural, the Expulsion of Heliodorus takes up this structure. But whereas the Virgin's twofold designation points out a particular object and a single figure in the Trinity, in the Heliodorus the painter points out the whole historical milieu and a series of kneeling-spectating women who offer a model of successive stages of spectatorship.

Starting from the left, the first woman in the series looks upward and into depth. She sees the two boys on the pier who sneak a glimpse of Onias and the other holy leaders of the temple praying at the altar. That such a view from above is required suggests that we are to imagine the Sancta Sanctorum as closed off from the foreground stage. Since only older men are within the Sancta Sanctorum, to the exclusion of women and boys, it is perhaps by necessity that the widow has only mediated and irregular access to this religious event.(64) Her "seeing" the activity of Onias's petitioning of the heavens is only through the vision of the two boys.

The next woman in the series looks heavenward with hands in prayer. This woman seems to have knowledge of the activities at the altar, since she, too, joins in the supplication (as specified in 2 Macc. 3:18-21) and waits in hope for a sign of divine aid. Whereas the first spectating woman has a mediated view of shrouded earthly affairs, the second is engaged in a heavenward "looking" that carries her, like the high priest, beyond the bounds of corporeal vision.

The third and final woman in the series is the most prominent. Of the three, she is the largest and the closest to us, brightly lit, and fully in view. Her twisting figure is remarkably complex. Her left leg projects forward, angling more leftward than the right, while her arms swing around her torso. This figure spirals around her own spinal axis. The tilt of her hips and shoulders directs this spiral upward, so that for the most part she adopts a serpentine pose. Yet a countermovement opposed to her body's spiraling begins with her head turning rightward, travels downward through her neck, and affects her shoulders. The apparent abruptness of this countermovement gives rise to the multidirected flying garment across her back. Her figure thus spirals upward only for this ascension to be pulled back down to earth through her turning to witness the miraculous appearance of the divine agents. The serpentine ascent is forestalled.

Women in serpentine poses are associated with ecstatic or divine visions in a number of other paintings by Raphael.(65) The central figure in the Saint Catherine in London and the Galatea in the Farnesina are, respectively, religious and mythological examples [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 18, 19 OMITTED].(66) In the Chigi Chapel in S. Maria della Pace, the Sibyl writing is infused with divine knowledge, as indicated by the upward pointing gesture of the attendant angel located directly above her head [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 20 OMITTED]. The ascending spirals of all three of these figures take them beyond themselves in a heavenward direction expressive of the elevated states of their souls. These women are in spiritual contact with the divine.(67)

In each case the divine object of contemplation is not pictured, although in the Galatea it is playfully hinted at and emblematized by the Eros in the upper left corner. The serpentine pose itself expresses awareness of the divine, indicating the soul's elevation. One should note that the frontally posed central saint in the Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, although "heating" the divine music of the angels, looks upward but does not fully assume a serpentine pose [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 21 OMITTED].(68) In this altarpiece an invisible cosmic sphere beyond the boundary of sky and cloud is rendered visible. The space and light of this celestial sphere are "translated" into the norms of representational painting: the angels are partially foreshortened, set within and against a golden sphere of light, and modeled in chiaroscuro with the light source coming from the same direction as that illuminating the saints below. The angels perform their heavenly music in this naturalized extraterrestrial zone? As the divine object of Saint Cecilia's inner sense, this music is depicted - or, to be more precise, the heavenly agents of its making are represented - along with a muted spiraling of the saint's body. It would seem that in the case of female visions in Raphael's paintings (at least those in which the woman is a chief protagonist) either the heavenly object or the ecstatic state of the soul receives pictorial emphasis, but not both.(70)

What about the serpentine pose of the woman in the Heliodorus? We must remember that unlike these other female figures she embodies the final moment in a series of spectatorial acts. Although she looks rightward, her arms and hands extend leftward. In reaching back they metaphorically "embrace" the two other women. Her left hand is juxtaposed with the leg of the first, while her right points toward the upturned face of the second (with this latter gesture also "hugging" this figure's contours). Culminating the series, the serpentine woman embodies a synthesis of the two prior moments of spectatorship. Her lower body is angled principally toward the altar area. Like the first woman, she does not directly see the secret religious activity but her body "knows" it. Also, her body spirals upward while her right hand points up to the upturned face of the second widow, who prays toward the heavens. The serpentine woman is also cognizant of divine matters.

The picturing of successive stages of spectatorship or cognition was not uncommon in Renaissance pictures. In Piero della Francesca's Resurrection of Christ from the third quarter of the quattrocento, the four foreground figures can be read left to right as sequential stages in the comprehension of the Body [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 22 OMITTED]. In Raphael's own Transfiguration, the three apostles on the mount likewise embody a leftward unfolding of the recognition of the transfigured Christ [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 23 OMITTED].(71) What differs in the Heliodorus, however, is that the final stage in the series is not a mere completion or terminus of a linear process but refers back to and subsumes both prior moments into itself in order to move forward toward dialectical resolution. Moreover, the first woman-spectator in the series has two orphan children, one of whom looks heaven-ward while the other steps and looks rightward. These children seem to adumbrate the subsequent two moments in the series. All three moments of spectatorship are contained in the first.(72)

Embodying the final moment in the series of spectatorial acts, the twisting figure witnesses the falling of Heliodorus. She incorporates both prior stages of the unfolding spectatorship into her own, so that her mode of vision can be defined as a synthesis of inner and outer seeing. Her perception of the sudden appearance of the avengers is informed by knowing insight into their divine origin. Through her corporeal eyes she can see their miraculous nature. Her spiraling upward expresses her "elevated" mode of perception - not, however, by continuing toward a celestial being, but instead by abruptly terminating its ascent at the level of her head as she suddenly and surprisingly finds herself witness to the three avengers. She is able to see the heavenly essence of these earthbound agents.(73)

Theater

The setting for the spectators at right and the historical action at left is distinct from that of the temple proper. The multicolored, patterned floor of the foreground abuts the raised grayish floor of the temple, so that the temple serves as a screen for the figural activities in the foreground. Although the temple has both innovative and archaeological features,(74) it thus functions much like a prospettiva theatrical backdrop, a contemporary rendition of the ancient scenae frons.(75) The boys clinging to the temple column provide a sure sign of the spectacle viewed: such figures constitute a motif to be found in frontispieces of printed editions of ancient Roman comedies, the earliest being the Terence issued in Venice in 1497.(76) Beginning in the mid-1480s classical Roman drama was revived in papal Rome.(77) The setting of the Heliodorus would have reminded the papal court of theater and their participation in its spectacle.

The most decisively expostulatory figures in the mural are a group of three women, presumably other widows. They stand in a row angled in depth behind the kneeling women. Two of them look toward Heliodorus's defeat and all, with differing gestures, designate this event. This group functions as the scene's dramatic chorus, which, as Aristotle put it, "should be regarded as one of the actors."(78) The woman furthest back is the only one in the chorus who neither points nor looks at the dramatic action. With fanlike extended left leg, this figure forms a planar foil for the others. Her face is strictly frontal and her body is in profile; she moves to the left. Along with her left arm stretching leftward, the small billowing of a head wrap suggests a quick leftward turn. The frontality of her face is so strict, the expression so fixed, that her countenance reads as a mask: with downturned lips, this figure may be taken as a personification of tragedy.(79) Bringing to a close her sisters' designation of the dramatic events, she signals the chorus's exiting from the stage.

The other two chorus women - so densely impacted, they offer a single trunk with two heads - gesture toward the miraculous falling of Heliodorus. They perform two aspects of the same fundamental gesture of designation. With right hand, one points with index finger, asserting the visual presence of the action. With left hand, the other gestures with open palm, insisting on a complementary tactile presence. Since touch requires immediate physical proximity, the left hand extends further, as if reaching toward the designated action. The pointing, however, is primary. This gesture is located at the terminus of an arm that is brightly lit and in full view, whereas the left arm is darkly clad and mostly obscured by this pointing arm, even as the open hand itself is well illuminated. The insistence on the tactility of the event is an extension or qualification of the primary assertion of its visuality.(80)

The face of the serpentine spectator is directly below the two-handed designation. Her viewing follows the chorus's lead. This is confirmed by her hands, the right pointing and the left palm open, in precise repetition of the chorus gestures. She not only sees the manifestation of heavenly agents on earth, she also grasps that these agents are corporeal beings able to impinge physically and with mighty force on the bodies of Heliodorus and his retinue.

What about the two men with text near the altar who seem to comprehend the ceremony scripturally? The open palm of the chorus gestures overlaps one of these men. The man who reads has his legs crossed in a casual manner, as if assured of the outcome of events. Is there a link between the man in red, arms folded, agitated hair, perhaps worried, and his companion who assures him, with book in hand, of Heliodorus's pending defeat - so that the overlapping chorus gesture "demonstrates" the truth of prophecy? If so, this would tie the Word of sacred text to the divine intervention of the corporeal avengers.

Whatever the case may be, there is no doubt that the corporeality of these agents does not compromise their intrinsic essence. For the chorus shows us the intervention of divinity. However, there is nothing to indicate that the women of the chorus, unlike their serpentine sister, have insight into the divinity of what they show. Their acts of designation are in fact only "extensions" of the painter's pointing, his pole virtually continuing into their rising arms. The chorus thus becomes a kind of surrogate within the historical milieu for the contemporary figure of Raphael.

Let us review some of the self-referential moments in the Heliodorus. At left Julius II singles out and authorizes his court painter Raphael to recount the biblical story of Heliodorus. Accordingly, the painter confronts the viewer and points both to the historical scene as a whole and to the series of three kneeling women, who in their succession serve as a model for a beholder's unfolding experience of the events. The culminating moment of spectatorship is embodied in the serpentine woman, whose perception of the earthly appearance of the heavenly agents is informed by spiritual insight. Her viewing of this event seems to follow the lead of the chorus. But in its role as designator the chorus is only an extension of Raphael.

The figure of Raphael points toward the historical action that in terms of spatial location and source of illumination is part of his own immediate environment. And yet his pointing marks the exact juncture of the two maniere. What he designates is differentiated from his own milieu as the more fictional realm of theater. It is as if through the act of pointing the painter has transformed the naturalism of the representation. The juxtaposition of maniere is not a simple mark or signature of the painter but a differential index of the manipulation of representational norms. Somehow a fictionalized reality has been produced by the painter's work.

Work of Art

What is the character of this work? The serpentine woman's glance toward the miraculous appearance of the divine avengers is motivated by the lead of the chorus. But the chorus's designation is essentially an extension of the painter's own. It is therefore Raphael who implicitly shows her the action. Since "showing" necessitates that the one who shows is already familiar with what is being shown - that there is a prior familiarity - the figure of the painter must already "know" the biblical event. This means that Raphael has previously comprehended the event in a manner similar to the way that she is shown it and comes to see it herself: that is, in a synthetic mode of inner and outer seeing. Prior to his act of designation, Raphael has negotiated two distinct cognitive pathways of "vision": one exterior and perceptual, the other interior and intellective. This mediation of inner and outer "seeing" is the key to grasping the essential character of the painter's work.

Here we take note that, in singling out and authorizing Raphael to recount the biblical tale, Pope Julius II points downward to the middle of the painter's head. In early-sixteenth-century painting this gesture had decided significance.

In the altar fresco of the Madonna with Saints in S. Onofrio, Rome, perhaps by Jacopo Ripanda, the medieval valuation of relative figure size reasserts itself among the adults [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 24 OMITTED]. The enthroned central Madonna is largest, the attendant saints are next in size, and the donor is smallest. The donor is located closest to the picture plane. His body is cropped by the lower boundary. Not precisely set on the floor, he neither stands nor kneels, and thereby lacks the gravity of the other figures. The dark value of his contour and his strict profiling separate him from the space of the holy figures; his volume even seems to project forward. In terms of scale, posture, and location, the donor's inclusion in the pictorial realm of sacred personae is rendered ambiguous.

This strategy of donor placement is comparable to that in Filippino Lippi's Vision of Saint Bernard in the Badia at Florence from around 1484 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 25 OMITTED]. Here, the donor, Francesco del Pugliese, in profile, gazes up to the Virgin's miraculous appearance to Saint Bernard. The figure of Pugliese is half-length, emphatically cropped by the lower boundary; his body implicitly continues downward into our sphere. This work, like the S. Onofrio fresco, effects a deconstruction of the donor's placement within the pictorial realm.(81)

Both altarpieces take up and transform elements from Masaccio's Trinity [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 17 OMITTED]. In the Masaccio, the kneeling contemporaries are projected on a ledge into the church space. They are literally able to see only what is in front of them. But through what Louis Marin termed a "planar effect within depth"(82) - the lateral association of elements that are separate in virtual depth - earthly spatial relations collapse. The donors "see" the sacredness of the Trinity with their inner eyes, bypassing the parameters of corporeal space.

The donor in the S. Onofrio altarpiece is also in prayerful meditation. His gaze is unfocused; his hands angle toward Christ. Not of the same level of reality as the Child, the donor "sees" Christ through his inner eye. Moreover, the activity around the donor's head clarifies the content of this "vision." The placement of saints' hands around a donor's head had a variety of theological and political significations in Renaissance pictures.(83) In the case of the S. Onofrio altar fresco, the saintly gestures indicate the donor's thought processes. The left hand of Saint Anthony passes down and behind the head of the donor. But in a planar effect within depth - that basic Renaissance strategy of collapsing earthly spatial relations - the saint's hand points "into" the donor's mind. The supernaturalness of this pointing is furthered by the different levels of figurative reality separating donor and saint. Perhaps in an act of petition to Mary and Christ, Saint Anthony calls attention to the holiness of the donor's thoughts; the donor himself has spiritually withdrawn into meditation. The saint's tau staff seems to pass "into" the man's head as well, its connection with the rosary beads further evidence of the devoutness of the donor's prayer.

The external indication of a donor's inner thoughts through the activity of a saint's hands was not unknown in quattrocento painting. For example, in Piero della Francesca's Montefeltro Altarpiece, Duke Federigo da Montefeltro kneels devoutly in prayer [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 26 OMITTED]. Through a planar effect within depth, his hands align with the reclining Child on Mary's lap. The duke's "vision" of the sleeping Christ is not perceptual, however, since he is located in a layer of space well in front of the Madonna and Child. As in Masaccio's Trinity, the donor "sees" the sacred figure with his inner eye.

Moreover, through another planar effect within depth, the hands of Saint Francis and Saint John the Evangelist indicate the content of the duke's inner thoughts. Francis displays a cross and reveals his stigmata; John holds a book. These saintly motifs form an arch that surrounds Federigo's head, halolike, and allude to how he comprehends the sleeping Child. Although not pointing "into" the mind, the objects encircling the donor's head suggest the content of his spiritual vision.(84)

The more specific motif of a hand pointing or passing "into" the mind of a figure was somewhat new in the opening decades of the sixteenth century. One example is in the School of Athens [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4, 27 OMITTED].

On the top level of the steps, at both the left and right lateral boundaries of the field, cropped slightly by the framing simulated arch, a male figure runs rightward. Both figures run with upper torsos inclined at the same slope. The one at left is seminude with head turned into lost profile; he is just entering the field, apparently summoned onto the scene by the man in contemporary dress toward whom he looks. The one at right is fully clad and turns his head outward and back over his right shoulder; located directly over the head of Raphael, he is leaving the scene.

The man just arriving is beautifully athletic and youthful. Like the statue of Apollo presiding over the left half of the arena, his nude form evokes classical antiquity. Carrying scroll and codex, he is a courier from the antique pasta type of Mercury - bringing the texts of ancient philosophy onto the scene. His cape swirls into a scroll, clarifying this allegorical role.(85) His counterpart at right holds no texts. Yet his left arm hangs down with bent wrist as if he could or should carry something. The positions of his left hand and wrist repeat those of Plato, who holds a copy of the Timaeus. These two figures wear salmon and violet garments, although worn in reverse of one another (Plato wears salmon on the outside, the running figure does so underneath). So why is the running figure, unlike Plato, not holding anything in his left hand?

The index finger of this empty hand is bent toward the thumb, as if prepared to hold something. But the other fingers extend downward and pass behind the head of Raphael. From our previous analyses we realize that metaphorically these fingers do more - that they "enter into" the head of the painter. The text we expect to find is absent from hand because it has passed downward "into" Raphael's mind. Looking out to us, standing under the providence of Minerva - deity of human wisdom - the young painter is wise in ancient learning, having assimilated texts like Plato's Timaeus. The self-presentation of the painter as verbally learned and intelligent complements the one in the Parnassus where Raphael has placed himself among the great epic poets.(86)

Returning next door to the Eliodoro, we see Pope Julius pointing to the middle of Raphael's head and metaphorically "at" the painter's mind. I wish to contextualize this motif further by turning to the famous letter on the idea ostensibly written by Raphael to Baldesar Castiglione. We now know, thanks to John Shearman's investigations, that the letter is a fiction written by Castiglione about 1522 as a memorial to his recently deceased friend.(87) The letter, however, is not only a literary portrait but also a belated response by Castiglione to Raphael's Roman art around the time of the Galatea (ca. 1512). By feigning Raphael's literary authorship, Castiglione attests to how he, as a courtly viewer of works like the Heliodorus, understood Raphael's sense of his own painting:

As for the Galatea, I should consider myself a great master if it had half the merits you mention in your letter. However, I perceive in your words the love you bear me; and I add that in order to paint a fair one, I should need to see several fair ones, with the proviso that Your Lordship will be with me to select the best. But as there is a shortage of good judges and of beautiful women, I am making use of some sort of idea which comes into my mind [io mi seruo di certa idea che mi uiene nella mente]. Whether this idea has any artistic excellence in itself, I do not know. But I do strive to attain it.(88)

The letter contrasts two potential avenues to artistic excellence. One, modeled after the ancient tale of Zeuxis, is an "empirical" or external approach that, with the help of the painter's connoisseur friend, may build up a beautiful figure from the judicious selection of parts. The other is an "idealist" or internal approach that makes use of a certa idea in the painter's mind. The latter path is Raphael's. But what is this idea? In his well-known reading of the letter, Erwin Panofsky makes a number of claims that will serve here as a counterpoint for our own exegesis.(89) First, Panofsky sees the certa idea as having no normative validity. This claim seems wrong since the idea may lead Raphael to artistic excellence - any qualifications about such achievement are for a literary effect of modesty. Second, Panofsky hypothesizes that, if asked, the author of the letter would have admitted that the idea originally had roots in sensory experience. But again this seems mistaken, since the antithetical rhythm of the letter's argument suggests a contrast between the two approaches. Third, Panofsky denies any "metaphysical origin" of the certa idea. Here we need to pay close attention to the phraseology.

The locution that an "idea comes into one's mind" is distinctive from the present-day expression that "one has an idea." During the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and into the seventeenth century, a fundamental shift in Western metaphysics was accompanied by a changing sense of the term idea: from "cosmic Ideas," as in Augustine's formulation that the divine Ideas are the thoughts of God, to "mental ideas" as possessions of a thinking subject.(90) What is striking about the phrase in the letter is that it calls on both these senses. That the certa idea comes into one's mind implies that it was not always there, that it was elsewhere, beyond the painter's being, and thus having something of a "metaphysical origin." Yet once in mind, the idea becomes a personal mental possession that can readily be used by the (particular) painter.(91)

In the letter, then, the certa idea would seem to be: (1) normative; (2) opposed to and independent of sense experience; (3) a mental possession that comes from outside the painter's mind; and (4) of metaphysical origin or significance. The notion of the idea in the letter conforms to the general lines of Renaissance Neoplatonism.(92) Of course, the passage is extremely brief and informal, lacking philosophical specificity, but the Neoplatonic tenor of the certa idea is clear enough. That the idea is passively received into the mind, for example, is comprehensible as an adumbration of the more proper philosophical separation between the ideas as innate in the soul and their receiving illumination from and hence activation by God.(93)

In light of the letter on the certa idea, the figure of the pope in the Heliodorus might be said to signal the character of the painter's mind in its ability to receive the idea or illumination from beyond itself. That such an idea comes into the painter's mind suggests a special receptivity - yet it tells us precious little about the character of the painter's work. In this regard we should recall that Raphael designates figures who, despite sharing with him a common illuminated spatial milieu, have a different "air" about them. It is as if in the act of pointing, Raphael transforms their mode of naturalism. And the reality sphere to which he points is theatrical, artificial, fictive. In the Heliodorus the painter's act of pointing promotes a fictionalized nature.

How is the painter responsible for this transformation in the mode of representation? Perhaps the pope is indicating that Raphael's mind (mente) is the locus of this transformative work. If so, the work cannot be in and of itself the passive reception of the idea. Instead, it must be taken as involving the fantasia, the faculty that recomposes the natural data of outer sense into new images.(94) By Raphael's day fantasia not only had entered into talk about painting - this was the case as early as with Cennino Cennini(95) - but it had also changed decisively in its soulful position, from a faculty of inner sense that mediated between the particulars of the outer senses and the universals of the intellect to a higher, more rational capacity, sometimes identified with the intellect itself. Products of the painter's fantasia achieved an intellective and rational status.

In the Expulsion of Heliodorus Raphael points to a fictive scene. The transformation from his own immediate sphere of visible nature to that of the dramatic players can be understood as due to the work of his fantasia. What he shows is a reworked, "fantastic" view, but one still within the naturalistic norms of Renaissance representation. But there is more. The transformed nature of the historical scene is not arbitrary. Its modeling mode suggests a "far view" placed close up. The more "distant" look of these figures, their broader highlights and hence greater brightness, as well as their bluish (and golden) tones, associates them with the view of the sky at the center of the image. They are "heavenly" figures made over into a mode of representable nature.(96) This is the influence of the metaphysical idea on the fantasia. Having passively received the idea into his mind, the painter takes mental possession of it and uses the idea to give rational order to his fantasia. This is the work that allows the painter to show us the synthesis of inner and outer vision. The skill to do so is special - remember that the pope singles Raphael out as auctor of the Heliodorus story - and it is a painter's art.(97) We can now speak with some precision of the Expulsion of Heliodorus as a work of art and assuredly of the painter Raphael as an artist.

There are no texts that spell out the specific artistic process of the Heliodorus, although there are close parallels. For example, Dante wrote about the alta fantasia as a poetic product that receives divine illumination from God.(98) But my point is that the Heliodorus itself exhibits this process, that the synthesis of inner and outer vision as necessarily performed by the artist is proper to its mode of pictorial representation. Leo Steinberg cautions, "There are moments, even in a wordy culture such as ours, when images start from no performed program to become primary texts. Treated as illustration of what is already scripted, they withhold their secrets."(99) Steinberg's suggestion is not only wise on matters of pictorial content, but even more so as regards the historical ontology of images.

Thus, in the Heliodorus, the figure of Pope Julius indicates the mental workings of art. Having received the idea (or at least some kind of divine illumination) into his mind, Raphael goes about using this universal to infuse the product of his fantasia with intellective order. This is the synthesis of inner and outer vision that is a precondition for the artist showing others the divinity incarnate in physical beings.

Renaissance Painting and Metaphysical Truth

In On Painting Leon Battista Alberti states unequivocally, "The painter is concerned solely with representing [fingere] what can be seen." In the Latin version of the treatise he even goes so far as to say that the painter can imitate only what "can be seen in light."(100) According to Alberti, Renaissance representation has limits to what it can legitimately depict: entities that are visible and immanent rather than those that are invisible and transcendent. God, as the ultimate metaphysical source and ground of all things, exceeds this limit. His invisible Ideas would seem to be unrepresentable. Yet Raphael's picturing of the story of Heliodorus overcomes such Albertian limits. Through the artist's cognitive negotiation of the metaphysical idea with the sensory manifold, transcendent spirit is rendered immanent within representation itself.

There is a self-referential model that further reinforces the Heliodorus's status as a "heavenly" scene. At its center, a series of concentric arches echo the outer framework. These arches centripetally telescope into depth so as to stress the inner core of the composition, which reveals a brightly lit opening to the sky.(101) The lunette shape of this internal field is very similar to that of the Heliodorus. Moreover, the proportions among this sky view's height, width, and lateral pilasters are identical to those of the illusionistic arch that frames the Heliodorus. The sky view is an analogue of the painting as a whole, an "image" within the image.(102) But within the horizon of the narrative action, this interior field is not literally a picture but an architectural aperture, bringing to mind Alberti's likening of the perspectival field to a view through a window.(103) The lunette field at the core of the painting likens the arch-framed Heliodorus scene to a windowlike view of the sky.

In addition, the two transverse arches farthest in depth merge into one another so as to form a single arch around the sky opening. This single arch is analogous to the massive simulated arch framing the entire scene (the underside of both is visible). The curtain hanging behind the altar parallels the room's actual basamento. The self-referential model extends to thematize the mural's physical location above the dado.

Kneeling before this curtain, the high priest looks upward praying to the heavens. In a planar effect within a depth, however, he is most immediately looking "at" the sky. His inner contemplation of the heavens is thereby equated with a spiritual "seeing" of the internal field. This lends the sky view a sense of the "heavenly."(104) To be sure, it is not the priest himself who is an analogue of a beholder, since a beholder would normally confront the image. The priest, in profile, displays himself in a narrative mode.(105) It is therefore the priest's act, not his personhood or social status - what he does rather than who he is - that is set into the model. A beholder's act of looking up at the Heliodorus is thereby likened to a spiritual vision. The self-referential model at the core of the picture not only posits the objective scene as "heavenly" but further characterizes the subjective act of viewing as a spiritual mode of seeing.

Raphael is the agent responsible for supplying a beholder with this "heavenly" view. The objective world of the picture is ordered in the first instance through a subjective point of view: having been reformed by the fantasia, visible nature is here the product of the artist's mind. Moreover, because it is influenced by the idea from above, the representation transcends the particularities of the sensible and acquires universal intelligibility. The artist's subjectivity is therefore the initial ordering principle of the resultant image - this is in part the force of the picture's point of view.(106) But in that the fantasia itself depends on mental contact with the divine idea, the representation finds its higher ground in the heavens above. Through the workings of his mind, the artist has raised the sensible to a coefficient of ideal intelligibility. The visible world of representation is incarnate with divine spirit, Raphael having conducted a kind of transubstantiation of the sensory.(107)

Metaphysical truth involves the adequation, identification, or correspondence between the intelligible and the sensible, idea and thing, concept and object.(108) In the Heliodorus such truth has a complex path: the pictorial representation corresponds to the artist's fantasia; the fantasia, through its contact with the heavenly idea, is adequate to this idea. Raphael shows us the Heliodorus story in its metaphysical truth. Moreover, since the workings of the artist's mind grounds the truth of pictorial narrative, Raphael "intends" what we see. Raphael's authorship in the Expulsion of Heliodorus marks an inaugural moment in the history of what today we call artistic intention.

This article draws on material from my dissertation, "Raphael's Art of Representation: Political Narrative and the Grounds of Truth in the Stanza d'Eliodoro." My thanks again to Richard Brilliant and David Rosand for guiding that project as well as to David Freedberg, Charles Larmore, and James Mirollo for useful suggestions. With regard to the present essay, I am indebted to Nancy Troy for excellent editorial counsel, to an unnamed Art Bulletin referee for corrections of detail, and especially to John Shearman, who waived his anonymity as reader, entered into correspondence, and generously shared unpublished research.

1. M. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter, New York, 1971, 81; idem, "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," in Holzwege, Frankfurt, 1950, 67, translation modified.

2. The first position is that of Richard Wollheim; the second that of Norman Bryson. See R. Wollheim, "What the Spectator Sees," and N. Bryson, "Semiology and Visual Interpretation," in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. N. Bryson, M. A. Holly, and K. Moxey, New York, 1991, 101-50 and 61-73.

3. N. Goodman, Languages of Art, 2d ed., Indianapolis, 1976, 21ff.

4. Such practices entail knowing how to encounter an image. So, for example, in attending to a medieval image understood as an "artistic creation,"one looks for formal nuances and niceties of paint application; in engaging the same image as "made without human hands," one seeks lustrous effects as signs of divinity. The general philosophical point here is Heideggerian - that understanding (Verstehen) is the know-how embodied in social practices. In this view, know-how is not reducible to a cognitive stock, web of beliefs, mentalistic interpretation, representation, categorical lens, or theory of art. See M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York, 1962. And for an important discussion, see H. L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division I, Cambridge, Mass., 1991.

5. This involved a shift in practices of beholding from the appreciation of precious materials to the judging of painterly skill. See Baxandall, 1-27.

6. On the restructuring of the Vatican palace, see Shearman, 1971. See also C. L. Frommel, "Il Palazzo vaticano sotto Giulio II e Leone X: Strutture e funzioni," in Raffaello in Vaticano, ed. G. Muratore, Milan, 1984, 118-36.

7. On the dating of the cycle and the controversy about the precise sequence of the design and execution of the decoration, see S. Ferino-Pagden, "Raphael's Heliodorus Vault and Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling: An Old Controversy and a New Drawing," Burlington Magazine, CXXXII, March 1990, 201-3.

8. On the Stanza d'Eliodoro as audience chamber, see Shearman, 1971, 383; and idem, 1986, 76. For a partial critique of Shearman's views, see J. W. Jacoby, Den Papsten zu Diensten: Raffaels Herrscherzyklus in der Stanza dell'Incendio im Vatikanischen Palast, Hildesheim, 1987, 66-67.

9. On the papal court, see P. Partner, Renaissance Rome. 1500-1559: A Portrait of a Society, Berkeley, Calif., 1976, 113-32. See also J. F. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation, Baltimore, 1983, 4ff. More generally, see M. Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, Cambridge, 1993.

10. On the canonical status of 2 Macc. in the early 16th century, and on the exegetical tradition of the Heliodorus tale (especially in relation to the sin of Avarice), see Shearman, 1986, 80-82.

11. The contemporary papal retinue with Julius on the sedia gestatoria is located in the lower left corner of the image field just above a doorway. In the same corner, on the adjacent wall, Saint Peter in the Liberation is about to be led by an angel down the steps and metaphorically into the room [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. I wonder whether there was any association between this imagery and actual ceremonial entrances into the stanza. Cf., however, the information in Shearman, 1971, 373, 386.

12. For a brief discussion of the contemporary clothing of the papal retinue, see Fischel, 102. See also Dussler, 79.

13. For the latter two points, I draw on S.J. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence, I, New York, 1971, 153ff. See also K. Oberhuber, Raffaello, trans. M. Magrini, Milan, 1982, 78. Characterizations along these lines were made earlier by Fischel, 102.

14. See the analyses of the two modes of modeling in the Mass at Bolsena by L. Caron, "Choices Concerning Modes of Modeling During the High Renaissance and After," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, XL, no. 4, 1985, 484. See also Hall, 132. The lunette of Cosimo Tura's Roverella Altarpiece offers an earlier instance of such dual modeling. Among the outer garments of the attendant saints. only John the Baptist's brilliant red garb lacks white highlights (with black used sparingly to model down). He is the only one of the historical characters to make direct eye contact with the viewer.

15. In his analysis of postmedieval image light - what he terms Beleuchtungslicht - Wolfgang Schone developed the notion of "'Indifferentes' Leuchlicht": that there is a quantity of brightness in the image world that exceeds what could be provided by the source(s) of light. I would add that in a picture like the Heliodorus there are differing qualities of illumination in the image world that likewise cannot be explained by reference to the source light. See W. Schone, Uber das Licht in der Malerei, 4th ed., Berlin, 1977, 112ff. Cf. the critical discussions of Schone's notion of "'Indifferentes' Leuchlicht" in the important reviews of his book by E. Strauss, Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, XIX, no. 1, 1956, 93; and by H. Sedlmayr, Hefte des Kunsthistorischen Seminars der Universitat Munchen, v, 1959, 46-47.

16. For some of Leonardo's views on these matters, see The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. and trans. J.P. Richter, I, New York, 1970, 127ff., 157ff.

17. On spatial perspective as equivalent to temporal "distance," see E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York, 1972, 108, 112-13. See also N. Struever, History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism, Princeton, 1970, 66-67, and D. Lowenthai, The Past Is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, 1985, 77-80.

18. See Richter (as in n. 16), 160ff.

19. On the identification of aria with maniera during the 14th through 16th centuries, see Summers, 56-69; and idem, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics, Cambridge, 1987, 117-24.

20. See the famous letter on the idea in V. Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti nelle testimonianze dei contemporanei e nella letturatura del suo secolo, Westmead, 1971, 30-31, also now available in Camesasca, 166. Shearman, 1994, has recently reattributed the letter to Castiglione and redated it to ca. 1522 (see my discussion below). For a reading of this passage that is in general accord with the one I offer - that Raphael made drawings of a particular subject matter in various modes or "styles" - see S. Settis, "Artisti e committenti fra quatro e cinquecento," in Storia d'Italia, IV, Turin, 1981, 729ff. Cf. J. Pope Hennessy, Raphael, New York, 1970, 34.

21. On the postmedieval transformation from "style" as normative and rule-governed to style in its diverse art historical and art critical meanings, see W. Sauerlander, "From Stilus to Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion," Art History, VI, no. 3, Sept. 1983, 253-70. And on personal style in the early 16th century, see M. Kemp," 'Equal Excellences': Lomazzo and the Explanation of Individual Style in the Visual Arts," Renaissance Studies, I, Mar. 1987, 1-26; M. B. Hall, "From Modeling Techniques to Color Modes," in Color and Technique in Renaissance Painting: Italy and the North, ed. M. B. Hall, New York, 1987, 12-13; and idem, 92ff.

22. I draw here on Nelson Goodman's analytical discussion of style. See his Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis, 1978, 23-40.

23. Cf. the remarks of Marcia B. Hall (96), who claims that in the Stanza d'Eliodoro the "shifting from one color style to another and then back again was unprecedented; it must be seen as pioneering a new attitude, which we recognize now as modal thinking." Cf. also the remarks of Leo Steinberg, who argues that the "more realistic the art of the Old Masters became, the more they raised internal safeguards against illusion, ensuring at every point that attention would remain focused upon the art. . . . They did it by abrupt internal changes of scale; or by shifting reality levels - as when Raphael's Expulsion of Heliodorus inserted a group of contemporaries in modern dress as observers of the Biblical scene" (Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, London, 1972, 72).

24. The allegorical statue-column at the far left of the simulated dado below the Heliodorus is directly aligned with the papal group [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. Like the outward-looking litter bearer above, it seems to confront the audience in the room and even points rightward with its right hand.

25. See J. Pope Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance, Princeton, 1966, 30. See also Koerner, 3-5 and passim. Of course, self-portraiture need not be restricted to such aspects of the painter; see the discussions by R. Brilliant, Portraiture, Cambridge, Mass., 1991, 141ff.

26. The identification of this figure as Raphael was first proposed by Fischel, 103. Among those who concur with this view are Dussler, 79; Oberhuber (as in n. 13), 93; D. Thompson, Raphael: The Life and the Legacy, London, 1983, 131; and J. Shearman, Only Connect . . . : Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton, 1992, 197. Cf. the view of George L. Hersey, for whom the standing figure at far left "is Raphael himself who looks on with admiring wonder at what his skill has wrought" (High Renaissance Art in St. Peter's and the Vatican: An Interpretive Guide, Chicago, 1993, 146). The two foremost standing contemporaries have received diverse nominations over the years, starting with Vasari's identification of the foreground litter bearer as Marcantonio Raimondi, which I find unconvincing (see Dussler, 79). John Shearman, however, has kindly shared with me unpublished research that helps identify the other figure as an important chamberlain of Julius's, Giovanni Pietro de Fogliari, whose name appears on the letter he holds This inscription, often said to be false, is part of the intonaco.

27. The respective roles of patron and painter in the production of images is a medieval theme as well. Yet as far as I know the actual depiction of both patron and painter in an Italian painting is by and large a postmedieval phenomenon. Cf., however, E. H. Gombrich, "Giotto's Portrait of Dante?" in New Light on Old Masters: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance IV, Chicago, 1986, 11-31.

28. On this altarpiece, see E. Borsook, "Cults and Imagery at Sant'Ambrogio in Florence," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, XXV, no. 2, 1981, 159ff., and J. Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work with a Complete Catalogue, London, 1993, 137-47, 422-26.

29. On the inscription "Is Perfecit Opus," see Borsook (as in n. 28), 198 n. 163; and Ruda (as in n. 28), 424.

30. Above the head of the donor, the Baptist points toward the heavenly throne, perhaps indicating that the Coronation is the object of Maringhi's inner contemplation. The motif of the external indication of the content of inner visions is a topic I discuss below.

31. See R. Hatfield, Botticelli's Uffizi "Adoration": A Study in Pictorial Content, Princeton, 1976, 98-100.

32. See M. Baxandall, "Rudolph Agricola on Patrons Efficient and Patrons Final: A Renaissance Discrimination," Burlington Magazine, CXXIV, July 1982, 424-25.

33. The classic study is by R. W. Lee, "Ut Pictura Poesis".' The Humanistic Theory of Painting, New York, 1967. On the early humanist uses of poetic and rhetorical categories in the explication of paintings, see M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450, Oxford, 1971. Recently, Christopher Braider has reversed the traditional normative emphasis on the poetic and has focused instead on how pictorial form came to refigure the practice of the other liberal arts, including that of poetry. See his Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700, Princeton, 1993. For exemplary theoretical and historical analyses of the intertwinings of word and image, see W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago, 1994.

34. See P. Watson, "To Paint Poetry: Raphael on Parnassus," in Renaissance Rereadings: Intertext and Context, ed. M. C. Horowitz et al., Urbana, Ill., 1988, 113-41.

35. G. Vasari, Le vite de'piu eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, IV, ed. G. Milanesi, Florence, 1879, 12. On Vasari's praise of Raphael's narrative skills (and for discussion of the passage that I cite), see D. Rosand, "Raphael, Marcantonio, and the Icon of Pathos," Source, III, Winter 1984, 49-50.

36. See M. Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, New York, 1984, 101-20.

37. For a different approach to the issue of pictorial authorship in the Renaissance, see Koerner, 111-12, who draws on Paul de Man's notion of autobiography in discussing Durer's authorial status.

38. The locutions "me fecit" and "me pinxit" evoked pious formulae appropriate for liturgical gifts, as with the inscription on a crucifx of 1129 in the Opera del Duomo at Siena: "Vos qui me videte rogate D[eu] M pro eo qui me fecit" (You who see me petition God on behalf of he who made me). See A.-M. Lecoq, "Cadre et rebord," Revue de l'Art, XXIV, 1974, 15-16. For further discussion and bibliography on such pious inscriptions, see H. Kessler, "On the State of Medieval Art History," Art Bulletin, LXX, no. 2, June 1988, 180. See also E. R. Curtius, "Devotional Formulae and Humility," in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask, Princeton, 1953, 407-16.

39. I draw here on the researches of A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, London, 1984. For the sake of my argument, I have taken the liberty of condensing, collapsing, and overlooking the nuanced history of changes in the status of authorship during the 12th and 13th centuries.

40. See A. R. Ascoli, "The Vowels of Authority (Dante's Convivio IV.vi.3-4)," in Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. K. Brownlee and W. Stephens, Hanover, 1989, 23-46; and idem, "The Unfinished Author: Dante's Rhetoric of Authority in Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia," in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. R. Jacoff, Cambridge, 1993, 45-66.

41. For some remarks, see A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, c. 1100-c. 1375, Oxford, 1988, 373ff. See also J. Glomski, "From Authority of the Text to Authority of Reason in the Sixteenth Century: A Matter of Interpretation," in Aequitas, Aequalitas, Auctoritas: Theoretical Reason and Legitimation of Authority in XVIth Century Europe, ed. D. Letocha, Paris, 1992, 291-94, which critically surveys several of the essays in the same volume.

42. On the Virgin's gesture in the Madonna of the Victory as one of favor and protection, see C. Schleif, "Hands That Appoint, Anoint and Ally: Late Medieval Donor Strategies for Appropriating Approbation through Painting," Art History, XVI, no. 1, Mar. 1993, 25. Cf. Shearman, 1986, 84, who sees the pope's gesture in the Heliodorus as one of protection over the women and children.

43. As Dussler reminds us (79): "According to Giovio's Life of Raphael, the subject [of Heliodorus's expulsion from the temple] was chosen by the pope himself." This sort of a procedure, however, was normative for such public images; it is a detail of fact that scarcely does justice to the rich relationship between painter and patron in this mural. On the patron's choice of subject matter as inventio from among the rhetorical categories of inventio, dispositio, and compositio, see Settis (as in n. 20), 722ff. Yet simply to correlate Julius's gesture with the category of inventio would be schematic and misleading. The meaning and ascription of the term invention was fluid in the 16th century, as we have already discovered from Vasari's praise of Raphael's invenzione.

44. For pertinent remarks, see Brilliant (as in n. 25), 43, 141ff.

45. This is perhaps comparable to verbal assertion that "points out" something to someone (cf. Heidegger [as in n. 4], 196-99). For a phenomenological discussion of designation, see M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London, 1962, 405-6. For an analysis of depicted gestures of designation that draws on speech act theory, cf. C. Gandelman, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, Bloomington, Ind., 1991, 14-35.

46. Michael Baxandall (71-76) has compared such pictorial figures to the festaiuolo in contemporaneous sacred dramatic performances, whose role it was to address the audience.

47. To be precise, "prophecy in Christian terms means announcing God's truth by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In Christian terms too it does not necessarily involve foretelling the future: thus a preacher who expounds God's word should be inspired by the spirit of prophecy" (J. Britnell, "Poetic Fury and Prophetic Fury," Renaissance Studies, III, June 1989, 107-8).

48. Eve Borsook has picked up on the issue of designating gestures in this mural. She makes the intriguing comment that there is a "mace-bearing chamberlain on the saint's right, acting as a kind of chorus" ("Fra Filippo Lippi and the Murals for Prato Cathedral," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, XIX, 1975, 19).

49. Cf. Hatfield (as in n. 31), 98 n. 108, who claims that in a number of Italian paintings from about 1470 to 1500 patrons and important contemporary figures gesture toward themselves in order to designate their importance (as in Botticelli's Adoration, [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED]).

50. On contemporary witnesses of sacred events in Venetian narrative painting of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, see P. F. Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio, New Haven, 1988, 125ff., 219ff. In some of these images, like Mansueti's Miracle at the Bridge of San Lio (Venice, Accademia), contemporary figures appear to point toward sacred happenings.

51. On the possible identities of some of the portraits in the Baptism, see R. Quednau, Die Sala di Costantino im Vatikanischen Palast: Zur Dekoration der beiden Medici-Papste Leo X. und Clemens VII, Hildesheim, 1979, 412-13.

52. For a large color reproduction of the altarpiece, see J. Burckhardt, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Italy, ed. and trans. P. Humfrey, Cambridge, 1988, 127, p1. 100.

53. It is thus of some interest that in the 15th century invenzione and even fantasia were perhaps more often associated with patrons than with painters. See M. Kemp, "From 'Mimesis' to 'Fantasia': The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts," Viator, VIII, 1977, 357ff.

54. For an interesting analysis of the contract for this altarpiece, see Baxandall, 5ff.

55. To the immediate left of the figure of Ghirlandaio there stands another contemporary, perhaps the prior of the Spedale degli Innocenti who commissioned the work, Francesco dei Giovanni Tesori. This figure overlaps the painter, is slightly higher in the field, and seems to be "designated" by the Baptist's cross, which also partially "frames" the face of the painter. In this picture patron and painter are complexly linked to Saint John's mediation of our access to the sacred event at center. Portraits of both painter and patron appear in other works by Ghirlandaio. The most interesting case is the Sassetti Chapel decoration in S. Trinita, Florence, completed about 1485. In the Raising of the Roman Notary's Son, the scene slightly overlapped by the top of the altarpiece, Ghirlandaio appears with his brother-in-law Bastiano Mainardi at the far right of the field (see E. Borsook, The Mural Painters of Tuscany: From Cimabue to Andrea del Sarto, 2d ed., Oxford, 1980, 117-19). The two painters are clearly separated from and located behind an orthogonal row of prominent Florentine citizens (some of whom were deceased). Although the two painters are not quite part of this elite social group, the figure of Ghirlandaio nevertheless looks out at us with his arm akimbo, a gesture of assured self-possession that expresses authority and control over one's social domain (see J. Spicer, "The Renaissance Elbow," in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. J. Bremmer and H. Roodenburg, Ithaca, N.Y., 1991, 84-128). The scene directly above, the Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule by Pope Honorius III, shows a row of contemporary figures in the right foreground (left to right): Antonio Pucci, Lorenzo de' Medici, Francesco Sassetti, and Sassetti's son. The three adults conjoin to mediate a beholder's access to the narrative action: Pucci looks out; Sassetti, with right hand directly below Pucci's face, points leftward; and Lorenzo the Magnificent welcomes the group arising from below. Portraits of the painters and the patrons are thus vertically aligned, with the patrons set higher. Although each group has a figure who looks out to the viewing audience, it is only the patron Sassetti who points to the action. More than the painters, the patrons are projected as the human agents responsible for the chapel decoration.

56. For further discussion of the two portraits, see J. B. Reiss, The Renaissance Antichrist: Luca Signorelli's Orvieto Frescoes, Princeton, 1995, 16-18, 51.

57. See Andree Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi - "Il Sodoma," New York, 1976, 101.

58. A.-M. Lecoq, "'Donner a voir,'" in P. Georgel and A.-M. Lecoq, La peinture dans la peinture, exh. cat., Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, 1983, 179, my translation.

59. Alberti, 1966, 78; idem, 1980, 72.

60. On the eyes of the Madonna, cf. N. Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, New Haven, 1983, 110.

61. On figural models of piety in painting, see F. O. Buttner, Imitatio Pietatis: Motive der christlichen Ikonographie als Modelle zur Verahnlichung, Berlin, 1983.

62. For discussions of the saint as model in the shaping of social collectives (albeit in 12th-century practices), see C. W. Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Berkeley, Calif., 1982, 95-106.

63. Alberti, 1966, 77; idem, 1980, 70.

64. According to the biblical text of the story, the priests congregated around the altar, whereas the women and people took to the streets (2 Macc. 3:15-20). Cf. Shearman, 1986, 80, who states that according to medieval exegeses of the tale, "women and girls entered even the inner court of the Temple in supplication" and, furthermore, that "the High Priest [in the painting] is the product of [extra-biblical] research."

65. On the theme of the beatific vision in Raphael's images, see Arasse. Bodily comportments were often engendered in Renaissance images, for which see S. Fermor, "Movement and Gender in Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting," in The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, ed. K. Adler and M. Pointon, Cambridge, 1993, 129-45. See also E. Cropper, "On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrachismo, and the Vernacular Style," Art Bulletin, LVIII, no. 3, Sept. 1976, 374-94. It remains unclear to me, however, whether or not the serpentinata was an engendered pose in Renaissance images.

66. On Galatea's pose, see C. Thoenes, "Galatea: Tentativi di avvicinamento," in Raffaello a Roma: Il convegno del 1983, ed. C. L. Frommel and M. Winner, Rome, 1986, 67.

67. The theme of the body as expressive of the state of the soul - a commonplace in Renaissance figurative thought - is discussed by Alberti, 1966, 77ff.; idem, 1980, 72ff. But on these same pages Alberti admonishes against serpentinelike poses, which he considers to offer impossibly juxtaposed views of the body. Perhaps he was referring to figures like the one with back to us in the scene of Saint Francis Mourned by the Poor Clares in the Saint Francis cycle at Assisi. On shifting senses of the serpentine conceit, see J. Shearman, Mannerism, Harmondsworth, Eng., 1973, 81-91; D. Summers, "Maniera and Movement: The Figura Serpentinata," Art Quarterly, XXXV, no. 3, Autumn 1972, 269-301; and D. Rosand, "Art History and Art Criticism: The Past as Present," New Literary History, v, 1974, 439-41.

68. On Saint Cecilia's pose in relation to the other figures, see H. Wolfflin, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance, trans. P. and L. Murray, Ithaca, N.Y., 1980, 259, and Arasse, 418ff. For an analysis of the posture of the Magdalene, which draws on Vasari's use of the dance term leggiadria, see Fermor (as in n. 65), 138ff.

69. On the pictorial status of the extraterrestrial space in the Saint Cecilia, see M. Dalai, "La struttura compositiva e spaziale: Una proposta di lettura," in L'estasi di Santa Cecilia di Raffaello da Urbino nella Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, Bologna, 1983, 104-17; H. Damisch, L'origine de la perspective, Paris, 1987, 38-40; and M. Bal, "First Person, Second Person, Same Person: Narrative as Epistemology," New Literary History, XXIV, 1993, 303.

70. To be sure, the gold-leaf rays of light that Saint Catherine "sees" are not objective in any representational sense. Although not stated precisely in these terms, this is also the view of Arasse, 413.

71. And on the terrestrial plane in the Disputa, an unfolding comprehension of the transubstantiation moves toward the altar on the left and away on the right. See the formal analyses in Wolfflin (as in n. 68), 89; and Freedberg (as in n. 13), 121.

72. One is reminded here of Hegel's dictum that "the result is the same as the beginning, only because the beginning is the purpose" (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, 1977, 12).

73. The two boys on the column seeking a glimpse of the hidden altar activities are directly above the figure of the twisting woman. They form a counterweight to her movements. The boy who looks down has assumed something of a serpentine pose while the lad hanging on has flying clothing. Since these youths are getting a downward glimpse of holy but earthly events, their joint serpentine form would seem expressive not so much of divinely elevated states as perhaps of wonder at seeing the hidden holy activities.

74. On the architecture as both innovative in its dome support system and partially archaeological in its layout as the ancient Jewish temple, see Shearman, 1986, 79. Also, on the modish Bramantesque use of the composite order, see J. Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Princeton, 1988, 252.

75. See Shearman, 1986, 79. On this kind of architectural structure in some of Raphael's earlier works, especially the designs for the Siena Library decoration, see idem, "The Born Architect," in Raphael before Rome, ed. J. Beck, Hanover, 1986, 206. For more general discussion on Renaissance scenography, see E. Povoledo, "Origins and Aspects of Italian Scenography," in N. Pirrotta and E. Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, Cambridge, 1982, 281 ff.

76. See D. Rosand and M. Muraro, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., International Exhibitions Foundation, 1976, 220; and D. Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, New Haven, 1982, 191. This motif also appears next door in the Sala di Costantino's Donation of Constantine from the early 1520s.

77. On the revival of classical drama in Renaissance Rome, see A. Greco, "Roma e la commedia del Rinascimento," Studi Romani XXIV, Jan.-Mar. 1974, 25-35; F. Cruciani, "Il teatro dei Ciceroniani: Tommaso 'Fedra' Inghirami," Forum Italicum XXIV, Winter 1980, 356-77; M. Cottino-Jones, "Rome and the Theatre in the Renaissance," in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey, Binghamton, N.Y., 1982, 237-47; and C. L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, Bloomington, Ind., 1985, 288-89.

78. Aristotle, Poetics 18.1456a.20, trans. S. H. Butler, New York, 1961, 92.

79. On Raphael having "naturalized the ancient dramatic mask" (e.g., in a drawing for the engraved Massacre of the Innocents), see Rosand (as in n. 35), 39.

80. For medieval and Renaissance writers like Aquinas and Ebreo, the senses were divided into those higher and more spiritual (sight and hearing) and those lower and more corporeal (taste, smell, and touch). See Summers, 1987 (as in n. 19), 215, 225. The visual and tactile affirmation of the avengers in the Heliodorus asserts their dual spiritual-corporeal nature. On the cognitive intertwining of touch and vision prior to their dissociation in the 19th century, see D. M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, Chicago, 1982, 12-13, 15; and J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, 19, 59ff. On the tactility implicit in the visual form of Renaissance painting, see H. Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, New York, n.d. Also, on the interplay between sight and touch in images, cf. Gandelman (as in n. 45), 1-13.

81. On similar placements of donors in altarpieces, see A. Chastel, "Le donateur in abisso dans les pale," in Fables, formes, figures, II, Paris, 1978, 129-43.

82. Louis Marin, interview by Viana Conti, Flash Art, CXXVII, Apr. 1986, 53.

83. See Schleif (as in n. 42), 1-32.

84. For a comparable reading of these motifs, see C. Bertelli, Piero della Francesca, New Haven, 1992, 148 n. 27. Also, for a mid-15th century instance of a figure indicating the contents of his own mind, see the central kneeling man in Vecchietta's Dream of the Blessed Sorore, Spedale di S. Maria della Scala, Siena (color reproduction in H. A. Millon, The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture, New York, 1994, 395).

85. Directly below this figure's roll and codex, in the foreground of the School of Athens, a man holds a book that angles outward, alluding to the texts in the library. A similar conceit is found in the lower left of the Disputa and in the Parnassus.

86. For further remarks on self-referential activity in the School of Athens (which can be taken to complement the reading I offer), see R. Brilliant, "Intellectual Giants: A Classical Topos and The School of Athens," Source, III, Summer 1984, 9.

87. Shearman, 1994.

88. R. Klein and H. Zerner, eds., Italian Art 1500-1600: Sources and Documents, Evanston, III., 1989, 33; and Golzio (as in n. 20), 30-31. See also Camesasca, 166.

89. E. Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. J. J. S. Peake, New York, 1968, 60.

90. See C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Mass., 1989, 143-44. In a letter quoted by Taylor, Rene Descartes also employs a locution of mental possession: "the idea I have within me." This is not to claim that earlier uses of "having" an idea do not exist (for example, by Francisco de Hollanda in his De pintura antigua of 1548, quoted in Summers, 230), only that there was a fundamental shift in the status of idea itself.

91. Perhaps this sense of the artistic idea as both mental possession and cosmic, as both personal and Platonic, also informs Durer's phrase that "a good painter is inwardly full of figures, and if it were possible that he live forever, he would have from the inner ideas, of which Plato writes, always something new to pour out in his works"; for the passage and important discussion, see Panofsky (as in n. 89), 123-25; see also Koerner, 138.

92. Shearman, 1994, rightly links the letter to the Pietro Bembo and Pico della Mirandola debates of about 1512 on imitation. I add only that Renaissance Neoplatonism (currents of which run through the Bembo-Pico debates) informs the metaphysical dimensions of the letter. On the Neoplatonic leanings of Raphael's courtly circle of literary friends and patrons as well as of his own art, see A. Chastel, Art et humanisme a Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique: Etudes sur la Renaissance de l'humanisme platonicien, Paris, 1959, 489-99; and idem, "Amor sacro e profano nell'arte e nel pensiero di Raffaello," in C. L. Frommel and M. Winner (as in n. 66), 3-10. For further discussion of the Neoplatonic resonances of the letter, see Camesasca, 156-60.

93. As summarized by Michael J. B. Mien, Marsilio Ficino's "mens or intelligentia . . . is not the specifically human aspect of the soul, but its highest part, its angelic face, and being the receptacle of the innate Ideas, it is therefore essentially passive, awaiting illumination or activation by God" (Introduction to M. Ficino, The "Philebus" Commentary, ed. and trans. M.J.B. Allen, Berkeley, Calif., 1975, 32). For Leone Ebreo, the idea in the artist's mind and the ideal form in the divine intellect are analogous to one another in a relationship of microcosm to macrocosm (this is the upshot of the unspecified passage quoted in Summers, 224). Yet although the artistic idea in this similitude partakes of the divine, it still requires illumination by God, just as in Ficino. See the first dialogue of Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore, translated as "On Love and Desire: A Dialogue between Philo and Sophia," in Renaissance Philosophy: I. The Italian Philosophers, ed. and trans. A. B. Fallico and H. Shapiro, New York, 1967, 198-99. The letter's terse formulation adumbrates this more properly philosophical distinction between innate ideas in the human mind and their illumination from above.

94. I draw here on Kemp (as in n. 53), 366-84; and Summers, 103-43, 203-33.

95. "E questa e un arte che si chiama dipignere, che conviene avere fantasia, con operazione di mano, di trovare cose non vedute. . . ." C. Cennini, Il libro dell'arte o Tratto della pittura, ed. E Tempesti, Milan, 1984, 29.

96. Perhaps something like the juxtaposition of maniere had already appeared in Raphael's Oddi Altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin, where all the earthbound and cloud-borne figures have their respective "airs." This disunity in "style" has been explained as due to a time lag in the design and execution of the upper and lower parts of the altarpiece. See P. de Vecchi, "The Coronation of the Virgin in the Vatican Pinacoteca and Raphael's Activity between 1501 and 1504," and F. Mancinelli, "The Coronation of the Virgin by Raphael," in Beck (as in n. 75), 73-82 and 127-36. Whatever the merits of such reconstructions of the genesis of the altarpiece, they do not preclude the contemporary reception of the two maniere as signaling metaphysical differences between the terrestrial and celestial realms. The Heliodorus displays not a vertical but a horizontal juxtaposition and differentiation of maniere of spatially unseparated groups located on common earthly terrain.

97. On the earlier humanist senses of the term ars - an ancestor of the modern notion of art - see Baxandall (as in n. 33), 15-17.

98. Purgatorio, canto 17, and Paradiso, canto 33. For discussion, see Summers. 120-21.

99. L. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, New York, 1983, 108. Also pertinent are Erwin Panofsky's remarks of 1920: "Thus these formulations [in language by contemporaries], just like the individual theoretical statements of the artists themselves, can once more only be phenomena parallel to the artistic products of the epoch; they cannot already contain their interpretation. . . . Even critical or theoretical statements of a whole period cannot immediately interpret the works of art produced in that period but first have to be interpreted by us together with the work"; Panofsky, "The Concept of Artistic Volition," Critical Inquiry, VII, no. 1, Autumn 1981, 23, 24.

100. Alberti, 1966, 43; idem, 1980, 10, 11.

101. This is also the case with the School of Athens in the Segnatura, although the central opening that frames Plato and Aristotle is not closed at the bottom. Moreover, there are three sky openings in the School of Athens but only one in Heliodorus.

102. On this theme in Renaissance painting, see A. Chastel, "Le tableau dans le tableau," in Chastel (as in n. 81), 75-98. For the Middle Ages, see J. Wirth, "La representation de l'image dans l'art du Haut Moyen Age," Revue de l'Art, LXXIX, 1988, 9-21. To be sure, not all images-in-the-image are self-referential, nor are they necessarily analogues of the whole.

103. Alberti, 1966, 56; and idem, 1980, 37.

104. Compare the compositionally similar Annunciation by Pinturrichio in the Borgia Apartments, where the sky region is now the place of God's appearance (reproduction in R. van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, XIV, New York, 1970, 231). Also, see the manuscript illustration allegorizing papal rule in Giovanni Francesco Poggio's De veri patore munere, where above the enthroned pope is a window that is like a mural opened to the skies populated with divine figures (reproduced in G. Morello, ed., Raffaello e la Roma dei papi, Rome, 1986, 169).

105. On the various significations of frontal and profile in Western pictures, see M. Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text, The Hague, 1973.

106. On the complicity of fantasia and point of view. cf. Summers, 133-34.

107. Cf. C. Braider, "Una piu Minerva: The Origins of Perspective and the Aesthetics of the Incarnation in Alberti's Della pittura," in Braider (as in n. 33), 20-36.

108. See M. Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," in Existence and Being, trans. R.F.C. Hull and A. Crick, Chicago, 1949, 292-324; and M. Theunissen, "Begriff und Realitat: Hegels Aufhebung des metaphysischen Wahrheitsbegriffs," in Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels, ed. R.-P. Horstmann, Frankfurt, 1978, 324-59. For thoughts on truth and painting, cf. J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod, Chicago, 1987; and M. Roskill and D. Carrier, Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images, Amherst, Mass., 1983.

Frequently Cited Sources

Alberti, L. B., De pictura, ed. C. Grayson, Rome, 1980.

-----, On Painting, trans. J. R. Spencer, New Haven, 1966.

Arasse, D., "Extases et visions beatifiques a l'apogee de la Renaissance: Quatre images de Raphael," Melanges de l'Ecole Francais de Rome: Moyen Age - Temps Modernes, LXXXIV, no. 2, 1972, 403-92.

Baxandall, M., Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, Oxford, 1972.

Camesasca, E., Raffaello: Gli scritti, Milan, 1993.

Dussler, L., Raphael: A Critical Catalogue of His Pictures, Wall-Paintings and Tapestries, London, 1971.

Fischel, O., Raphael, trans. B. Rackham, London, 1964.

Hall, M. B., Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting, Cambridge, 1992.

Koerner, J. L., The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago, 1993.

Shearman, J., "The Vatican Stanze: Functions and Decoration," Proceedings of the British Academy, LVII, 1971, 369-424.

-----, "The Expulsion of Heliodorus," in Raffaello a Roma: II convegno del 1983, ed. C. L. Frommel and M. Winner, Rome, 1986, 75-88.

-----, "Castiglione's Portrait of Raphael," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, XXXVII, no. 1, 1994, 69-97.

Summers, D., Michelangelo and the Language of Art, Princeton, 1981.

Michael Schwartz received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1994. He teaches, lectures, and publishes in the areas of Western art history, aesthetics, and Continental philosophy. One facet of his research concerns the metaphysical dimensions and artistic ramifications of the emergence of post-medieval painting paradigms [Department of Fine Arts, Augusta State University, 2500 Walton Way, Augusta, Ga., 30904-2200].

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