National Galleries of Scotland

This painting illustrates the mystical episode described in three of the gospels when Christ demonstrated his divine nature to his disciples Peter, James and John. On a remote mountain he was transformed, appearing in a vision conversing with the Old Testament prophets Moses and Elijah, his face radiating light and his clothes dazzling white. The stunned apostles lie prostrate on the ground in complicated poses. Painted around 1588, this is a typically spiritual work from the early maturity of Lodovico Carracci, who with his younger cousins Agostino and Annibale had founded a highly influential artists? academy in their native Bologna earlier that decade.