The Touch of the Master’s Hand.
If you’ve ever been to an auction,
you know there’s no telling how much something will sell for. Something you
think valuable might go for a song, but other stuff you think worthless brings
many times its estimated value.
Recently a black chalk sketch of a
face, with the simple title “Head of an Apostle,” created around 1519 or 1520,
was auctioned off. Its estimated value was between $16 million and $24 million!
But because it was drawn by the Italian painter Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino,
more popularly known as Rafael, it went for the staggering price of $47.8
million!1
Obviously, the touch of that master’s
hand was one reason it proved to be worth far more even than the experts had thought!
That sketch was made as a study for
the magnificent painting titled “The Transfiguration,”2 which hangs
in the Vatican Museum. Rafael’s masterpiece actually tells two stories. We see,
in the upper portion of the painting, the transfigured Jesus, flanked by Moses
and Elijah. Unlike many older paintings, no one wears a halo in this one, but
there is no need. All three are backlit by heavenly light, and all three are
floating several feet off the earth. The apostles, stunned, are lying on the
ground, barely able to raise their eyes.
Then below, we see the same
apostles, speaking excitedly to a crowd of men, women and children about the
Transfiguration. This is where we come into the picture! Because it’s not
enough that something extraordinary happened. We need to tell people about it.
A three-part drama
Initially, the three apostles who
witnessed this revelation about Jesus in the Transfiguration were told to keep
it a secret. That might seem odd since so much of the ministry of Jesus was
public, but this event occurred at a crucial time in his life, when it seems
the Savior was trying to make it clear exactly what it meant for him to be the
Messiah.
The Transfiguration is the third of
a cluster of three events that Matthew, Mark and Luke all relate. The first
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