'The Raising of Lazarus' (1517–1519) by Sebastiano del Piombo

Hello and welcome to the National Gallery. My name is Matthias Wevel and I am the curator of 16th-century Italian paintings here at the Gallery, i.e. this room and the rooms to either side here. I'll be speaking about this very large... The second largest painting in the Gallery and one of the oldest in terms of when it entered the collection because it carries the inventory number NG1. The paintings acquired for the Nation, for the Gallery, all have NG numbers and this is the first one. It was part of the Angustine Collection, which was a private collection established by a banker. And that collection, along with the Beaumont Collection, formed the incipient National Gallery in 1824. They were acquired for the Nation for the purpose of establishing a gallery for the people. And this is the first talk in a series of six that charts the history of the National Gallery through six paintings. So, appropriately, we start with the one given number one. Obviously, it ended the collection along with a number of other paintings, but it was judged so important that it was given the first number. Today, it's possibly a painting that a lot of people walk by on their way to our famous Bronzino, our Michelangelo's, our Titian's in here, the Vernese and Tintoretto and other things in there, great Venetian paintings. It's a little bit of a difficult painting. It's a painting that rewards concentration and close viewing, though, and engagement. So, I will try to unpack it a little bit here. It is painted by Sebastiano del Piombo, a painter from Venice working in Rome, and he painted this between 1516 and 1519. He did it with the assistance of a close friend and associate at this time who was a lot more famous, and today is even more famous, than he himself was, and that was Michelangelo. I will get into that a little bit later. First, I want to talk a little bit about what you see to get you into the painting. This is a depiction of the story of the Raising of Lazarus. It's told in the Gospel of John 11, Chapter 11, and it's about Christ coming back to Judea, to Bethany, to see his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. He has gotten word that Lazarus is sick to death and has been called back, but it's also a bit dangerous for him because the people of Judea have threatened to stone him just some days previously, and therefore he's not there. But he hears that his friend is dying. He still waits for four days before going back, and by that time, Lazarus is dead. So, this is the moment when he comes back, but there are several moments collapsed into one here. He comes back with his disciples. You see Christ there in the middle, and behind him are his disciples. In front of him is Mary, the sister of Lazarus, who is often conflated with Mary Magdalene. She's not necessarily the same person, but they're often conflated, and were often conflated in the 16th century. And behind them is another woman, and that's Martha, and she recoils, as you see here. Just before the scene you see here, she has berated Jesus that he did not come back earlier. If you had been here earlier, my brother would not be dead. And he says, your brother will rise again. I am the resurrection and the life. If you believe in me, you will never die. And she says, well, that's true. On the final day, we will all be resurrected. And he says, no, it will happen now. And that's then what happens here. He says, Lazarus, come forth. Lazarus has been laid in his tomb, and then he rises from the tomb in his burial shroud. Life comes back to his body, and he is resurrected. So that's the miracle you see here. He's pointing towards Lazarus, a very muscular Lazarus, who's just been to the gym before dying, who looks up at Christ with a shocked... You can feel there's a sense of physical shock in the body of Lazarus. It's still stiff with rigor mortis, you see, it's a stiff body. And it has a different pallor than the skin that you see on the characters around it. It has this deathly pallor. He's laid in the tomb for four days. But he has that wide-eyed stare at Christ. And this is the moment where Christ speaks those words. At the same time, Martha is overcome probably by the admonishment she's received from her friend Jesus, but also by the miracle that's happened. She's shocked. And this is really what Sebastiano is trying to convey here, the reaction to the miracle. So you see that, you see Christ speaking the words, you see Lazarus waking and the life returning to his body, and the physical shock of almost... You see somebody being revived by CPR. They get their heart beating again and they wake up. You've seen that in films many times, maybe seen in real life. But it's a very physically powerful moment. And I think that's what he's trying to get at here. The people around Christ and Lazarus react in various ways. I've talked about Martha. Mary, who's dressed in yellow and therefore attracts our attention, has fallen on her knees. She recognizes the miracle. As in the Gospel, she already knows that this is going to... She has confidence that Christ will help, even though her brother is dead. And she recognizes the miracle, as does Saint Peter, who's here, who also falls to his knees and clasps his hand in prayer. Behind him, the disciples are reacting in a variety of ways and they're discussing what has happened. They may not quite have understood the significance of it. So there is discussion going on, there is curiosity, there is disbelief to a certain extent. And that disbelief is enhanced even more in the Pharisees, you see. So the people of the town, you see, on the other side, who are reacting in shock, in disbelief. Some are holding their noses, we see these women behind Martha, holding their noses at the stench from the tomb, the stench of the rot in the tomb, also described in the Gospel. So they're holding their noses at that. And others are disbelieving, maybe even a bit angry, some of them. Horrified. There's a variety of reactions. And I think this is very important to understanding the painting. Sebastiano here is not trying to tell us what to think about this miracle. He's telling us to think about the miracle. Just like the characters, and there are 40 figures, which he stressed later in the letter when he was trying to collect money for it. He's painted 40 figures, I should have some more money. There are 40 figures, it's a lot of figures to have in an even a large altarpiece. And their life size. All these 40 figures react in different ways. There are even the attendants of Christ over here who have not really recognized, or attendants of Lazarus, who have not really recognized the significance of this miracle because they're trying to solve a practical problem of unwrapping Lazarus. So they're like contractors or something, and they're having a conversation about how do we unwrap him here. Like, if you hold his arm, I can do this. There's that kind of conversation going on there. So, just like those figures, we are encouraged to contemplate, discuss, understand what has happened, and interpret it. So I think it's a very pedagogical picture in that way. And this is quite characteristic of Sebastiano at this moment. He's very interested in encouraging engagement in this way. Intellectual engagement, theological engagement, emotional engagement. So, that's the story that's being told. It is painted with great confidence in oil on a panel. The problem, one problem of encountering this painting today is that when it was in the Orléans collection in France, so the Duke of Orléans was the temporary ruler of France and amassed one of the most important collections in the 18th century of European art. And he took this out of the church in France, in Narbonne, where it was meant for, I'll get back to that later, and brought it to Paris. And there in the 18th century, in the early 18th century, it was transferred from the original panel to canvas. It was a pioneering technique they had at that time for transferring panel paintings to canvas in order to preserve them. It was believed that that would preserve them. In the more humid climate of northern France, there was concern that panels might warp and crack in ways that damaged the paintings. But actually, they did much more damage by removing the paint and sticking it onto canvas. Very complicated techniques that involved various chemicals and also hacking away the panel from the back. So, therefore, what you see here is a severely damaged painting, which has gone through several re-linings since then of the canvas. It's been put onto new canvases and is currently sitting on a very thin composite board, sort of an MDF, a glorified MDF board, the last very important restoration in the 1960s was transferred to that. So, it's also in a very fragile state in that respect. Therefore, it only moves very rarely. And so, therefore, the surface you see is not nearly as lush as it would have been when Sebastiano painted it, nor are the colours fully as vivid as they were. They're quite vivid, but they were much more vivid at the time. Some of them have darkened over time, especially you see that dark area at the top right there, it's very dark. That would have been much easier to make out. It's probably a rock with trees and bushes growing on it, but it's a little bit hard and there's an architectural element you see at far right, up at the right corner, there's an architectural part of it and it's very hard to make out what exactly it is. Sebastiano, as I said, hailed from Venice and he had come to Rome in 1511 as the most sophisticated oil painter in the Venetian tradition. And Venetians were ahead of the curve in Italy in terms of applying oil and working with oil paint. And this is why he was brought to Rome, because of his skills in painting. At this point, Sebastiano was more sophisticated than Titian, his slightly younger contemporary. They had become artists together and they were quite close. And Titian was about five years younger and was not regarded yet as the great, great master that he would become in Venice. Also, one might say that Sebastiano prepared his way by leaving Venice and leaving the scene open to Titian. So, Sebastiano came to Rome and immediately became embroiled in the very competitive milieu there. The artists... This was at a time when Rome was experiencing urban renewal at a very grand scale under Julius II. He had various very important artists working for him, among them Bramante, the great architect, who was the architect of St Peter's at this time, the new St Peter's that Julius wanted to build. There was an old basilica and he wanted to build a new one. There was Michelangelo, who had come in 1505-1506 to sculpt the tomb of Julius II, this enormous tomb with about 40 life-sized figures that he was supposed to sculpt for Julius II. It never happened, it ended up being much smaller many years later. And then there was Raphael. Raphael had arrived in 1508 and when Sebastiano arrived, Raphael was quickly becoming the most sought-after painter in Rome. He was threatening Michelangelo's position. Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, also commissioned by Julius II, and Raphael was painting in the papal apartments right next door, including the famous Stanza della Segnatura where the School of Athens was. He was painting that, his most famous work. So, Michelangelo felt threatened by this young upstart Raphael, who he had known in Florence before, they had encountered each other in Florence and been friendly, but by this time Raphael was really... He felt he was threatening his position because he was an oil painter and extremely efficient, very charming, very charismatic, everybody liked him. Michelangelo was difficult, Michelangelo was grumpy and dirty and never washed and so on, and was not a people person. And Raphael was charming and beautiful and had a lot of success. So, I think that also played into it. They're very different characters. Michelangelo felt a lot of resentment to Raphael, also because Raphael stole his ideas. He took ideas from Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling. When Michelangelo was not there, he would sneak in and look at it, then copy things down or even get to his drawings and copy his drawings and then go and apply those ideas in his own paintings right next door and transform them into his own. And this really bothered Michelangelo, that he saw his ideas transformed by somebody who was probably as gifted as he was. So, when Sebastiano arrives, we have an oil painter of great, great skill who knows things that even Raphael doesn't know in oil painting. So, Raphael feels a bit threatened by Sebastiano and they're working right next to each other for a private client in what is now called the Villa Farnesina, which was owned by a very wealthy banker called Agostino Chigi and they worked right next to each other there and probably developed their rivalry at that point. So, they very closely followed each other at this time and Michelangelo recognised that Sebastiano was somebody who could help consolidate a position opposite Raphael, with his help, maybe. So, he had the Venetian colour, the Venetian approach to oil painting and Michelangelo could draw like nobody else and had an inventive mind like nobody else. So, he proposed to Sebastiano that they work together on certain things. He would provide Sebastiano with drawings that he would then use in his paintings. And this lasted for a number of years, they became very close. In fact, it lasted for two decades, but it was especially in the first, in the 15-teens, that they were extremely close in terms of creative collaboration. And then we get to this painting. This painting was commissioned a few years into Sebastiano's presence in Rome by Giulio de' Medici, who was nephew to the Pope Leo X at this time. Julius II had died, Leo X was the new Pope, and his nephew Giulio de' Medici was very powerful at the Curia. He was made a cardinal by his uncle and had a very sensitive mind and aesthetic sense. He was a great patron of the arts. He became Michelangelo's most important patron for a long while, and indeed Sebastiano's and Raphael's. And he commissioned this painting and also a painting from Raphael, two great altarpieces, for a church that I mentioned earlier at Nain-Bonne in southern France. This church was very politically important because there was a new... Leo X was trying to heal a conflict with France that the Papal State had had under Julius II, they'd been at war. And he was trying to heal this breach between these two great powers. And this bishopric was symbolically important to that. And he awarded the position of archbishop to his nephew, Giulio de' Medici, who never went there. It was lucrative and politically important, but he never went there. But he recognised he had to do something for this church, and therefore he commissioned the two greatest painters in Rome to paint altarpieces for it. And this put Raphael and Sebastiano in direct competition with each other. This happened in 1516. By that time, Michelangelo had been sent to Florence, his hometown, to work on Medici projects there. The Pope was a Medici and his nephew, Giulio de' Medici, as I said, of course Medici, and the de facto ruler of Florence. Very important projects, the façade of the church of San Lorenzo for Michelangelo and later the Medici chapel and the Laurentian library that he built in Florence. So he was there for the next many years. So Sebastiano was on his own at this time. He started painting this and he knew he had to measure up to Raphael, who was enormously inventive and great at composition. And when you look at this composition, you see it doesn't quite cohere as a whole, especially when you look at Raphael, where everything coheres and you can't remove a single figure without it falling apart. Everything is codependent in Raphael. Here you have these clusters of figures around the panel that are probably organised in that way. When he started drawing, he would start drawing in the Venetian manner. He would plan segments of the composition and then put them together as he was painting and then maybe return to drawing a bit to work out an idea and then return to painting. It was a very organic way of working that the Venetians practised. Whereas Raphael was trained in central Italy, in Florence, and before that in Umbria, and he would plan everything meticulously in drawing before even thinking about painting. So everything would be planned out, the whole composition would be planned out at various stages and various scales and then transferred one-to-one, from one-to-one full-sized drawings transferred onto the panel or the wall or whatever they were painting, to be painted there. So everything was pre-planned. This was not how Sebastiano worked. This was how Michelangelo worked, it was how Raphael worked, but not how Sebastiano worked. And when we look at infrareds of this picture, we can see that there are many changes to the figures. He's changed a lot of things while painting, which is a very Venetian way of working. There is underdrawing done with a brush, but not transferred from a full-sized drawing, a cartoon. It's not the kind of mechanical line you get from a cartoon that you see, for example, with Michelangelo working over there in this unfinished painting, the Manchester Madonna. If you look at that afterwards, you'll see how the lines are kind of mechanical because they're transferred lines. They're not freehand, extemporal drawings. It's in the two angels on the left. You can see the drawings when you go closer. This is the Florentine way of working. Here, the drawing is freehand, done with the point of the brush, maybe based on sketches, but not directly transferred. So he's working on this, and Raphael hasn't started his. He's so busy at this time, he's working on the Pavel Apartments, he's decorating other parts of the Vatican Palace, he's been appointed overseer of archaeology in Rome and will soon be appointed architect of St Peter's. So he's very busy and manages a huge workshop where Sebastiano is in much smaller operation. He's painting this, and he wants to keep it from Raphael. There's a correspondence between Sebastiano, Michelangelo and various people, various allies they have. When reading this correspondence, this very vivid correspondence, you feel the threat that Sebastiano is sensing from Raphael. And Raphael is trying to sabotage it. He doesn't want Raphael to see it, so he's trying to keep him out because he doesn't want Raphael to get one apartment by stealing his ideas, which he actually ended up doing. Raphael stole from the best of them and, as I said, made things his own. So there's a real sense of threat. And it's a very overheated situation. And then Michelangelo comes back to ratify a contract with the Pope for his Medici projects in Florence in January of 1518. And what happens then is that they look at this painting together, and this is something we've discovered recently by looking at the infrareds of this painting, and he says, why don't I help you out a little bit here? Your figure of Lazarus, which is not the figure we see here, is kind of limp. He gets lost in the action. And indeed, under this figure is a figure that's much more rigid and smaller and would get lost. And we have a sketch by Sebastiano that has this figure. So Sebastiano, one of the most important figures in the composition is not quite there. So we have a couple of drawings that Michelangelo did for... sketches that he did for Sebastiano at this stage to improve this figure. And indeed, the figure you see here, along with the attendant in front and possibly the attendant behind, although probably not, are designed by Michelangelo. Those are the parts done by Michelangelo in this painting. He hasn't painted them, but he did the drawings for them. And then Sebastiano interpreted those drawings in the painting. And he changed it twice based on these drawings. One of the original ideas from Michelangelo's point of view that Sebastiano ended up changing was that Lazarus had his hand outstretched. Just like the famous creation of man at the Sistine Chapel ceiling where the two fingers meet, where God gives life to Adam. This life has also been given here or returned. And initially, the idea was for the fingers to meet. But Sebastiano had already painted Christ and there was no real room for his hand to be outstretched and meet Christ's hand. And also the scale was wrong, because this figure was too big already. You see the scale is not quite right. And if you walk up close to it, you can actually see the ghost of that arm outstretched like where Martha's dress is there. That kind of dead area where Martha's dress is was his hand originally. So he decided to pull it back. And indeed, of course, Lazarus is resurrected not by touch, but by the word. Lazarus, come forth, is what Christ is saying. So he's resurrected by the word. So that's what he ended up with, this moment of torsion where he turns his body and his arm is across his chest. And that's what they settled on, or what Sebastiano decided, because Michelangelo left again. He was only there for a few weeks. And he painted this painting and it was finished in May of 1519. And it was received with great enthusiasm at the Papal Court and the Pope loved it and so on. Raphael had not quite finished his yet, but did so soon afterwards, almost, because he died before he finished it fully. And that painting is the Transfiguration. It is now in the Vatican Palace. It's a fantastic painting that shows Christ being transfigured on Mount Tabor. So he's floating in the air where his divinity is confirmed. He's surrounded by two prophets, Moses and Elijah. And then under him are the disciples trying to heal a possessed boy and failing. Christ will later come down from the mountain and heal the boy. Only Christ can do that, can drive out the devil. That's the message of the painting. But it's an extraordinary composition that conflates two different stories. And it steals a lot from this and improves on it. I think if the two were shown together, people would probably prefer Raphael. And that's indeed what happened at the time, because Raphael is just so great at compositions. That's what happened at the time because the two paintings were exhibited together. So this was like... The rivalry of the two artists exemplified in that way. And everybody in Rome was talking about it, these two great altarpieces that were exhibited together. But Raphael had died. The first place where Raphael's great altarpiece was exhibited and where people came to see it was above his beer in his studio where he lay in state after he died. He died very suddenly and it was an extreme shock to everybody. I think there's a letter including Sebastiano and Michelangelo. Sebastiano sends a letter to Michelangelo saying, I'm sure you've heard of Raphael's death. God rest his soul. Now to move on to the next part... He probably didn't feel that sorry about it, but he was certainly shocked. He moves on to their business and how he can maybe move in and take over some of Raphael's commissions with Michelangelo's help. So this is the kind of situation we have. Michelangelo kind of hated Raphael by this point and did for the rest of his life. We have him talking about Raphael much later in life and saying, everything he got, he got from me, he stole everything. So he really hated this guy. But he was out of the picture by this point and then Sebastiano became the most important painter in Rome for the next many years until Michelangelo returned in 1534 to paint The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel by which time the two of them fell out and didn't speak again. It is clear, I think, to most people that even if I asked you cold, which part do you think Michelangelo designed, after thinking a bit, you might point to Lazarus. And that's because Michelangelo couldn't design a boring figure if he tried. Every time he designed a figure, it was memorable. And this is indeed what's happened here and Sebastiano did not have that gift. He could not quite do that. The figure of Christ, I think, was designed by him and is quite memorable, but is based on various ideas by Michelangelo. So he's looking very closely at Michelangelo. The choice of colouring, you see many very bright colours here, these strong pastels, the pink, Christ is the only one in pink, so he's really accentuated that way. But the pinks, the greens, the various different greens, you see every green here is different, slightly different. He's showing off how he can manipulate chromatically a hue across the canvas. So we have apple greens, bottle greens, moss greens, and so on. And he really shows off what he can do in oil paint. And Raphael learned from this and actually used it and did something maybe even more amazing, but at least as amazing. So that's what he's doing, and then he's painting this glorious landscape behind, which is very Venetian in character. Oh, I should just say about the colours. They are not very Venetian. The technique is Venetian. The idea of applying many layers of colour and translucent glazing across the top to have it really glow. You see some of that in Martha's dress, where it's underpainted in red and then gone over in blue. And that gives it a depth of hue and a quality that you wouldn't usually get in Central Italian painting. He's very good at adapting those things. Also this transition from green to yellow by shading Mary's dress, yellow dress, with greens. There are also just elegant details, such as all the whites. The concentration of white is in the right part of the painting. It's almost woven through all those headscarves, the shroud, and there's less of it here, and that sets up a distinction between right and left in the composition. That also has to do with, I think, that undergirds the story or supports the story. Look at how the white is interwoven with the other colours over there. It's very impressive. But the colour choice is not Venetian. The colour choice is very Florentine, and that's interesting. It's more in step with, when you look at Bronzino over there, the very bright colouring of Mary, blue and red over there, and other artists of that generation, the so-called Mannerists, that were the generation after. This unnaturalistic, very bright, chromatic scale. And that is because Sebastiano had seen Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which is full of those extremely bright, non-naturalistic colours. He had probably been up on the scaffolding with Michelangelo in 1511 and seen Michelangelo work up there and seen him paint, and I'm sure it would have blown his mind. Anybody seen Michelangelo paint at that scale? At that point, it was late in the process. He spent four years on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Towards the end, he wasn't even preparing drawings anymore. He was just painting in fresco. It was not oil. He couldn't change his mind, but he was so confident that he could just paint. Sebastiano would have seen that and it would have just gone. He changed his life forever, and he was beholden in many ways to Michelangelo's example for the rest of his life, even though he was an independent artist with a very different sensibility. But he incorporated this Michelangelo... and struggled with this Michelangelo-esque influence for the rest of his life. And indeed, it's here not just in the figure designs and in their monumentality, but in the colours, even though he's rendered them with Venetian verve. To return to the landscape, that landscape, of course, it shows Roman ruins, the kind of ruins that he would have studied in Rome and he was interested, we have later anecdotes about Michelangelo and Sebastiano later when Michelangelo returned to Florence and before they fell out, where they would go and look at the ruins together and investigate and learn from antiquity. So he's painting a Roman campagna, a Roman countryside landscape here. And then he has this light, this afternoon light shooting across the fields and illuminating them in spots. You almost feel the clouds passing over the sun and the rays of the sun dotting the landscape. And that is just something that is supremely Venetian and what Sebastiano could do better than anybody in Rome at this time. He's rivalled in this probably only by Titian amongst his contemporaries. And it actually also is based on the Gospel, I think, because when Christ's disciples come to him and say, you shouldn't go back to Judea, you're taking an enormous risk, they want to kill you there. And he says, the day has 12 hours and people are safe during that time because they're guided by the divine light. And then he goes on to say that the divine light is not present when it's dark. And I think Sebastiano is possibly alluding to that, the passage between light and dark. This is in the afternoon, it's not night yet. The sun is there, maybe it's after a storm, who knows. That whole section would have been much more vivid at the time. It seems quite dark now, so some people think it's almost nocturnal at an evening lamp, but it would have been much brighter blue. So it's probably afternoon, the sun is still up, it's not a time when it's quite dark yet. But it looks more like that now. You also see how the light is passing through the leaves. The edges of the leaves, the brown leaves, are illuminated by the sunlight. This is the kind of thing that he was supremely good at. So, what are we dealing with here? We're dealing with a composition that tries to engage us in a divine miracle and give us a feeling of what that is. It encourages us to think about it, it opens it up to us, and I think it instils in us a sense of grandeur and the power of divine intervention. And indeed, to make a bit of a non-sequitur, Charles Darwin, in his study, had a print after this, and various other old master paintings. But this was a painting that was very important to him. Late in life, he remembered coming to the National Gallery to see this painting at age 15. And he mentioned various paintings, and he says, this is Sebastiano del Ciampo, always excited in me, a sense of sublimity. And this is, I think, exactly what this painting is doing. It gives you that sense of something greater, something incomprehensible, something in the face of which we are, in a way, insignificant, but in which we play a role. This is, of course, a romantic ideal. This is something that's formulated in the late 18th and early 19th century, but it's a way of understanding, I think, the feelings that this painting will elicit in the engaged viewer. Thank you.