The Raising of Lazarus

Perino del Vaga's Raising of Lazarus, painted in 1539 in oil on canvas and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, depicts the climactic Gospel miracle in which Christ raises the dead Lazarus from his tomb before the assembled mourners of Bethany. The Raising of Lazarus was among the most dramatic and theologically significant of Christ's miracles — demonstrating his divine power over death and prefiguring his own resurrection — and it attracted some of the most ambitious pictorial treatments of the sixteenth century, including Sebastiano del Piombo's enormous canvas for the same patron network as Raphael's Transfiguration. Perino's 1539 version, painted in Rome during the Farnese period of his career, would have brought his elegant Raphaelesque figure style to this charged narrative, with the contrast between the living crowd and the emerging bound figure of Lazarus as its dramatic core.

The large canvas supports the multi-figure composition that the Lazarus miracle requires — a crowd of amazed witnesses surrounding the central confrontation between Christ's commanding gesture and the emerging Lazarus. Perino's oil technique on canvas allows for the tonal range needed to distinguish the bright outdoor setting from the darker recesses of the tomb, creating a dramatic emergence of the living from the domain of death.