The Transfiguration

The Transfiguration by Aelbrecht Bouts at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge depicts the moment from the Gospel of Matthew when Christ appears transfigured on a mountaintop, his face shining like the sun, witnessed by Peter, James, and John. Aelbrecht Bouts, son of the celebrated Dieric Bouts, inherited his father's Louvain workshop and continued the carefully refined Flemish religious painting tradition into the 1490s and beyond. The Transfiguration was a subject requiring the artist to represent supernatural radiance — a pictorial challenge that tested the limits of tempera and oil technique.

The representation of Christ's supernatural luminosity required Bouts to use gold and white paint to suggest radiance, the figure of Christ surrounded by an aureole of light that the disciples below shade their eyes against. The three witnesses below are rendered in the careful Flemish manner of his father's school, their gestures precisely calculated to convey awe.