About this work
*Vision of Ezekiel* is a painting of around 1518 in which Raphael renders the prophet Ezekiel's vision of God in majesty. Despite its modest dimensions — oil on panel, just 41 by 29 centimetres — dated ca. 1518, it delivers an image of concentrated, almost vertiginous power. At the centre stands an unclothed God the Father, his body strong and young, surrounded by an eagle, an angel, a lion, and a bull, with two cherubim at his sides.
Matthew is depicted as the angel enrobed in a pale blue-purplish robe, and the four creatures follow the interpretation of St. Jerome: the man symbolising Matthew, the lion Mark, the ox Luke, and the eagle John.
A centrally placed tree dominates the low, broad landscape below, while the sky is stormy and turbulent; the divine group hovers amid the clouds, surrounded by an aura of bright light, as the angel, eagle, lion, and ox spiral around the vigorous central figure.
A corolla of angelic heads fills the red-hot opening in the sky, painted in monochrome or simply engraved in the primer, creating a vibrant sense of movement.
Ezekiel himself is so small he can scarcely be recognised in the bottom left, the scene completely dominated by the vision.
The panel is generally agreed to date to 1517–1518, the period of Raphael's most intense activity in Rome, when his workshop was populated by gifted collaborators to whom the artist delegated important tasks for translating his ideas in both graphic and pictorial terms.
It is a telling example of how elements derived from Michelangelo entered Raphael's work after 1517.
Although the iconographic formula of the Vision of the Almighty had been painted and sculpted thousands of times in Byzantine and Romanesque art, in Raphael's interpretation it resurfaced totally rejuvenated, creating a strange atmosphere that had nothing to do with the conventional laws of perspective.
Rather than describing the four Cherubim as the prophet did — inspired by Babylonian iconography — Raphael represents a classical divinity with the traditional symbols of the Evangelists, fusing biblical scripture with the visual language of antiquity. Giorgio Vasari, who saw the panel in person, noted: "No less rare and beautiful in its smallness than the other things in its greatness."
In 1799 the panel was seized by French troops and kept in Paris until its return in 1816;
