The Transfiguration by Raphael (16th century)

Catalogue identity

The object is catalogued under the title The Transfiguration and attributed to Raphael. In the institutional record, its creation is placed in the 16th century, a broad period designation rather than a precise year. That period association belongs to the dating of the work itself, not to the dates of the later events in its documented history, which belong to the late 18th century and to modern cataloguing. The record also gives the subject as the Transfiguration of Jesus: Christ shown in glory above, with a possessed boy below. This is what the catalogue states about the work's title, maker, period and subject matter.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., File information; Date)

According to the institutional record, the painting is oil on canvas and measures 3,766 millimetres in height and 2,648 millimetres in width. The support distinguishes it from works on panel, and the scale establishes it as a very large canvas, dimensions that condition how the two connected zones of the subject are experienced. The same record also places the painting in the collection of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, under accession number 507, and it is under that number and in that collection that the object can be traced. These are the descriptive particulars supplied for the work: title, attribution, period, support, dimensions, subject and repository with accession identifier.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., File information; Date)

Taken together, the catalogue identity and the provenance record describe an object whose documented modern life in London collections is anchored by the Vandergucht ownership, the 1796 Christie's sale and the Mills gift, while its creation is assigned only broadly to the 16th century and its attribution to Raphael is stated as a matter of institutional record. The distinction between the object date and the later catalogue and transaction dates matters for how the work can be studied: the painting's period of making and the record of its movement through 18th-century hands are separate kinds of evidence. The subject, support, dimensions and repository information, together with the accession number, provide the fixed coordinates by which this particular Transfiguration can be identified and distinguished from other treatments of the same Gospel episode, and the two-part composition, glory above and a possessed boy below, is the descriptive link between the object's catalogue entry and the subject it depicts.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., File information; Date; Object history)

The artwork is titled The Transfiguration and was created by Raphael.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

The work is associated with the 16th century in its creation date, as stated in the institutional record.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

Subject and composition

Visual observation

The painting depicts the Transfiguration of Jesus, a religious subject in which Christ appears in glory above and a possessed boy is shown below. The institutional record describes the work under the title The Transfiguration, attributing it to Raphael, and associates its creation with the sixteenth century. The subject is therefore presented in the source as a single Gospel episode organized into two connected zones: the glorified Christ in the upper part of the composition and the possessed boy in the lower part, with the crowd and disciples occupying the ground level. This description is the object record's own summary of what the painting shows, and it is the basis for any further discussion of the composition and its iconography.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Description)

The Transfiguration is recorded in the collection of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, with accession number 507. The same record documents a provenance running from B. Vandergucht before 1794, through a Christie's sale in London on 11 March 1796, lot 92, where the work was bought by Thomas Mills, who gifted it in 1796. These details locate the painting within an institutional collection and trace a documented sequence of ownership, sale and gift. They also establish that the object's modern identification and its history of possession are separate strands of evidence: the visual subject described in the record and the chain of owners and transactions documented for the canvas are both part of the object's archive.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Description)

Interpretation

The relationship between the two registers is the central compositional fact recorded for this painting. Christ is described as glorified above, while the possessed boy appears below; the source presents these as parts of one religious subject rather than two separate pictures. Because the evidence supplies only the recorded description and does not detail the gestures, garments, furnishings or architectural setting, the account must stop at what the record establishes: an upper zone of glory and a lower zone of distress, each occupied by named figures in the Gospel narrative. Any reading of the picture as a contrast between divine power and human limitation would be an interpretation of that arrangement rather than a fact stated by the source, and the evidence does not attribute such a reading to Raphael's private intention.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Description)

Visual observation

Taken together, the documented medium, dimensions, collection and provenance give the visible subject a specific place in material and institutional history. The record identifies an oil on canvas of very large dimensions, held at Dulwich Picture Gallery under accession number 507, with a late eighteenth-century ownership and sale history before its gift in 1796. The source does not supply further details of clothing, furnishings, architecture or iconographic convention, nor does it document technical imaging or changes in appearance. What the evidence does establish is that the Transfiguration subject, the physical object and its documented history of ownership are recorded together, allowing the painting to be studied as both a religious image and a collected, transferred work whose later history is part of its identity.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Medium, Dimensions; Description)

The painting depicts the Transfiguration of Jesus, a religious subject showing Christ in glory above and a possessed boy below.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

Documented support and scale

The Dulwich Picture Gallery object record describes this work as oil on canvas, measuring 3,766 millimetres in height and 2,648 millimetres in width. The same institutional record associates the painting with the sixteenth century as its creation date. These are object-record facts rather than the results of technical examination: the supplied evidence establishes the medium and the dimensions as recorded data, and it establishes the century of creation as stated in the institutional record, without describing a canvas weave, a ground layer, a primer, a varnish, a stretcher, a lining, a pigment analysis, a sampling campaign or any conservation treatment. That distinction matters for how the painting is described here, because the support and medium are documented while the layered structure of the object remains, in the evidence supplied, unexamined.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Medium, Dimensions)

Visual observation

The large scale implied by those dimensions is not incidental to the subject. The object record gives the subject as the Transfiguration of Jesus, showing Christ in glory above and a possessed boy below, so the picture is organized as a single surface carrying two connected zones of action. A canvas of this size allows an upper register of radiant figure and a lower register of crowded, agitated bodies to be read together rather than as separate compositions, and it is that double structure, glory above and distress below, that the recorded subject and the recorded dimensions jointly describe.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Description; Medium, Dimensions)

The painting is oil on canvas and measures 3,766 mm in height and 2,648 mm in width.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

Documented Ownership and Transfers

The documented history of this Transfiguration begins with B. Vandergucht, who owned the painting at some point before 1794. The institutional record preserved on the Wikimedia Commons file page does not state how or when Vandergucht acquired it, nor whether the work had earlier owners, so no date of acquisition can be attached to his name from the evidence supplied. Ownership by B. Vandergucht before 1794 is the first recorded link in the chain, and the interval before it remains unrecorded rather than proven to be free of owners. The painting is oil on canvas, dated to the sixteenth century in the same record, and now belongs to Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, under accession number 507; those object particulars frame the provenance that follows, since they identify the physical work whose movements are being traced.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Object history)

The next documented event is a sale at Christie's, London, on 11 March 1796, where the painting appeared as lot 92. The lot number and the auction date are the specific identifiers the record supplies for this transaction, alongside the house and city. The sale is described as the occasion on which the work passed out of Vandergucht's hands, and the buyer is named as Thomas Mills. The record states that Mills gifted the painting in 1796, the same year as the Christie's sale, so the acquisition and the gift fall within a single documented year. What the record does not give is the identity of the recipient of that 1796 gift, the price at Christie's, or the terms of the transaction; those details are absent from the evidence rather than merely uncertain, and the account should not supply them.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Object history)

Interpretation

Read as a chronology, the provenance has two fixed points: ownership by B. Vandergucht before 1794, and the Christie's sale of 11 March 1796, lot 92, at which Thomas Mills bought the work and then gifted it in 1796. Between the 1794 terminus ante quem for Vandergucht and the March 1796 auction there is a gap of up to roughly two years that the evidence leaves unaccounted for; the record does not say when Vandergucht ceased to own the painting, only that he owned it at a time before 1794. In the same way, the record connects Mills to the painting in 1796 but does not document what happened to the work between the gift and its later presence at Dulwich Picture Gallery. The gap between the 1796 gift and the Dulwich accession is an unrecorded interval, not evidence of a change of ownership: the accession number 507 confirms the painting's current institutional home without establishing by what route, or in what year, it reached Dulwich. This distinction matters for how the object is studied, because a documented sale or gift is a different order of fact from a silence in the record.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Object history)

The Record and Its Limits

The provenance information is attached to an object record that also gives the painting its title, The Transfiguration, its attribution to Raphael, its subject as the Transfiguration of Jesus with Christ glorified above and the possessed boy below, and its dimensions of 3,766 by 2,648 millimetres. Those particulars are part of the same institutional record that supplies the Vandergucht, Christie's and Mills sequence, which means the provenance and the physical description are documented together rather than independently. The record dates the work to the sixteenth century and describes it as oil on canvas, consistent with the attribution to Raphael and with the work's stated place in Dulwich Picture Gallery. Because the record is the single supplied source for both the object data and the ownership history, later research that confirms or revises any part of that history would also bear on how securely the object description can be used.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Object history)

Interpretation

For the larger history of art and material culture, the documented provenance of this painting places a large sixteenth-century Transfiguration attributed to Raphael in the world of late eighteenth-century British collecting and auction commerce. The Christie's sale of 11 March 1796, with its lot number 92 and named buyer Thomas Mills, is a specific instance of how such works moved through the London market in that period, while the gift recorded in the same year shows the painting passing from a purchaser into another arrangement that the record does not detail. Vandergucht's ownership before 1794 shows that the work was already in British hands before the auction. The accession to Dulwich Picture Gallery, where the painting now bears number 507, is the end point of the supplied history, and the record does not describe the steps in between. Within that history, the painting's subject and scale, an oil on canvas of 3,766 by 2,648 millimetres showing glory above and need below, are the features that made it worth acquiring, gifting and eventually holding in a public collection.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Object history)

The painting was owned by B. Vandergucht before 1794 and sold at Christie's, London, on 11 March 1796, lot 92, where it was bought by Thomas Mills, who gifted it in 1796.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

Object record and collection

The work recorded here is The Transfiguration, an oil painting on canvas associated in the institutional record with the sixteenth century and attributed to Raphael. The same record gives its dimensions as 3,766 millimetres in height and 2,648 millimetres in width, so the picture belongs to the category of very large altarpiece-scale canvases rather than to a portable or cabinet format. Its subject is stated as the Transfiguration of Jesus, with Christ shown in glory above and a possessed boy below. These are the object-specific particulars on which the collection and display history of the work rests, and they come from a Wikimedia Commons file page that functions as a discovery aid rather than an official museum catalogue entry. The Commons page is the only source supplied for this object, and its own annotation describes it as providing title, artist, medium, dimensions, collection, accession number and provenance details where no official museum source was available; that qualification should be kept in view wherever the record is used as documentation.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Collection)

That account places the painting in the collection of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, under accession number 507. Through that accession number and that holding, the object enters a public museum collection rather than remaining in private hands, which is the point at which questions of cataloguing, attribution, condition and display policy become part of its history. The evidence supplied records the collection and the accession number but does not describe how the work is hung, how it is labelled, what its conservation history has been, or how it has been interpreted in gallery interpretation; those aspects cannot be stated from the units available and should not be inferred from the fact of collection membership alone.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Collection)

Provenance and transfer

The same record documents a provenance sequence for the work. It was owned by B. Vandergucht before 1794. It was then sold at Christie's, London, on 11 March 1796, as lot 92, and was bought there by Thomas Mills, who gifted it in 1796. The 1796 sale date falls two years after the Vandergucht ownership is dated, and the gift by Mills in the same year as his purchase means the work moved from private collection to gift within a very short interval. Because the unit gives no intermediate owners between Vandergucht and the 1796 sale, and no recipient named for the gift, the chain of custody should be reported only in the terms the record uses: Vandergucht before 1794, the Christie's sale of 11 March 1796, lot 92, purchase by Thomas Mills, and Mills's gift in 1796. Any continuous ownership narrative beyond those four facts would be an addition, not a documented interval.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Collection)

Subject and composition in the record

The subject recorded for the picture is the Transfiguration of Jesus, with the glorified Christ above and the possessed boy below, and that binary composition matters for how the object has been described and collected. A single Gospel episode is presented in two connected zones, an upper glory and a lower scene of need, so that devotional attention is directed both at the radiant figure and at the unfinished healing on the ground. Because the supplied record identifies the subject in this two-part way rather than as a single narrative moment, the collection description and any future display label would need to account for both registers. The evidence does not attribute any intention to Raphael in choosing this arrangement, and no reading of the composition should be presented as if the sources stated one.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Collection)

Qualifications and limits of the record

Interpretation

Several consequential points about this object remain uncertain in the evidence supplied. The Commons record is a partially consulted discovery aid, not an official museum source, so its attribution to Raphael, its sixteenth-century dating, its medium and dimensions, and its provenance details are secure only to the extent that this single page can be treated as documentation. The record supplies no information about condition, treatment, frame, exhibition history, page-level catalogue references, or the terms of the 1796 gift; nor does it state an acquisition date for Dulwich beyond the fact of accession number 507. The appropriate scholarly posture is therefore to treat the collection, the accession number, the physical description and the provenance sequence as the object's documented skeleton while marking attribution, dating and interpretive framing as reported rather than independently verified in these units.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d., Collection)

The work is in the collection of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, with accession number 507.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

The object and its record

Interpretation

The object is recorded as The Transfiguration, a sixteenth-century oil on canvas by Raphael, held in the collection of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, under accession number 507. Its recorded dimensions are 3,766 millimetres by 2,648 millimetres, a scale that the calculation below treats as exceptionally monumental for a canvas. The same institutional record specifies the subject as the Transfiguration of Jesus, describing Christ glorified above and the possessed boy below, so that the title, medium, support, date, holding, and iconography all rest on a single supplied source rather than on independent documentation.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

Provenance as supplied runs from B. Vandergucht, who owned the painting before 1794, to a Christie's sale in London on 11 March 1796, lot 92, where it was bought by Thomas Mills, who then gifted it in 1796. Notably, the excerpt gives no price for that sale or for any other transaction connected with the work; the ownership sequence is recorded, the money is not. The object history in the excerpt therefore establishes a chain of hands and an auction event but supplies no financial figure that could anchor a market value.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

Value: what was calculated and on what basis

The single supplied evidence unit in this section is a working insurance calculation, not a valuation record. Dated 2026-10-16, it is described as model-generated and intended for manual review only, and it is explicitly not an official insurance value, appraisal, auction result, or sale price. It carries the qualification that it must not be used as the basis for binding coverage, lending, tax, or transfer decisions, and that it should be confirmed with a qualified fine art appraiser, the holding institution, and a specialist insurer before any insurance placement.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

The calculated range of US$300 million to US$500 million is derived entirely from the supplied context: Raphael as a premier Italian Renaissance master, a large oil on canvas dated to the sixteenth century, the monumental dimensions, and a long institutional collection history at Dulwich Picture Gallery with accession number 507. The methodology states that no comparable sales and no private insurance records were used or accessed, and that because the work is a public-institution holding and no official insurance value, last sale price, or auction result appears in the excerpts, the calculation is intentionally broad and conservative. The range is set high enough to reflect the rarity and historical importance implied by the confirmed artist and period, but it rests on no market transaction or private valuation record.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

Read together, the two strands of evidence describe an asymmetry worth stating plainly. The object's authorship, period, medium, dimensions, subject, accession number, and provenance sequence are all affirmatively recorded, while its monetary history is empty at exactly the points where a valuation would normally begin: no 1796 hammer price, no later sale result, no official institutional figure. That asymmetry is the reason the calculated working range exists at all, and it also explains its breadth. Within the supplied record, the calculation is the only statement about value, and it identifies itself as a provisional construction rather than a documented fact, so it cannot be promoted into evidence of what the painting is worth or has ever fetched.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)

Working estimate

Calculated working insurance estimate, not a sale price: Estimated value: US$300M to US$500M Recorded date: Working calculation, generated 2026-10-16. Methodology: This working range is derived from the supplied context only: Raphael, a premier Italian Renaissance master; a large oil on canvas dated to the 16th century; dimensions of 3,766 mm by 2,648 mm, indicating an exceptionally monumental scale; and a long institutional collection history at Dulwich Picture Gallery with accession number 507. The object history in the excerpt records Vandergucht before 1794 and a 1796 Christie's sale, but no price is given. Because the work is a public-institution holding and the excerpts contain no official insurance value, last sale price, or auction result, the calculation is intentionally broad and conservative. The range is set high enough to reflect the rarity and historical importance implied by the confirmed artist and period, but it is not based on a market transaction or private valuation record. Qualification: Model-generated working range for manual review only. This is not an official insurance value, appraisal, auction result, or sale price, and it must not be used as the basis for binding coverage, lending, tax, or transfer decisions. No comparable sales or private insurance records were used or accessed. The range relies solely on the supplied artwork context and institutional metadata. Confirm with a qualified fine art appraiser, the holding institution, and a specialist insurer before any insurance placement.(Wikimedia Commons: The Transfiguration, n.d.)