The Raising of Lazarus (Sebastiano del Piombo)
| The Raising of Lazarus | |
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| Artist | Sebastiano del Piombo |
| Year | 1517–1519 |
| Medium | Oil on wood, transferred to canvas |
| Dimensions | 381 cm × 299 cm (150 in × 118 in) |
| Location | National Gallery, London |
The Raising of Lazarus is a large altarpiece of 1517–19 by the Italian High Renaissance artist Sebastiano del Piombo, for which Michelangelo supplied drawings for some figures. Intended for Narbonne Cathedral in France, it is now normally in Room 18 of the National Gallery in London, where it is "NG1", the first painting catalogued at the founding of the gallery in 1824. Until June 2017 it is in the exhibition Michelangelo & Sebastiano at the National Gallery, together with several of the preparatory drawings for it by both artists, and letters between them.
It was commissioned in what was effectively a contest engineered by Michelangelo, using Sebastiano as "a kind of deputy", or "cat's paw", in a rivalry between the two and Raphael, whose Transfiguration (now in the Vatican Pinacoteca) is the same size of 381 cm × 299 cm (150 in × 118 in) and was commissioned for the same cathedral. The verdict of Roman critical opinion was that Raphael's painting won.
According to Michael Levey, the painting is "a tour de force of massed, gesticulating bodies and glittering colour ... Perhaps all the elements have not been quite successfully fused, but the grand manner of the composition is impressive, and in its conscious rhetoric the painting looks forward to the Baroque."
Sebastiano, who had arrived in Rome from Venice in 1511, may have intended to dazzle the Roman critics with the colouring for which the Venetian School was famous, giving "the greatest and most subtly varied range of colours ever seen in a single painting". However, the complicated restoration history of the painting, and aspects of Sebastiano's technique combined with effects of age, have led to a general darkening of the painting, and significant changes in some of the large number of colour shades.
Lazarus's resurrection from the dead was much the most frequently depicted of the miracles of Jesus in medieval and Renaissance art, as both the most remarkable and the easiest to recognize visually, because of the grave-cloths. As well as following the Transfiguration in traditional sequences of the Life of Christ in art, the subject was especially appropriate for the cathedral at Narbonne, which had relics of Lazarus. The Medici family, whose name means "doctors" in Italian, were often attracted to subjects showing Christ as a healer (or medicus).
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