The Icon of the Transfiguration of Christ
There is a moment when looking at an old fresco when the eye already knows more than the mind has managed to name. At first, all you see is an oval — bright, blazing, unmistakably central — and a figure in white standing within it so calmly, as though standing in the middle of an explosion of light were the most natural thing in the world. Only after a moment does recognition come: this is not one scene but three scenes at once, played out on the same wall, by the same brush, among the same figures — only at three different moments in time, which the painter, without the slightest hesitation, has folded into a single image.
