throng of angels. A second modello, done by Gianfrancesco Penni, shows a design with two scenes, as the painting was to develop. This modello is held by the Louvre. The Raising of Lazarus was unofficially on view by October 1518. By this time Raphael had barely started on his altarpiece. When Sebastiano del Piombo's work was officially inspected in the Vatican by Leo X on Sunday, 11 December 1519, the third Sunday of Advent, The Transfiguration was still unfinished. Raphael would have been familiar with the final form of The Raising of Lazarus as early as the autumn of 1518, and there is considerable evidence that he worked feverishly to compete, adding a second theme and nineteen figures. A surviving modello for the project, now in the Louvre (a workshop copy of a lost drawing by Raphael's assistant Gianfrancesco Penni) shows the dramatic change in the intended work. Examination of the final Transfiguration revealed more than sixteen incomplete areas and pentimenti (alterations). An important theory holds that the writings of Blessed Amadeo Menes da Silva was key to the transformation. Amadeo was an influential friar, healer and visionary as well as the Pope's confessor. He was also diplomat for the Vatican State. In 1502, after his death, many of Amadeo's writings and sermons were compiled as the Apocalypsis Nova. This tract was well known to Pope Leo X. Guillaume Briçonnet, Cardinal Giulio de' Medici's predecessor as bishop of Narbonne, and his two sons also consulted the tract as spiritual guide. Cardinal Giulio knew the Apocalypsis Nova and could have influenced the painting's final composition. Amadeo's tract describes the episodes of the Transfiguration and the possessed boy consecutively. The Transfiguration represents a prefiguration of the Last Judgment, and of the final defeat of the Devil. Another interpretation is that the epileptic boy has been cured, thus linking the divinity of Christ with his healing power. Raphael died on 6 April 1520. For a couple of days afterward, The Transfiguration lay at the head of his catafalque at his house in the Borgo. A week after his death, the two paintings were exhibited together in the Vatican. While there is some speculation that Raphael's pupil, Giulio Romano, and assistant, Gianfrancesco Penni, painted some of the background figures in the lower right half of the painting, there is no evidence that anyone but Raphael finished the substance of the painting. The cleaning of