The higher was stately, static and calm, while in the lower zone the disciples sprawl and writhe, in sleep or in terror. In Eastern depictions each prophet usually stands as secure as a mountain goat on his own little jagged peak; Christ may occupy another, or more often float in empty air between them. Sometimes all three float, or stand on a band of cloud. Western depictions show a similar range, but by the late Middle Ages, as Western artists sought more realism in their backgrounds, the mountain setting became a problem for them, sometimes leading to the upper zone being placed on a little hummock or outcrop a few feet higher than the apostles, the whole being set in an Italian valley. Two compositions by Giovanni Bellini, one in Naples and the other in the Museo Correr in Venice illustrate the rather unsatisfactory result. One solution was to have Christ and the prophets floating well above the ground, which is seen in some medieval depictions and was popular in the Renaissance and later, adopted by artists including Perugino and his pupil Raphael, whose Transfiguration in the Vatican Museums, his last painting, is undoubtedly the most important single Western painting of the subject, although very few other artists followed him in combining the scene with the next episode in Matthew, where a father brings his epileptic son to be healed. This is "the first monumental representation of Christ's Transfiguration to be entirely free of the traditional iconographic context", though it can be said to retain and re-invent the traditional contrast between a mystical and still upper zone and a flurry of very human activity below. The floating Christ inevitably recalled the composition of depictions of his Resurrection and Ascension, an association which Raphael and later artists were happy to exploit for effect. The so-called Dalmatic of Charlemagne in the Vatican, in fact a 14th or 15th century Byzantine embroidered vestment, is one of a number of depictions to include the subsidiary scenes of Christ and his disciples climbing and descending the mountain, which also appear in the famous icon by Theophanes the Greek (above). Interpretation Most Western commentators in the Middle Ages considered the Transfiguration a preview of the glorified body of Christ following his Resurrection. In earlier times, every Eastern Orthodox monk who took up icon painting had to start his craft by painting the icon of the Transfiguration,