San Giacomo Maggiore. Dettaglio della cupola

Here Christ appears to us as he soars to the heavens to take the Evangelist with him. All around a wreath of apostles seated on the clouds surrounds the opening that sinks into the highest sphere of Paradise, where a luminous blanket of cherubs, whose splendor fades into the golden clouds, surrounds Christ. Here, as Augustine teaches, Christ reappears, as he had left the earth at the moment of his Ascension into heaven, to ascend a second time. The twelve apostles are witnesses of this. Truly amazing is the figure of Christ, such as to leave Saint John incredulous and surprised, which captures our gaze in his fascinating isolation in the middle of tiny heads of cherubs. They stand out in a golden light that fades away, by virtue of the nuanced, towards the center of the sky until it fades into a diaphanous light from which it is possible to measure the dense density of the painterly matter. This is an admirable synthesis of the master; thanks to the mixture of light-color matter, he reaches an unprecedented formal definition in the figure of Christ and the cherubs, and below the apostles and ephebes.