Die Vision des Ezechiel

This is tiny, barely 16 inches tall, and Raphael packed the whole sky into it. The prophet Ezekiel described a vision of God carried by four strange living creatures. Raphael, painting around 1518 in Rome, turned that into something more classical: God borne aloft by the four symbols of the Evangelists, the angel, the eagle, the lion and the ox, spiraling around him with two small cherubs. Ezekiel himself is almost impossible to find. He is a tiny figure down in the lower left, swallowed by the vision he is having. The panel later traveled against its will. French troops seized it in 1799 and kept it in Paris until it was returned to Florence in 1816.