Raphael
NG 213 
The Dream of a Knight

Carlo Plazzotta, 2024

Extracted from:
Carol Plazzotta and Tom Henry, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings: Volume IV, Raphael (London: The National Gallery, 2022).

About 1504

Oil on poplar, 17.5 × 17.5 cm (panel); 17.1 × 17.3 cm (painted area)

Inscribed at bottom left, in dark paint, the Borghese inventory number 69¹ (fig. 1)

Support²

The support, identified as poplar,³ is a single panel, vertical in grain, with a variable thickness of 0.4 cm reducing to as little as 0.15 cm in places. The tiny panel corresponds in size to its erstwhile companion, the Three Graces in the Musée Condé, Chantilly (fig. 2). The similar array of rings in the upper half of both panels, centred around a knot, suggests that each was made using wood from the same tree, the two planks probably cut consecutively.⁴ The pattern of pores is different, however, precluding the possibility that the pictures were recto and verso of a single board.⁵ At an unknown date, probably in the nineteenth century before the picture’s acquisition, the panel was thinned and reinforced with fixed wooden battens applied to the back, providing a framework similar in appearance to a stretcher for a canvas. There are three horizontal battens, at the upper and lower edges and across the centre of the panel. These intersect six shorter vertical sections at the left and right edges and in the middle. No nails are visible in the X‐radiograph so they must be attached with glue. Small blocks of wood are glued alongside the battens in the interstices formed by the structure. All four edges have been trimmed, but the bottom edge – where traces of a ‘barbe’ remain (see under ‘Ground and priming’ below and fig. 3) – less so. The Chantilly panel has a different cradle on the back, probably applied at some time after the two works were separated when sold from Sir Thomas Lawrence’s estate (see under ‘Previous owners’ below).

Ground and priming

The panel was prepared with a white gesso ground, identified as calcium sulphate by chemical tests under a microscope. The presence of a priming is indicated by brushstrokes crossing forms beneath the surface of the paint, visible in raking light and infrared reflectography, although its composition has not been determined. Tiny white spots in the X‐radiograph reveal where the priming has penetrated bubbles in the gesso. The ‘barbe’ (a raised spur of gesso) that survives along the bottom edge only, as it also does on the Three Graces, implies that each was originally painted in an engaged frame, attached before it was prepared for painting.⁶ The removal of the frames, gessoed continuously with the panel, left a jagged barbe along the edges, three of which were subsequently trimmed off (as mentioned under ‘Support’ above).

Underdrawing⁷

As is evident from the infrared reflectogram mosaic (fig. 4), the underdrawing for the composition of the Dream of a Knight, executed in a liquid material, is based on pouncing, almost certainly from the closely corresponding pricked cartoon in the British Museum (fig. 5; see under ‘Drawings’ below).⁸ A ruled vertical central line, which also appears in the cartoon, was incised into the gesso to register the design on the panel. The main outlines of the cartoon were pricked through with a pin and powdered charcoal was pounced through the holes onto the support in preparation for painting. The resulting dots, or spolveri, were joined up using paint or ink but have mostly been brushed off the gesso and are therefore difficult to detect in the underdrawing. They can be observed only where they have been trapped by the line, for example in the outlines of the hills in the background on the right, and at the back of the skirt of the female figure on the right. Even where the actual dots no longer remain, the style of the underdrawing is typical of a drawing based on a cartoon transfer, with simple rather schematic outlines.

Raphael was meticulous in his pricking of cartoons, which are characterised by numerous closely spaced holes along every outline, enabling him to produce exceptionally exact replicas on the prepared support, as is the case here.⁹ After the basic design had been transferred, he frequently elaborated the underdrawing further, adding hatching for shadows and making changes freehand. In the Dream of a Knight, only very minor additional squiggles for bushes, drapery folds and revisions to rooflines were added in the underdrawing because the pricking from the cartoon was already so comprehensive.

Revisions

Characteristically, Raphael made some minor changes. Already in the underdrawing, he modified the revealing décolletage of the female figure on the right to a looser, more modest tunic. When he began painting, he adapted the neckline of the female on the left to a rectangular design and replaced a stream traversed by a flat bridge with a crossroads where three horsemen congregate. Otherwise, the painting’s composition is identical to that of the drawing. Landscape features such as grasses, bushes and the stones in the foreground, along with other delicate details including the flowers held by the figure on the right and in her hair, and the leaves and branches of the bay tree, were added at the painting stage.

Materials and technique¹⁰

Owing to the small size of the picture, and its excellent state of preservation, only one sample exists, taken from the blue sky in the extreme top right corner. The materials were instead studied with a stereomicroscope at magnifications up to 40x. The presence of a priming and the nature of the brushwork are indicative of an oil medium, although this has not been confirmed by scientific analysis.¹¹

The sky is painted with natural ultramarine mixed with white, as are the distant mountains. The greener parts of the landscape are composed of varying proportions of a green pigment, probably verdigris, lead‐tin yellow and some ultramarine, with a little black in addition in the darker greens in the middle distance. The central laurel tree is painted directly over the sky; the bluish‐green foliage contains azurite, verdigris and a yellow pigment; lead‐tin yellow is the main pigment in the highlights.

The blue dress of the female figure at the left is painted with ultramarine combined with varying amounts of white, applied on a purplish underlayer containing ultramarine, red lake and white. The yellow and pale pink parts of her sleeves are modelled with red lake and red earth mixed with white over a lead‐tin yellow underpaint, while the browner yellow upper part of the sleeves contains orpiment and red earth pigment with lead‐tin yellow highlights. The orpiment may have degraded to some degree given the dull tone of the paint. Verdigris and lead‐tin yellow were used in the green sash of the dress. The headdress contains white, ultramarine and a trace of red lake.

The highest‐quality ultramarine in the picture was reserved for the knight’s cuirass at the heart of the picture. His cool grey armour is painted with white and black; there is some ultramarine in addition in the bluer highlights. His green cloak is lead‐tin yellow mixed with verdigris with a green glaze. There is a modelled pink underlayer of red lake and white in his orange hose, partially covered with a layer of yellow containing orpiment and yellow earth; a similar technique is used for the shoes, which have a grey‐mauve underlayer. The leather parts of the armour also contain orpiment. The shield consists of a modelled underlayer based on vermilion with a red lake glaze; its duller red reflection in the armour is represented in red earth mixed with some black.

The red underdress of the female figure on the right has a mauve undermodelling that tends towards pure blue (ultramarine and lead white) in the shadows; the upper layer of red is red lake with white, together with vermilion in the more intense red mid‐tones and probably a further red lake glaze in the deepest shadows. There is a thin fragmentary line of gilding following the hem. The red lake glaze shows evidence of blotting with a finger on one of her sleeves. Her pale pink and blue cangiante drapery consists of a pinkish‐mauve mixture of white, red lake (faded) and some ultramarine, with ultramarine in the bluest areas. The string of coral beads is rendered with pure vermilion.

The flesh paints are quite solidly worked, given the small scale of the painting, and are modelled with lead white, red lake and a little vermilion.

A simple gold border painted around all four edges is old but not original. A similar gold border surrounds the painting of the Three Graces, except at the right edge, which was clearly trimmed at a later date (its edges were in addition bevelled before the gold border was applied, possibly indicative of its slightly different function; see under ‘Original commission and function’ below).¹² On both pictures, the gold border is painted on top of vestiges of red‐orange and blue‐green paint on the inside of the surviving barbes at the bottom edge, perhaps remnants of the colours of the original gessoed frames, which may have been painted rather than gilded.¹³

Condition and conservation¹⁴

The painting was described on acquisition as being ‘in excellent preservation’ with an ‘uninjured surface shown by the prominence of the darks’.¹⁵ It consequently received no treatment at the National Gallery until it was cleaned and restored for the first and only time in 1985. This treatment permitted the picture’s fresh colours and fine condition to be appreciated once again. There are two small areas of loss from the sky, at the left edge and to the right of the head of the female on the right, and a few flake losses from her skirt and from the thick red paint of the knight’s shield. An old scratch (now retouched) runs through the rocks and tree trunk at the centre of the painting.

Description

A young soldier, dressed in all’antica armour, lies asleep, reclining on his shield beneath a tall laurel tree, the slender trunk of which divides the picture into two halves. Standing barefoot to either side, and gazing tenderly down at him, are two young women who may be supposed to appear to him as in a dream. The one on the left, soberly dressed and with her long dark hair covered, offers him a book and a sword, while the woman on the right, more fetchingly attired, proffers a sprig of white flowers. The contrasting modes of life represented by the two women are reflected in the landscape background with a steep and winding path leading to a palace by a craggy eminence on the left, and gently undulating hills leading down to a sunlit lake on the right. In the middle distance, below the elbow of the figure on the left, three horsemen meet at a crossroads.

The picture combines a daring variety of blues, including a range of hues in the sky and distant hills, the violet‐blue dress of the figure on the left, and the pale blue dress with pretty pink highlights of that on the right; the most startlingly intense blue is reserved for the knight’s cuirass. The blues, warm reds and oranges of the figures’ costumes make them stand out against the green landscape, emphasising their almost heraldic symmetry.

This formal composition, with its lucid design and graceful intervals, is an unusual case of a painting devised in the manner of a syllogism or three‐part argument of a sonnet, seeming to propose that when virtue and pleasure are combined in just measure, chivalry flourishes (see below, under ‘Interpretation’, for a verse equivalent in a sonnet by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) that may have inspired Raphael’s tripartite structure). The obvious symbolism was undoubtedly driven by the picture’s probable origin as a wedding gift, and although we do not know its precise relationship to its companion, the Three Graces, the clarity and legibility of each may relate to their function (see under ‘Original commission and function’ below).

Attribution, dating and style

The painting has almost always been accepted as autograph (though René De Maulde la Clavière writing in 1897 mentioned it had recently been contested).¹⁶ In their monograph of 1882–5, Joseph Arthur Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle dated it to the time of the Oddi Coronation of the Virgin (1502–3, Vatican Museums, Vatican City), comparing it especially to the predella, while several subsequent scholars suggested earlier dates.¹⁷ Comparison with the symmetrical composition (particularly of the Virgin and Saint Augustine proffering crowns) in Raphael’s studies for the Coronation of Nicholas of Tolentino (1500–1) might seem to support some scholars’ preference for a slightly earlier date.¹⁸ However, although Raphael may have been harking back to an earlier design, the figures in the Dream of a Knight are less mannequin‐like and the ‘pot‐hook’ character of the drapery folds is much less mechanical and more fluid. The date of about 1504 for NG 213 is now widely accepted on account of the style of both the painting and its cartoon, the date of Raphael’s Sienese sojourn (around 1503) when he was able to study the antique sculpture representing the Three Graces owned by the Piccolomini family (see Appendix 1 and fig. 23), as well as its likely connection with events at the Urbino court outlined under ‘Original commission and function’ below. A little later, in his Madonna of the Pinks (1506–7; NG 6596), the hands of the Virgin, holding the pinks that give the painting its name, are extremely close in form to those of the woman on the right in NG 213 but in reverse, demonstrating Raphael’s habit of recycling successful designs.

The Dream of a Knight is executed with miniature‐like precision (see, for example, the tiny drawbridge leading from the rock to the castle and the bell visible in the campanile at the end of the pontoon; figs 6 and 7). Raphael is still working in the tradition of Pietro Perugino (about 1450–1523) and in a workshop style dependent on the study of male studio models, or garzoni, standing in simple contrapposto poses, with gracefully tilted heads and simple hand gestures (see fig. 19 under ‘Drawings’ below). The comparably small picture of Saint George, painted to commemorate the bestowal of the Order of the Garter on Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino (1472–1508) by the English king Henry VII in May 1504, but usually dated around 1505–6 (fig. 8), is already more confident in the arrangement in space of the rider, horse and particularly the writhing dragon.

The landscape features – including the buildings with steep roofs, spires and the causeway or covered pier projecting into the lake (fig. 9) – show Raphael responding to Northern European art, filtered through the work of Pietro Perugino, who so often depicted receding green and blue hills and fairy‐tale buildings on the banks of sunlit waterways. The older master had been much influenced by Netherlandish landscape painting, which he had observed when in Florence in works by Hans Memling (1430–1494). Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi (for whom see further under ‘Subject’ below), had praised the works of Netherlandish painters Jan van Eyck (active 1422; d. 1441) and Rogier van der Weyden (about 1399–1464) in his rhymed chronicle, and Raphael almost certainly knew works by these artists, both noted for their exquisitely detailed landscapes, in the Montefeltro collections at Urbino.¹⁹ The landscape in the Dream of a Knight is nevertheless still relatively simple – one might say additive – when compared with those of Perugino, and especially so with the much more sophisticated Netherlandish inspired landscapes of Raphael’s own slightly later works such as the Madonna of the Meadow (1505–6; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) or the portraits of Agnolo and Maddalena Doni (about 1506–7; Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence). These comparisons place NG 213 firmly in the period before Raphael moved to Florence in late 1504, when he immediately began to absorb and respond to the avant‐garde art he was able to study there.

Subject

Since Cecil Gould first catalogued the painting in 1962, the picture has usually been referred to by the National Gallery as An Allegory (‘Vision of a Knight’).²⁰ This title presumably derives from the first scholarly description of the picture by William Young Ottley, the learned connoisseur, collector and dealer who acquired it from the Borghese collection, in the catalogue accompanying his fourth attempt to sell the picture, on 25 May 1811 (see further under ‘Provenance’ below): The Vision of a Christian Knight, on pannel [sic]; from the Borghese Palace at Rome. The subject of this little picture may be termed the application of ancient Allegory to the state of Christian warfare. As in the choice of Hercules, the hero is here represented in a vision, assailed on the one side by the Pleasures of the World, whilst, on the other, he listens to the persuasive eloquence of Religion. It was probably painted some time after Raffaele’s first visit to Florence, is studied and finished in every part, so as to bear the largest magnifier, and is perhaps in its kind unique.²¹

In his monograph on Raphael, Johann David Passavant consistently referred to NG 213 as The Vision of a Knight, while Crowe and Cavalcaselle used the Knight’s Vision and Dream of a Knight interchangeably.²² Elsewhere in the literature (particularly French publications in the Gazette de Beaux‐Arts and the monographs of Eugène Müntz), the more poetic – and accurate – title of The Dream of a Knight (the protagonist evidently being asleep) became more frequently used, and this title is preferred here.²³

There have been several important contributions to the picture’s interpretation in the course of its history, which have gradually helped uncover the subtleties of Raphael’s deceptively simple yet sophisticated allegory. The first known record of the work, dating from the early seventeenth century when it was in Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s collection, describes it as ‘Le Tre Virtù’ (‘the Three Virtues’), which in many ways remains the most apt summary of the picture to this day, and one that does not exclude other interpretations (for the full text of the inventory reference, see under ‘Previous owners: The Borghese Family’ below).²⁴ The Three Virtues could refer either to all three figures in the picture, representing respectively Virtue, Valour and (courtly) Love, or to the three attributes proffered by the female figures, which would be Courage (the sword), Wisdom (the book) and Love (the white flower possibly identifiable as myrtle, which was sacred to Venus).²⁵ These are the chivalrous male equivalents of the three ideal feminine virtues represented in the picture’s companion piece, the Three Graces.

So far as we know, no classical source was proposed for the picture until Ottley first associated it with the ancient fable of the Choice of Hercules (see the quotation at the beginning of this section), invented by Greek philosopher Prodicus (465–395 BC) and retold by the Greek philosopher and historian Xenophon (430–354 BC). Nearly a century later, at the close of the nineteenth century, De Maulde la Clavière, noticing the absence of the lion skin, club and other attributes of Hercules, suggested that it represented instead an allegorical contest from a Renaissance retelling of the Hercules tale, namely the Stultifera Navis (Ship of Fools), in which Virtue and Pleasure vie for the future of the sleeping hero. This had been inserted in Jacob Locher’s (1471–1528) 1497 Latin adaptation of the wildly popular satirical allegory Das Narrenschiff, written by his teacher and patron, the German humanist Sebastian Brant (1458–1521) in 1494. Such a fashionable bestseller would no doubt have been immediately acquired and enjoyed at the Montefeltro court, and it is plausible that Raphael had access to it. De Maulde la Clavière indicated the relevance of the chapter entitled ‘Concertatio Virtutis cum Voluptate’ (‘The Contest between Virtue and Pleasure’) together with its woodcut frontispiece showing Hercules lying asleep in full armour, with two female personifications appearing to him as in a dream (fig. 10; discussed in Appendix 2 below).

In an erudite article dedicated to ‘Hercules at the Crossroads’ published in 1930, Erwin Panofsky demonstrated that the dialogue in Locher’s text incorporated phrases from Silius Italicus’s epic poem Punica (about AD 83–96), recounting the exploits of Scipio Africanus in the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, which had been rediscovered by Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) in 1417.²⁶ The connection between Locher and Silius led Panofsky persuasively to propose that Raphael’s subject relates to the dream of Scipio Africanus.

Scipio Africanus and Silius Italicus

The valiant Roman general Scipio the Elder (236/5–183 BC) was revered during the Renaissance for his victory over Hannibal and his defence of republican Rome, earning him the nickname Scipio Africanus. He was frequently included in monumental pictorial cycles of uomini famosi (famous men), such as the frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448–1494) in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and Perugino’s in the Cambio in Perugia (figs 11 and 12). For Dante – who in his Divine Comedy placed Scipio in Paradise – he was the saviour of Rome and a model of continence.²⁷ A little later, Petrarch (1304–1374), writing before the discovery of the account by Silius Italicus (AD 26–101), devoted himself to reconstructing Scipio’s heroic exploits from classical sources. His research culminated in his late unfinished epic poem Africa, written in Latin hexameters, a manuscript copy of which Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1422–1482), commissioned for his library there.²⁸ However, since Petrarch’s medieval account was not published until 1501, it was Silius’s more authentically antique narrative, published in no fewer than ten editions between 1471 and 1500, that was the most readily accessible and widely read source for the life of Scipio Africanus at the end of the fifteenth century.²⁹

Silius’s text tells how Scipio, taking his forces into battle against the African general Hannibal, won victories in Spain and North Africa, putting an end to Carthage’s empire in the western Mediterranean. It contains an episode (Book II, XV, 18–128), based on Xenophon’s account of the Choice of Hercules, in which the young Scipio is faced with the same dilemma as the mythological hero in his youth: These anxious thoughts filled the young man’s mind as he sat beneath the green shadow of a bay‐tree that grew behind the dwelling; and suddenly two figures, far exceeding mortal stature, flew down from the sky and stood to right and left of him: Virtue was on one side and Pleasure, the enemy of Virtue, on the other. Pleasure’s head breathed Persian odours, and her ambrosial tresses flowed free; in her shining robe Tyrian purple was embroidered with ruddy gold; the pin in her hair gave studied beauty to her brow; and her roving, wanton eyes shot forth flame upon flame. The appearance of the other was far different: her hair, seeking no borrowed charm from ordered locks, grew freely above the forehead; her eyes were steady; in face and gait she was more like a man; she showed cheerful modesty; and her tall stature was set off by the snow‐white robe she wore.

Raphael’s picture is clearly not a literal illustration of the story told by Silius: in his picture, Virtue and Pleasure are human in stature and their robes are neither snow‐white nor Tyrian purple respectively. But his depiction of the hero as a young soldier, the presence of the bay (or laurel) tree and – corresponding to a later passage – the character of Virtue’s abode (‘set on a lofty hill, a steep track lead[ing] there by rocky ascent’) provide significant parallels with Silius’s ‘vision’. Furthermore, although awake at the moment when Virtue and Pleasure appear to him, Silius’s Scipio subsequently falls into a ‘slumber deep as death’ and dreams of his dead father encouraging him to take the strategic port of New Carthage (modern day Cartagena) in Spain, which Scipio courageously goes on to do. It is significant that although Virtue in the painting offers the boy a sword, he already has one in the hilt at his side, indicating that – like the young Scipio – he is already equipped and has experience in battle. All these connections make it clear that the Punica was closely consulted, whether by Raphael himself, his patrons or perhaps a learned adviser or friend.

Raphael had grown up in the sophisticated humanist environment of the small court of Urbino in which classical fables such the Choice of Hercules, the Dream of Scipio and the Judgement of Paris were common currency, not least in the form of the luxurious series of Tournai tapestries representing the History of Troy that adorned the Throne Room of the Ducal Palace.³⁰ Storytelling of all kinds was a daily activity there, at the same time educational and entertaining, as demonstrated by the witty classical anecdotes and examples recalled by the participants in the courtly conversations in Il Cortegiano (Book of the Courtier) by Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), written and set in Urbino.³¹ Raphael’s father Giovanni Santi (active 1469–1494) had been employed as court painter to Duke Federico da Montefeltro (for whom see under ‘Original commission and function’ below), but he also invented texts and decorations for court masques, and wrote poetry, including, after the duke’s death, an epic rhymed chronicle recounting Federico’s life and deeds, in which he himself drew on the story of the Choice of Hercules as an allegory of creative endeavour, referring to his own text as a ‘visione in somno’ [‘a sleeping vision’].³² The classical stories of Hercules and Scipio, each with three distinct protagonists, are related in a manner that makes them very easy to visualise, and it is worth remembering that there was a tradition of reading texts out loud at the Urbino court. The erudite Federico had employed a reader both in his studiolo and during meal times, so that books and manuscripts were constantly brought to life in a manner that stimulated conversation and debate rather than being confined to scholarly perusal in a library.³³ Raphael was able to read some Latin but did not receive a fully humanist education; however, listening to such tales from a very young age would naturally have charged his visual imagination.

Influences

By far the closest visual precedents for Raphael’s dreaming knight are the sleeping apostles in paintings by Pietro Perugino. Raphael’s recumbent figure bears a striking resemblance to the slumbering Saints James and Peter – both with crossed legs and in the case of Peter with a dangling hand – in the older master’s altarpiece depicting the Agony in the Garden (figs 13 and 14).³⁴ Raphael also would have considered Perugino’s Resurrection for San Francesco al Prato in Perugino, which depicts a soldier in armour, his legs again crossed, sleeping at the foot of Christ’s tomb (fig. 15).³⁵ He characteristically developed Perugino’s formula and devised a more elegant and graceful solution for his sleeping knight.

In addition to these precedents, the minutely detailed engraved landscapes of the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) would have been of intense interest to Raphael. Dürer’s print of Hercules at the Crossroads (fig. 16), with contrasting background landscapes either side of a copse of trees, may have prompted the similar dichotomy in Raphael’s landscape background, though Dürer’s figures are very different.

Interpretation

In Raphael’s painted version of the story, the female allegorical figures, though contrasted, do not appear as contestants, or propose a moral choice between Virtue and Pleasure, as they do in the classical tale of Hercules at the Crossroads and several near‐contemporary depictions of it. Raphael seems to have started designing the Dream of a Knight with a similar contrast in mind, first drawing Pleasure in the cartoon in a low‐cut dress, the tight bodice of which reveals her cleavage through a transparent chemise (fig. 5), but he later changed this to a more modest style of dress. Thus, in the finished picture, both females appear equally chaste and decorous, and the gifts they offer are complementary, bearing equal weight in the knight’s dream. Only the landscape retains a hint of the divergent paths represented by the ladies in the myth.

As first pointed out by Andrew Ungar in 2006, the dual appeals of the women evoke, rather than antagonism, the chivalric spirit of a beautiful sonnet by Dante in which the Tuscan poet discusses how a love of both Duty (Virtue) and Beauty (who possesses ‘the high charm of perfect grace’) may be reconciled in a lover’s heart.³⁶ Raphael would have known the works of Dante very well by this date (indeed, the miniature painting of Saint Michael, about 1503–4, Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 608, also almost certainly painted for the Montefeltro not long before the Dream, draws on different parts of Dante’s Inferno). NG 213 is as evocative of the sonnet as of any previously identified literary source, and knowledge of it could well have fed into Raphael’s interpretation of this theme: Two ladies to the summit of my mind
Have clomb, to hold an argument of love.
The one has wisdom with her from above,
For every noblest virtue well design’d:
The other, beauty’s tempting power refined
And the high charm of perfect grace approve:
And I, as my sweet Master’s will doth move,
At feet of both their favours am reclined.
Beauty and Duty in my soul keep strife,
At question if the heart such course can take
And ‘twixt the two ladies hold its love complete.
The fount of gentle speech yields answer meet,
That Beauty may be loved for gladness sake,
And Duty in the lofty ends of life.³⁷

The key to the picture may lie in the graceful laurel tree, a sapling and thus young like its subject. Laurel was symbolic of honour in war as in love, and here it seems to spring directly from the young knight’s heart. If Raphael’s knight has a choice to make, it is how to balance the noble qualities of which he dreams in order to lead a just and exemplary life.

Both Hercules and Scipio were youths when they dreamt of their future path, and thus apt subjects to present to a boy on the threshold of manhood (see below under ‘Original commission and function’ for the probable recipient, Francesco Maria della Rovere, who was only 14 at the time the picture was painted). Raphael, who at 21 had himself only just emerged from boyhood, possibly identified with the question of how to balance virtue and pleasure, while pursuing honour and fame in artistic and poetic endeavours. This being the case, the picture may on some level be a personal manifesto, as Passavant was the first to suggest.³⁸

Original commission and function

The outstanding quality of the Dream of a Knight, combined with its literary and courtly subject, has led most scholars to conclude that it and its companion representing the Three Graces were painted for a patron at the court of Urbino, where Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (1472–1508) had ruled as duke since the death of his father Federico, the famous soldier, scholar and patron of the arts. Duke Federico had been portrayed, with his infant son and heir by his side, in a magnificent portrait (fig. 17) by the Spaniard Pedro Berruguete, one of the many cosmopolitan artists he attracted to his court.³⁹ Seated before a lectern in full armour, the insignia of the Order of the Garter prominently displayed on his left calf, his sheathed sword at his hip and gleaming helmet on the ground, he reads from a leather‐bound manuscript volume (the Commentary on Job by Pope Gregory the Great), from the rich and extensive library that he had assembled in his palace at Urbino.⁴⁰ The same attributes of armour, sword and book in the Dream of a Knight suggest that this picture, too, was designed to edify and inspire a young knight at court.

Scipio Africanus was a particularly apt exemplum of chivalrous behaviour for the Montefeltro military rulers. Duke Federico had been compared to the Roman general in the opening page of his biography written by the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (1422/3–1498).⁴¹ His portrait medal by Clemente da Urbino (active 1468) is framed by an inscription describing him as a second Caesar and second Scipio ‘in peace as in war’ (fig. 18). And as a youth, his son Guidobaldo had staged a triumphal procession in Casteldurante in 1488 in which actors playing his late father, in the company of Scipio, Caesar, a Sybil and an angel, rode in a chariot drawn by pantomime centaurs.⁴²

The year 1504, to which the pictures can be dated on stylistic grounds, was a highly significant one in the history of Urbino. In November 1503, Giuliano della Rovere (1443–1513) had ascended to the papal see as Pope Julius II, and had consolidated the restoration of Urbino to the Montefeltro following the city’s occupation from June 1502 to August 1503 by the condottiere (mercenary leader) Cesare Borgia (1475–1507). Guidobaldo’s sister, Giovanna Feltria (1463–1513), had been married to the Pope’s younger brother Giovanni Della Rovere (1457–1501), prefect of Rome and lord of Senigallia, and thus Pope Julius and Duke Guidobaldo were brothers‐in‐law sharing a common nephew, Francesco Maria Della Rovere (1490–1538), the prefect’s only surviving son. After the death of his father in 1501, the boy moved to Urbino to live with his uncle Guidobaldo and his consort Elisabetta Gonzaga (1471–1526) in the ducal palace there, leaving his mother to act as regent in Senigallia.

Following his elevation to the papacy, Julius II finally persuaded the impotent and sickly Guidobaldo reluctantly to adopt the fatherless Francesco Maria as his own son, with right of succession to the duchy, a decision confirmed at a consistory in Rome in May 1504, thereby fulfilling the Pope’s ambition to secure the title and territory of Urbino for the Della Rovere family.⁴³ On 22 May, Guidobaldo was appointed captain‐general of the Church (commander of the Pope’s military forces), and, in the presence of the Pope, his cardinals and the papal court, was formally invested as a knight in the English royal Order of the Garter, as his father Federico had been before him, an occasion celebrated by a sumptuous banquet and a parade through Rome, led by Guidobaldo wearing the insignia and robes of the Order. Guidobaldo’s promotion as captain‐general and his adoption of Francesco Maria were celebrated in the presence of the Pope’s papal nuncio and the entire court and citizens of Urbino in two grand ceremonies in the cathedral at Urbino in September 1504.⁴⁴

Meanwhile, from as early as December 1503, Julius had begun negotiating the marriage of the young Francesco Maria to Eleonora Gonzaga (1493–1550), daughter of Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua (1466–1519) and Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), and niece of Guidobaldo’s duchess Elisabetta, which took place by proxy in Rome in March 1505.⁴⁵ Although, in 1507, Francesco Maria brutally murdered his widowed sister’s lover with his own hands – a matter of considerable embarrassment for the court – this did not prevent the formal celebration of the marriage from proceeding in Urbino in 1510.⁴⁶

On account of its intimate link with the papal court in Rome, the court at Urbino began to attract scholars and artists who hoped to be recommended to the Della Rovere Pope. Baldassare Castiglione and Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), who were both to become close friends of Raphael during his years in Rome, worked there in the first decade. Although there is no documentary proof that Raphael was in Urbino in 1504 (documents are very sparse for these early years of his life), there was every reason for him to promote himself in his native city at this momentous time. In October of that year, just one month after Francesco Maria’s adoption ceremony in the Duomo, Raphael obtained a letter from Giovanna Feltria (often referred to as prefetessa on account of being the widow of the prefect of Rome, her son inheriting the role of prefetto), recommending him to Piero Soderini (1452–1522), head of the government of the republic of Florence where he wished to study artistic developments pioneered most notably by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564).⁴⁷ The warm terms in which the prefettessa speaks of him imply that she knew Raphael well, even from childhood, since she also mentions her fondness for his late father, Giovanni Santi.⁴⁸

Although Raphael’s exact movements are undocumented, it is perfectly plausible that he was present in Urbino shortly before Giovanna Feltria’s letter was written. If this was the case, then the Dream of a Knight may well have been commissioned from him there around the time of Francesco Maria’s formal adoption, and in anticipation of his forthcoming marriage to Eleonora Gonzaga. With its companion the Three Graces, it matches in quality and sophistication other small paintings that Raphael painted for the court at this time, notably another pair depicting Saint Michael and Saint George (about 1503–4 and 1504–5; Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 608 and 609).⁴⁹ These were almost certainly made to commemorate the investiture of the young Francesco Maria Della Rovere into the French royal chivalric Ordre de Saint Michel in 1503,⁵⁰ and Duke Guidobaldo into the English equivalent Order of the Garter, whose patron was Saint George, in 1504. Raphael’s painting of Saint George in Washington (mentioned under ‘Attribution, dating and style’ above), prominently displaying the garter on his left calf, is also convincingly associated with Duke Guidobaldo’s investiture, and may have been presented by him as a gift to one of his English sponsors (fig. 8).⁵¹

Marriage pictures

The Three Graces portrayed in the Chantilly panel were identified in Roman mythology as Castitas (Chastity), Voluptas (Pleasure) and Pulchritudo (Beauty), and in the Renaissance were often depicted as the companions of Venus or Cupid. Rarely, if ever, individually characterised in art, either ancient or modern, Raphael also makes no attempt to do so. His Graces are unusual in that each holds a golden ball.⁵² Several scholars who have written about the painting identify these as the golden apples that grew on the tree, guarded by the Hesperides, which Gaia had given to Zeus and Hera as a wedding present, and which Hercules had been charged to obtain as his eleventh Labour.⁵³ Alternatively, the gold balls could simply represent dowries or endowments for the bride, as often represented in the legend of Saint Nicholas.

As discussed under ‘Support’ above, the two panels were cut from the same tree, and thus likely to have been executed at the same time, but cannot have been recto and verso of the same board due to the different pattern of pores in the wood. The two works are linked through the modestly inclined heads of the five women, their graceful contrapposto poses, and above all in the coral beads that wind through the hair and about the necks of the three Graces, connecting them with the figure of Pleasure in the Dream who is similarly adorned, with coral beads in her hair and a long string that criss‐crosses her torso.⁵⁴ Often thought to have formed a diptych, they do not match compositionally when seen side by side because of the larger figures, more generalised background and different horizon line in the Chantilly panel.⁵⁵ Another explanation sometimes proposed is that they were intended as covers for portraits of the betrothed pair that have not survived or were never made; however, the square format, uncommon in portrait design, argues against this. The most plausible hypothesis is that the Three Graces was the cover of the more preciously worked and elaborately detailed London picture, which demands much closer inspection for full enjoyment (‘studied and finished in every part, so as to bear the largest magnifier’, as Ottley first remarked).⁵⁶

The Dream and the Three Graces are the only secular pictures other than portraits that Raphael is known to have painted before 1508. Regardless of how they were originally combined, they form an ideal pair probably having served a specific function: their conjunction of the masculine virtues of courage, learning and love with the feminine counterparts of chastity, beauty and love suggest they were made to mark the occasion of a marriage. The two images, one for the bride and one for the groom, would have had a commemorative function, not unlike medals struck for such occasions.⁵⁷ A suggestive comparison is afforded by the reverse of Niccolò Fiorentino’s (1430–1514) portrait medal of Giovanna degli Albizzi (1468–1488) made to mark the occasion of her marriage to Lorenzo Tornabuoni (1465–1497) on the reverse of which the Three Graces are represented (see under note 120 below).⁵⁸

When all of the above is considered, it is very probable that the two pictures were commissioned by a patron of the highest standing at the court of Urbino, most likely Duke Guidobaldo or the prefetessa Giovanna Della Rovere. The fact that the Dream depicts the soldier Scipio as a boy on the threshold of manhood strongly suggests that they were made as a gift for Francesco Maria della Rovere, soon after he had received a chivalric order, at the moment of his adoption as Guidobaldo’s heir and future Duke of Urbino, and in the knowledge of his forthcoming marriage to a Gonzaga princess following the precedent of his adoptive father Duke Guidobaldo.⁵⁹

Drawings

A single autograph drawing survives for the Dream of a Knight, namely the scale cartoon Raphael used to transfer his design to panel (fig. 5).⁶⁰ It was reunited with the painting probably in the collection of Sir Thomas Lawrence, and the two remained together when owned by Lady Sykes, passing on her death in 1846 to her heir, the Revd Thomas Egerton, who sold them to the National Gallery in 1847.⁶¹ For conservation reasons and as part of a bid to rationalise the national collections, the cartoon was formally transferred to the British Museum, along with other drawings in the National Gallery, in 1994.

The drawing is executed in pen and brown ink, and is exceptionally fine in its handling, characterised by Crowe and Cavalcaselle as ‘the faultless treatment of a hand trained to every finesse of drawing’.⁶² Most of the miniature paintings Raphael made for private patrons in his early years depend upon similarly detailed cartoons. This method of painstaking preparation is reflected in the clear construction and confident execution of the finished work.

The outlines and central plumbline are pricked for transfer. Both recto and verso are rubbed with pouncing dust (more heavily on the verso), indicating that the design was reproduced, certainly in the same orientation and possibly at some stage in reverse.⁶³ In addition to laying out the overall composition, Raphael paid close attention to nuances of light and shade in the figures, confidently building up the shadows with rapid diagonal strokes of hatching and cross‐hatching. The figure of the knight and the upper body of Virtue are elaborated in more detail than other parts. For the areas of deepest shade on and beneath the shield, Raphael intensified this linear hatching into a diamond pattern reminiscent of engraving, a technique with which he was familiar through his study of Northern prints. The cartoon – with its indications of light and shadow – would have been kept for reference during the execution of the painting, since only the outlines could be transferred by pouncing.

Since the outlines of the cartoon are unerring, suggesting that he had already worked out the design elsewhere, it is probable that Raphael had made other preliminary sketches for this composition. Gould referred to a copy after a lost garzone study by Raphael in the former Grand‐Ducal Museum (now Graphische Sammlungen), Weimar, as evidence that the artist drew the standing figures from life (fig. 19).⁶⁴ It shows two youths in contemporary costume, posed exactly as the two figures in NG 213, the one on the left even holding the sword and the book in his hands.

Previous owners

The Borghese Family

The Dream of a Knight and its companion at Chantilly are first recorded in an inventory of Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s collection, probably drawn up between Pope Paul V Borghese’s death in 1621 and the cardinal’s own in 1633 (see further the entry on Saint Catherine of Alexandria, NG 168, under ‘Previous owners’).⁶⁵

Gallaria [sic] dell’Appartamento di Mezzo

The identification of the ‘tre Virtù’ as NG 213 cannot be doubted due to its identical square size and proximity to the Three Graces, and to more explicit descriptions in later inventories, including that of 1693 (see further below). As stated in the inventory, they hung, in a very select display, with two arch‐topped paintings, the Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and a dancing figure of Hope,⁶⁶ then also believed to be by Raphael, in the ‘Gallaria [sic] dell’Appartamento di Mezzo’, probably one of the smaller rooms adjacent to Scipione’s studio in his new apartment on the piano nobile of the Palazzo Borghese in the Campo Marzio. Raphael’s Saint Catherine (NG 168) was one of eight ‘quadri di sopraporte’ (overdoors) by various artists in the same room.

By the time the caretaker of the Villa Borghese, Giacomo Manilli, published his guide to the family’s suburban retreat in 1650, Scipione’s heir, Prince Marcantonio II (1601–1658), had moved many pictures from the Palazzo Borghese to the villa on the Pincio, where he converted a room in the tower at the eastern corner of the piano nobile into an apartment consisting of three camerini, or cabinet rooms, to which he could retire to enjoy the precious group of pictures assembled there. NG 213 and its companion were displayed with other small works in the second room, corresponding to either Gallery XII or XIII in today’s arrangement, which had a bed in it.⁶⁷ Raphael’s Saint Catherine (NG 168) was also displayed here, again as an overdoor, and there were six other works then thought to be by the artist: the same two (probably) with which the pair had hung at Campo Marzio, and four little pictures of the Story of Joseph now recognised to be by Francesco Ubertini, called Il Bachiacca (1494–1557), still in the Villa Borghese today. Other religious or allegorical paintings of the highest quality included works attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Guido Reni (1575–1642), Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530) and Correggio (active 1494; d. 1534), and pictures in hardstone mosaic by Marcello Provenzale (1576–1639).

During the second half of the seventeenth century, after the Borghese title had passed on Prince Marcantonio II’s death in 1658 to his grandson and heir Giovanni Battista (1639–1717), the paintings were progressively moved from the villa, henceforward reserved principally for the display of sculpture, back to the palace in the Campo Marzio. After the major refurbishment of the ground‐floor apartments in 1671–6, partly to accommodate the enormous collection of more than 700 pictures from both the Borghese and Aldobrandini branches of Giovanni Battista’s family, the collection remained fairly static for a prolonged period. The most complete record of it at this time is an inventory of 1693, at which point the pictures were furnished with numbers many of which remain legible on works to this day. NG 213 is recorded, together with the Three Graces nearby though not immediately adjacent to it, among a prestigious group of profane pictures in Room VI, the state bedroom in the suite that formed Giovanni Battista’s apartment; these consisted mostly of female nudes or other amorous subjects, which surrounded the enormous zampanaro, or ceremonial four‐poster bed.⁶⁸

Little changed in the palace display for much of the eighteenth century until 1767–75, when the apartments were refurbished on the occasion of the marriage of Giovanni Battista’s great‐grandson Marcantonio IV Borghese (1730–1800) to Anna Maria Salviati (1752–1809). From then on, the majority of the paintings by Raphael, including the Dream of a Knight, Saint Catherine and the Baglioni Entombment, were displayed in the fourth room of the enfilade, which was the antechamber to the Throne Room. By then NG 213 had been framed between the little picture of Hope, with which it had been displayed earlier, and another small picture of Charity from Raphael’s workshop, all three mounted together on a single board.⁶⁹ Visitors to the palace, such as Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse (1746–1803) in 1783 and Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr (1757–1822) in 1787, began to discriminate between the quality of NG 213 and these two flanking compositions, which Von Ramdohr attributed to Raphael’s assistant Gianfrancesco Penni (1496–1528). By this time NG 213 had become dissociated from the Three Graces, which was displayed in a gabinetto (a small room dedicated to cabinet pictures) between the seventh and eighth rooms. Heinse waxed lyrical about both pictures, while Von Ramdohr demoted the Three Graces to the school of Raphael, deeming it ‘Zu unrichtig gezeichnet, um von ihm selbst zu seyn’ (‘Too ill‐drawn to be by himself’).⁷⁰

Ottley and Reboul

The separation of the two companions in the display at Palazzo Borghese must have been a factor in their being sold to separate buyers during the following decade when the Borghese and other Roman families scrambled to divest themselves of their more valuable works of art following the French invasion of Italy of 1796. The Dream of a Knight was bought in December 1798, together with many other Borghese pictures, by the artist, connoisseur and collector William Young Ottley (1771–1836). Some time that year, the French commissioner Henri Reboul of Pézenas (1763–1839), advised by the dealers Pietro Camuccini (1761–1833) and Alexander Day (1745–1841), had selected a small number of pictures that included the Three Graces.⁷¹

After completing his training as a painter at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Ottley spent several years in Italy, at first studying and then also collecting works of art (1791–9), which led to his eventual reputation as one of the leading connoisseurs of his day. His presence in Rome enabled him to be among the first to buy important works from the foremost noble collections flooding the market as a result of the political situation. On his return to London in March 1799, he offered for sale by private contract 26 Italian paintings, almost all from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which he had bought in Rome the previous December. Undoubtedly the most significant painting in this group was the Dream of a Knight (no. 24), described as, ‘A most capital and highly finished cabinet Picture, representing a Sleeping Warriour [sic], and two Female figures […]’.⁷² Three other pictures attributed to Raphael, also from the Borghese Palace, were the two little pictures (nos 16 and 17, in one frame) that had previously flanked NG 213 in the late eighteenth‐century Borghese display, and ‘A small Picture, representing the Martyrdom of Saints’ (no. 23, identifiable as Saint Jerome saving Silvanus and punishing the Heretic Sabinianus, about 1502–3, part of the Mond Crucifixion predella, today in the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, inv. G.65.21.1). Like most of the works in this first sale, NG 213 remained unsold and was reoffered in January–April 1801, and again in May, when it was bought in at 470 guineas. A decade later, Ottley attempted to sell the picture a fourth time, in May 1811, when it was once again bought in, now at 390 guineas. Although the connoisseur dealer recognised the picture’s quality and value, its tiny size and naive style did not make it attractive to collectors seeking glamorous statement pieces to decorate their imposing homes, the demand for which the recent Orléans sales had amply fulfilled.

After these failed efforts, Ottley seems at some point to have sold the painting privately to his friend the painter and collector Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), from whose estate, according to Passavant, it was acquired by its subsequent owner Lady Sykes.⁷³ In 1823 Lawrence, by then President of the Royal Academy, famously bought the majority of Ottley’s magnificent collection of old master drawings, including many superb examples by Raphael and Michelangelo. The high price of £8,000 (over a million pounds today) contributed to the passionate collector’s ever‐mounting debts. He may have acquired NG 213 from Ottley at around the same time, though it could have been earlier or later.

In 1822 another friend of Lawrence, the dealer Samuel Woodburn (1783–1853), had heard that pictures bought from the Borghese collection by the French commissioner Henri Reboul were being offered privately in Paris. Hastening there, Woodburn was able to acquire the Three Graces from Reboul’s wife for a mere 4,000 francs (approximately £150), selling it on to Lawrence for £500 the following year.⁷⁴ Soon after Lawrence had acquired the Three Graces, he asked Woodburn, who had remained in Paris, to find a frame for his prize: I thank you for the remembrance of the Graces, and of the pedestal for Mr. A[…]: a beautiful frame for the former is certainly a matter of anxiety with me. If you chance to meet with one most exquisitely wrought in gold, or even silver, by Benvenuto Cellini, I will not disdain it.⁷⁵

The silver frame on the picture in Chantilly today was not that commissioned by Lawrence but may have been inspired by it.⁷⁶ By December 1825, Lawrence, clearly in need of extra funds, obtained a loan of £2,000 from Lord Dudley, which he secured by giving him a promissory note for that figure, subject to interest and to be repaid within two years plus the Three Graces, which he had the option of redeeming at the end of the term for its by now increased valuation of £1,000.⁷⁷ Woodburn astutely realised that the two pictures reunited in Lawrence’s collection were originally conceived as a pair, referring to them as ‘companions’ in his letter authenticating NG 213 at the time of its purchase by the National Gallery in 1847.⁷⁸

Lady Henrietta Sykes

Just three years after Lawrence’s death, Passavant saw the Dream of a Knight in the collection of Lady Sykes, during his Kunstreise of 1833. Henrietta Sykes (1803–1846) was the daughter of Henry Villebois (1777–about 1847), whose family had attained their wealth by marrying into the Truman Brewery in a previous generation.⁷⁹ In 1821 she married Sir Francis Sykes, 3rd Baronet (1799–1843), whose country seat was Basildon Park in Berkshire. Orphaned at a young age, he had inherited not only the estate but also the debts and mortgage of his grandfather. The dowry of £20,000 that Henrietta brought to the marriage appears to have been the price for her to acquire a title, for it was no love match, both parties being involved in extramarital affairs. While Sir Francis was away on prolonged tours to Europe to improve his fragile health, Henrietta notoriously embarked on liaisons with two younger men, the future prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1894–1881), between 1833 and 1836, and immediately afterwards, the Irish painter Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) in 1837. Henrietta played muse to both lovers: in the year their affair started, Disraeli began the first volume of his romantic novel, Henrietta Temple, whose heroine was based on his mistress. At the start of her liaison with Maclise, the latter produced a large, highly romanticised, watercolour portrait of the Sykes family in medieval dress, with Henrietta – as regal in her apparel as the recently crowned young Queen Victoria – stealing the limelight from her dejected‐looking husband (fig. 20). This portrait, as well as another one by Maclise of Lady Sykes, was exhibited in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1837.⁸⁰

As a result of his ongoing financial problems, Sir Francis had placed his Berkshire estate on the market in 1829. His inflated asking price of £100,000 meant that the house was slow to sell, and thus was often let. It is therefore probable that Passavant saw the Dream of a Knight in the Sykes’s town house in Upper Grosvenor Street, London. The fact that Passavant described the collection as Lady Sykes’s rather than her husband’s is perhaps explained by the fact that the couple’s wealth was almost entirely due to her (curiously, in his Kunstreise of 1833 Passavant describes her as widowed, which he perhaps assumed because of Sir Francis’s prolonged absence, an error eliminated in the 1836 translation).⁸¹ Passing swiftly over two landscapes by Gaspard Dughet (1615–1675) and a landscape and a Virgin and Child by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Passavant wrote at length about NG 213, which he regarded as the ‘gem’ of the collection.⁸² He was delighted to discover that Lady Sykes possessed not just the painting but also the scale cartoon for it (see under ‘Drawings’ above), commenting: ‘the opportunity of examining these two works thus side by side, was no small gratification’.⁸³ His wording implies that he met Lady Sykes in person, so his later report that the picture was bought from Lawrence’s estate, otherwise unsubstantiated, is probably reliable.⁸⁴ Although there is no documentary proof, it is highly likely that the cartoon was also acquired from Lawrence’s ‘succession’ at the same time as the painting. As a practising artist, Lawrence – more than any other collector – enjoyed and understood the value in reuniting drawings with the pictures for which they were preparatory: he had, for example, bought the Purification of the Temple (NG 1194) by Marcello Venusti (1512/15–1579) from Woodburn to join four Michelangelo drawings for it already in his possession.⁸⁵

Despite having tolerated Henrietta’s affair with Disraeli on account of himself simultaneously conducting an affair with Disraeli’s former lover Clara Bolton, Sir Francis was incensed by his wife’s liaison with Maclise, so much so that in advertisements in The Sun and Morning Chronicle newspapers he denounced the pair, having arranged for them to be caught in flagrante by his servants at his house.⁸⁶ The scandal damaged Maclise’s career and ruined Lady Sykes’s reputation, obliging her to retire from society. Sir Francis died in 1843 and she followed him to the grave soon after in May 1846, at the age of only 54. The Dream of a Knight and its cartoon were inherited by her heir, the Revd Thomas Egerton (1809–1847). At present no other association between them is known, so the reason for her choice of him as her heir is a mystery. He appears to have been a respectably married clergyman, with a parish in Shrewsbury, who perhaps came to her aid after society had shunned her. It is also possible that Lady Sykes had promised the painting to him in return for financial assistance, judging by how swiftly after her death Egerton offered it to the National Gallery (on 30 January 1847) for the sum of 1,000 guineas, confirming a few days later that the cartoon was also included in the deal.⁸⁷

Acquisition by the National Gallery

When Egerton offered the picture, Charles Eastlake (1793–1865), then Keeper of the National Gallery, acted quickly, seeking the opinions of experts in accordance with prudential procedures put in place by Robert Peel (1788–1850) and Eastlake himself to establish consensus regarding the attribution and value of works to be purchased by the Gallery. Eastlake first approached the London‐based picture dealer Thomas Emmerson (about 1776–1865) and the Belgian art dealer Christian Johannes Nieuwenhuys (1799–1883), who on 2 February went to inspect the painting and the cartoon at Egerton’s London residence at 21 St James’s Place. While the former fully accepted the attribution to Raphael of both works, the latter rejected it, deeming them ‘unworthy of a place at the National Gallery’.⁸⁸ Because of this difference of opinion, Eastlake then sought two further opinions, from Samuel Woodburn and the eminent German engraver and print expert Ludwig Gruner (1801–1882). Describing NG 213 as ‘a Companion to the three Graces which I sold many years ago to Sir Thomas Lawrence for £500’, Woodburn stated he had ‘no doubt that both the Drawing and the Picture are true Works by Raffaello Urbino’.⁸⁹

Gruner is a little‐known hero in Raphael studies, specialising in engraving from originals by the artist, and having some years previously been chiefly responsible for recognising that the utterly neglected and very dirty Donna Velata (about 1513–14; Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, inv. 1912, no. 245) was a masterpiece by Raphael.⁹⁰ A friend and neighbour of Charles and Elizabeth Eastlake (1809–1893) in Fitzroy Square, he was appointed art adviser to Prince Albert in 1845, acquiring, commissioning and designing works of art and interiors for the royal consort for the next 15 years.⁹¹ He later supervised the design of the mausoleum in which Albert was buried at Frogmore, within the Royal Park at Windsor, arguably the most Raphaelesque building ever devised.⁹² When Eastlake sought his opinion about the Dream of a Knight, Gruner professed himself ‘astonished […] that there was some doubt raised as to the originality of […] this exquisite little gem’: I cannot but give it as my fullest conviction that either this little picture or none is done by the immortal master – in fact I am of the persuasion that to any artist or amateur who ever studies Raphael the little toe alone of the left hand figure in the design accompanying the picture will be ample proof of the originality.⁹³

Eastlake submitted the three positive opinions to the Treasury and the Gallery received confirmation that the purchase had been approved by the Lords Commissioners on 17 March 1847.⁹⁴ The vendor, Egerton, died in September of the same year.

Copies and prints

When Passavant viewed the Dream of a Knight in the collection of Lady Sykes, she gave him permission to make a watercolour copy, which survives in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt (fig. 21).⁹⁵ Otherwise, perhaps because of the small scale and intricacy of the composition, no painted copies of note exist.

Ludwig Gruner (for whom see under ‘Previous owners: acquisition by the National Gallery’, below) engraved the composition twice, once for the first edition of Passavant’s monograph on Raphael of 1839, and a second time in 1847 on his own account, as Passavant himself recalled in his French edition of 1860.⁹⁶ Passavant must have arranged with Lady Sykes for Gruner also to study the painting from the original since his engraving is considerably more accurate and detailed than Passavant’s copy.

• 1. Engraving and etching, 24.1 × 24.5 cm (the same size as the painting), inscribed at lower centre: ‘DIE VISION EINES RITTERS’.⁹⁷
• 2. Engraving, 22.7 × 23.2 cm, inscribed ‘RAPH.VRBI.INV’.⁹⁸ Other impressions are inscribed ‘VISION OF A KNIGHT’. It was engraved again with the National Gallery’s permission, probably in late 1868, by Jean‐Baptiste Danguin (1823–1894).⁹⁹
• 3. Engraving, (plate) 30.3 × 27.2 cm. Inscribed with the title ‘LE SONGE DU CHEVALIER/ NATIONAL GALLERY’.¹⁰⁰

Framing

Like the Three Graces, the Dream of a Knight was originally painted in an engaged gilt frame (see under ‘Ground and priming’ above). When in Scipione Borghese’s collection, both pictures were recorded in matching ebony frames.¹⁰² By the end of the seventeenth century, the former had a gilt frame, presumably also matched by the frame on the Three Graces, which hung below it, though the framing of the latter is unspecified.¹⁰³ By the 1780s, the Dream was again redisplayed, this time framed on a long panel flanked on either side by small pictures of Hope and Charity (then also attributed to Raphael), reflecting the difficulty in displaying such tiny works on the wall.¹⁰⁴ The Three Graces, in an adjacent room, was also recorded as being mounted on an oblong panel.¹⁰⁵

There is no record of the frame when the painting was acquired by the Gallery from Thomas Egerton in 1847. It was placed ‘in a case and under glass, together with the drawing’ and was seen in this arrangement in 1861 by the French sculptor Baron Henri de Triqueti (1803–1874).¹⁰⁶ In 1870 the then Keeper and Secretary of the National Gallery Ralph Nicholson Wornum (1812–1877) noted that the painting was put in a new frame and case (shadow box), apparently the third one since its acquisition (the case, though not the frame, was similar to that designed by Wornum for the Garvagh Madonna in 1865).¹⁰⁷ There is a note in the Board Minutes for 1870 about the expediency of protecting the cartoon from light, which may have occasioned it being displayed behind a curtain (fig. 22).¹⁰⁸

In 1914 the Director Sir Charles Holroyd (1861–1917) had safety glass manufactured by the Triplex Glass Co. Ltd fitted to a group of pictures including the Dream of a Knight following attacks by suffragettes on the Rokeby Venus (1647–51; NG 2057) by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) in March and five works by Giovanni Bellini (about 1435–1516) in May of that year, though this was soon dispensed with.¹⁰⁹

Wornum’s solution for the display of the painting above the curtained cartoon was still in place in 1935 (fig. 22), and probably until the painting was reframed at an unknown date in a simple gilt moulding fitted into a shadow box with an olive‐green velvet mount. The cartoon was displayed in a matching shadow box.¹¹⁰

For security purposes as well as for aesthetic reasons it was decided in 1987 to make a new frame for the painting.¹¹¹ An early sixteenth‐century Italian cassetta‐style frame with pastiglia arabesques was designed by John England and made in November 1987 by Christine Powell.¹¹² A similar frame was made for the cartoon at the same time.¹¹³

Exhibitions

London 1944; London 1980 (16); London 1983–4 (ex‐catalogue); London 1997 (ex‐catalogue); London 2004–5 (35); Rome 2006 (4); London 2007–8 (78); Urbino 2009 (37); Florence and Paris 2013–14 (16); Vienna 2017–18 (12); Rome 2020 (IX.8).

Provenance

In the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577–1618) by 1633, and thence by descent to Prince Marcantonio IV Borghese (1730–1800). Bought by William Young Ottley (1771–1836) in December 1798, and offered by him for sale four times in London from 1799 to 1811: Ottley private contract sale, 1799–1800, 31 Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, lot 24;¹¹⁴ anonymous private contract sale, evidently Ottley, 24 January–25 April 1801, 118 Pall Mall, lot 21 (presumably unsold);¹¹⁵ Ottley sale, Christie’s, the Great Room, Pall Mall, 16 May, 1801, lot 27, bought in (470 guineas);¹¹⁶ Ottley sale, 25 March 1811, lot 88, bought in (390 guineas).¹¹⁷ At some point, sold to Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), from whose estate acquired by 1833 by Henrietta Villebois, Lady Sykes (1803–1846). By whom bequeathed to the Revd Thomas Egerton (1809–1847), from whom purchased, 1847.

Appendix 1
The Case of Siena

Noting the influence in the Dream of a Knight and the Three Graces of classical works of art and themes popular in Siena in the early sixteenth century, Erwin Panofsky was the first to propose they may have been painted for a Sienese patron, and specifically a member of the patrician Borghese family, Sienese ancestors of the Roman branch of the family, who numbered more than one family member named Scipio.¹¹⁸ Panofsky thought the pictures could have been made for the confirmation in 1500 of Scipione di Tommaso Borghese (b. 1493), but this date is impossibly early for these panels, and the religious occasion would not have necessitated two panels with masculine and feminine connotations.

An important point in Panofsky’s argument is the fact that the composition of the Three Graces is based on an ancient Roman sculpture owned by the Piccolomini family who moved it from their Roman palace to Siena in 1502 (fig. 23). Raphael probably took the opportunity to study the sculpture – as attested by a copy after a lost drawing by him in the Venice sketchbook – when he provided drawings for Pintoricchio (about 1454–1513), who had been engaged to paint a cycle of frescoes in the Piccolomini Library in Siena in 1502. Raphael’s involvement is likely to have occurred during the winter of 1502–3 (or at least by the end of 1503), and therefore earlier in date than the Dream of a Knight and the Three Graces. Luke Syson, building on Panofsky’s case for a Sienese patron, pointed out the popularity of Scipio Africanus in Sienese iconography around 1500, including a birth tray by Benvenuto di Giovanni (1436–about 1509) depicting the Choice of Hercules (fig. 24), painted as a wedding gift for a Sienese family (mentioned in Appendix 2 below).¹¹⁹ Unlike in Urbino, where Scipio was particularly associated with the ruler himself, in Siena Scipio was one among many classical heroes and heroines depicted in a city newly ruled by oligarchs seeking to promote their city’s association with ancient Rome.

In this author’s view, the fact that the pair of paintings demonstrates knowledge of Sienese art neither establishes that they were painted in that city nor – if sent there from elsewhere – that they were necessarily for Sienese patrons. Raphael naturally absorbed and reconfigured the works of art he studied in Siena – as well as those he studied in the Marches, Umbria and Florence – in projects unrelated to the places where he had seen them. His homage in the Three Graces to the antique sculpture owned by the Sienese Piccolomini family would hardly have been an appropriate compliment had a rival Sienese family such as the Borghese commissioned these works. But any antique reference would have been suitable for a commission at the humanist court of Urbino. The Three Graces had, from the late fifteenth century, already been adopted as a subject by Italian medallists inspired by the antique mirror relief that we now know to have belonged to the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455).¹²⁰

Appendix 2
Other Contemporary Allegorical Images of the Choice of Hercules

As mentioned under ‘Subject’ above, a German woodcut – square in format like Raphael’s picture – has been proposed as a possible visual source for NG 213 (fig. 10), and particularly of the sleeping soldier in the foreground.¹²¹ Although it was Locher’s 1497 Latin translation of Brant’s text that led Panofsky to identify the subject of NG 213 as the Dream of Scipio Africanus, this should not lead one to assume that Raphael’s design was necessarily inspired by the woodcut, which is only conceptually rather than pictorially similar to the National Gallery picture. Illustrating the Choice of Hercules, the caricatured figures in the woodcut, in keeping with the spirit of Brant’s satirical text, are in stark contrast to each other. Pleasure (here called Voluptuousness) is represented by a young woman, coquettishly naked but for her hat and shoes, shadowed in a bower of roses by a leering skeleton (standing for the vanity of earthly delights), while Virtue is a modestly attired old crone with a distaff (connoting industry), surrounded by a thicket of thorns. As the verse below the woodcut explains, Hercules, considering the possible consequences of either choice, opts for the path of Virtue.

Apart from Locher’s woodcut illustration, an often‐cited visual precedent of the subject, which some authors believe Raphael might have seen when in Siena, is the desco da parto (birth tray) by the Sienese painter Benvenuto di Giovanni, probably made in connection with the marriage in 1500 of the Sienese patrician Girolamo Vieri to Caterina Tancredi (fig. 24). Here, the boy Hercules, shown naked, is pulled in opposing directions by the two ladies: by Virtue towards a rocky wilderness populated by lions, and by Pleasure or Voluptuousness towards nude bathers swimming in a stream.¹²² The ladies are portrayed as equally appealing. Unlike in Locher’s woodcut, the moral consequences of the youth’s choice are not explicitly spelt out and he is apparently perplexed as to which way to go.

Subtler than these examples is the elegant manuscript illumination by Giovan Pietro Birago (active about 1470–1513) in the Grammatica of Aelius Donatus, made in the late 1490s for the young prince Massimiliano Sforza (1493–1530) with its explicit rhyming caption, ‘Qui tutto alla virtute el conte e dato / E la donna di vitii ha refutato’ (‘Here the count gives himself to virtue entirely / and has rejected the lady of vice’; fig. 25).¹²³ Despite naming them as antagonists, the two ladies are depicted as equally graceful, elegantly dressed in contrastingly coloured costumes. Apart from the caption, the only clue to their identities is that Virtue points to the rocky path in the background, while Vice indicates a gaping black hole in the ground. As Kurt Forster pointed out, Raphael’s picture has far more in common with the aristocratic ideal of good conduct proposed by the manuscript illumination than with the Northern woodcut, both having been created in the context of humanist court culture, with an emphasis on education leading a young prince to wise choices (a topos known as the ‘exhortatio ad iuvenem’ or ‘exhorting youths to do the right thing’).¹²⁴ In the illumination, the child prince acknowledges his allegiance to Virtue by turning to her with his hand raised. In Raphael’s picture the sleeping knight lies at the feet of the two women, his head inclined towards Virtue, his heart at the root of the laurel and his body on the side of Pleasure.

Notes

The author is grateful to the following for their assistance in the preparation of this entry: Maria Alambritis, Rachel Billinge, Duncan Bull, Tom Henry, Nicholas Penny and Marika Spring.