The Dream of a Knight

A young knight sleeps while two women stand beside him, one offering a book and sword, the other a flower. Raphael painted it on a panel barely 17 cm across, and scholars still debate what the dream means.

The story behind the painting

Raphael finished this small painting in 1503 to 1504. It is egg tempera on poplar, about 17 cm square, and it is known by several names: The Vision of a Knight, The Dream of Scipio, or simply Allegory. It probably formed a pair with Raphael's Three Graces, a panel of the same size now in the Musée Condé. The two little pictures may once have been seen side by side, but today they live in different countries, and the knight's panel is in the National Gallery in London.

What to look for

At the centre a knight lies asleep, and two female figures stand with him. One holds a book and a sword; the other, in looser robes, holds a flower. Behind one of them rises a steep and rocky path. Raphael used an extensive palette for this colourful scene, and pigment analysis by ColourLex has identified lead-tin yellow, ultramarine, verdigris and ochres. Look at how much colour and detail Raphael fits into a panel smaller than a page, and at the objects in the women's hands, which carry the meaning of the scene.

Meaning and intent

There are several theories. Some art historians see the sleeper as the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus, who according to Cicero's Dream of Scipio had to choose in a dream between Virtue, with her steep path, and Pleasure, in her loose robes. Yet the two women do not look like rivals. They may instead stand for the ideals a knight should unite, the book, sword and flower pointing to the scholar, the soldier and the lover. The most likely literary source is a passage in the Punica, an epic poem on the Second Punic War by the Latin poet Silius Italicus.

Legacy

The panel was brought to England by William Young Ottley in 1800, and it is now part of the National Gallery. Its meaning has never been settled, and that uncertainty is part of its charm: a picture small enough to hold in two hands that asks how a life should be lived. One writer quoted in the source compares the sleeper to Lancelot and to Scipio, who toured the cosmos in a dream and learned that virtue is rewarded with a place among the stars, a reminder of how much this miniature has made people imagine.