Vision of a Knight

I did this a cou­ple of years ago. It’s a copy of a small panel paint­ing by Raphael (6.7 × 6.7 inches) at the orig­i­nal size. Wikipedia says this about it (the orig­i­nal, of course):

The Vision of a Knight or The Dream of Sci­pio or Alle­gory is a small egg tem­pera paint­ing on poplar by the Ital­ian Renais­sance artist Raphael, fin­ished in 1504. It is in the National Gallery in Lon­don. It prob­a­bly formed a pair with the Three Graces panel, also 17 cm square, now in the Château de Chan­tilly museum.

The theme is con­tro­ver­sial. Some author­i­ties intend the sleep­ing knight to rep­re­sent the Roman gen­eral Sci­pio Africanus (236–184 BC) who was dream­ing to choose between Virtue (behind whom is a steep and rocky path) and Plea­sure (in looser robes). How­ever, the two fem­i­nine fig­ures are not pre­sented as con­tes­tants. They may rep­re­sent the ideal attrib­utes of the knight: the book, sword and flower which they hold sug­gest the ideals of scholar, sol­dier and lover which a knight should combine.

I did it in egg tem­pera with oil glazes. More recent analy­sis by the National Gallery indi­cates that the orig­i­nal was actu­ally an oil paint­ing. Although it is by no means a per­fect copy, I am mostly sat­is­fied, as I think I man­aged to cap­ture some por­tion of the sweet­ness of Raphael’s early work.