Although the ‘Knight’s Dream’ is so small, and Raphael was but a boy when he painted it, the picture has the true romantic air, characteristic of the joyful years of the early Renaissance.  He does not seem to have felt the conflict between the old religious ideal and the new pursuit of worldly beauty as Botticelli felt it.  Yet he chose the competition of these two ideals as the subject of this picture.  The Knight, clothed in bright armour and gay raiment, bearing no relation at all to the clothes worn in 1500, rests upon his shield beneath the slight shade of a very slender tree.  In his dream there appear to him two figures, both of whom claim his knightly allegiance for life:  one, a young and lovely girl in a bright coloured dress with flowers in her hair, tempts him to embrace a life of mirth, of

  Jest and youthful Jollity,
  Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles,
  Nods and Becks and wreathed Smiles.

The other resembles the same poet’s

  Pensive Nun, devout and pure,
  Sober, steadfast, and demure.

She holds sword and book, symbols of stern action and wise accomplishment.  Which the knight will choose we are not told, perhaps because Raphael himself never had to make the choice.  He was too gifted and too fond of work to be tempted from it by anything whatever.  Always joyous and always successful, he was able to paint any subject, sacred, profane, ancient, or modern, so long as it was a happy one.  He was too busy and too gay to feel pain and sorrow, as Botticelli felt them, and to paint sad subjects.  To him the visible world was good and beautiful, and the invisible world lovely and happy likewise.  His Madonnas are placid or smiling mothers.  The fat and darling babies they hold are indeed divine but not awesome.  Yet the extraordinary sweetness of expression, nobility of form, and beauty of colouring in the Madonnas make you almost hold your breath when you look at them.

In the ‘Knight’s Dream’ there is a simple beauty in the pose and grouping of the figures.  You can hardly fancy three figures better arranged for the purpose of the subject.  There is something inevitable about them, which is the highest praise due to a mastery of design in the art of composition.  Raphael’s surpassing gift was in fitting beautiful figures into any given space, so that it seems as though the space had been made to fit the figures, instead of the figures to fit the space.  You could never put his round Madonnas into a square frame.  The figures would look as wrong as in a round frame they look right.  If you were to cut off a bit of the foreground in any of his pictures and add the extra piece to the sky, you would make the whole look wrong, whereas perhaps you might add on a piece of sky to Hubert van Eyck’s ‘Three Maries’ without spoiling the effect.

[Illustration:  THE KNIGHT’S DREAM From the picture by Raphael, in the National Gallery, London]