David Playing the Harp before Saul (sketch)

Every three years the Florence academy set a subject and let its painters compete on it. In 1852 the subject came from the first book of Samuel, and Silvestro Lega, then 26, won with it. The picture he handed in is the large canvas now in the Galleria dell'Accademia, 174 centimetres across. This is the small version he settled the composition on first, signed in cursive at the lower right.

Saul, the first king of Israel, was said to be tormented by an evil spirit, and the young David was brought to court to play the harp until it let him go. Lega's own title spelled all of that out at length. He was still painting to the taste of his teacher Luigi Mussini, a purist who sent his pupils back to the clear outlines of early Renaissance painting, and who had taken him on around 1845 when the academy's teaching bored them both.