Saint Georges et le Dragon

In 1504 Henry VII of England sent the Order of the Garter, his highest honour, to a small Italian court, the Duke of Urbino, as a piece of Renaissance diplomacy. Someone at that court asked the young Raphael, barely into his twenties, to paint a thank-you, and this palm-sized panel of Saint George is very likely it. The clue is on the knight's leg. He wears the blue Garter itself, and if you lean in you can read the first word of its French motto, HONI, painted in gold. It is a chivalric English decoration smuggled into an Italian devotional picture. Raphael gives the whole violent moment the calm of a jewel, the lance already snapped, the horse turning, the princess small in the distance. Within a decade he would be running the largest workshop in Rome.