Saint Michel terrassant le démon

Raphael was barely 21 when he painted this small panel of the Archangel Michael, around 1504, still working near his home town of Urbino before Rome made him famous. It is tiny, and it was made as a luxury object rather than a church piece, painted on the back of a gaming board for the Duke of Urbino. Behind the calm young angel, who presses his spear down onto a crouching devil, the ground falls away into a burning, smoke-filled city of the damned, with tormented figures scattered across it. Those background torments are drawn straight from Dante's Inferno, which every educated Italian of the time knew almost by heart. The gift may have marked an honour paid to the ruling family of Urbino by the king of France, a reminder that this delicate little scene of Hell was also a piece of court diplomacy.