David Beheading Goliath

Around 1517–19, artists from Raphael’s workshop frescoed the interior of a loggia, a long open-sided passageway, in the Vatican. On the ceiling of the eleventh bay is this scene of David beheading Goliath. According to the Books of Samuel from the Bible, the young David, future king of Israel, felled the Philistine warrior Goliath using a simple sling and stone. Here David is set to behead Goliath with the fallen giant’s own sword. Viewers in the 1500s would immediately have interpreted David as Christ, Goliath as Satan, and the Israelites as the Church Triumphant. The engraving differs from the finished fresco in many details. Marcantonio likely based his work on a now-lost drawing by Raphael or a preparatory work by one of his assistants.