Like Raphael's frescoes of the Days of the Week, the frescoes of the 12 nymphs known as "Raphael's Hours of the Day and of the Night" are available to us now only as black and white prints of etchings made directly from the paintings, as vivid chromolithographs of those etchings with colors added by the printer, and as ornamentation on items for use or for wear, such as cameos. Unlike the Days, general scholarly consensus is that the Hours were not painted by Raphael himself but by one or more of his disciples, from drawings that are thought to have come from the hand of the Master.
These are sometimes known as "Raphael's Pompeian Hours", and authors like Sarah Killikelly seem to accept it on faith that the great artist was influenced by the frescoes found when the buried towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum were excavated. However, Raphael died in 1520, while Pompeii had not even been located until late in the 16th century and Herculaneum not until 1709.
It is not known for certain where the frescoes were, although the most commonly given location is in the Sala Borgia, Vatican, nor how they were arranged. It is difficult for us to imagine any work that Raphael touched being painted over, but there it is. Despite the loss of the originals, the Hours seem to have been wildly popular in the late 19th century and for a time into the early 20th.
Interpreting each figure and its companion predella ( a narrow, horizontal, rectangular space below each figure containing various symbolic elements, presumably related to that Hour) seems to have been a whole little cottage industry during that period. Since we have yet to see a cameo that included the predella with the Hour, and because the interpretations are various, lengthy, and frequently seem to be made from whole cloth, the predellae will be shown but not discussed in the articles.
You can see all twelve Hours together in the Gallery. The full complement also occasionally turns up in cameo clock form. The round cameo is from the workshop of Giovanni Apa. While the oval cameo appears to be from a different source, both have placed the clock hands at noon and positioned the Fourth Hour of the Day, with her sundial, at the top. The pocket watch shown above, with its working hands at 10:12, observes the same convention.
