Ad Blankestijn: Saint George and the Dragon by Uccello (Paintings and their stories)

Saint George and the Dragon was painted around 1470 by Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) and is on view in the National Gallery in London.

This is a strange, cartoonish painting - a two-legged, winged dragon is being killed by a boyish knight on a prancing horse, while a storm is gathering at his back (a sign of divine intervention to help the knight to victory); he pricks the lance into the dragon's head (its maw is wide open) and blood drips on the ground. Behind the dragon we see a grotto with a weirdly gaping entrance and water on the floor, presumably the lair of the dragon. To the left stands an elegantly dressed (but bored-looking) young woman who uses her blue belt to hold the dragon on a leash like a lap dog. Also look at the unrealistic, geometrical shapes of the grass, and the colored discs on the dragon's wings...

What do we see?

These are two episodes from the legend of St. George, whose story is told as follows. The citizens of Silene in Libya were terrorized by a dragon. Every day he devoured two sheep, which were sacrificed to appease him. When the last sheep had disappeared in this way, the dragon demanded human sacrifices. These were selected by drawing lots. One day the lot fell on the king's daughter, and although the king pleaded with the citizens to spare her life, they refused; they had lost all their children and there was no reason why the king should not lose his. She went to her death in bridal clothes. But George, who was a military tribune, happened to be passing the lake where the dragon lived, near which the princess was awaiting her fate. When the dragon appeared George wounded the monster and called to the princess to tie her belt around its neck, which then followed her like a lap dog on a leash. George next promised the king and the people that he would kill the beast if everyone would be baptized by him. When the king and people agreed, he killed the dragon and on that day 15,000 people were baptized. The dragon symbolizes paganism - slaying the dragon symbolizes the conversion of a pagan country to Christianity.

Who was St. George?

George of Cappadocia or Saint George (d. April 23, 303 CE) is a martyr and saint. Since 1222 he has been patron saint of England. He is best known for the above story that he killed a dragon. In fact, Saint George is one of the saints who is completely fictional. The first mentions of him were recorded hundreds of years after his supposed martyrdom. It is also not clear where this Saint George would have lived, he is placed on the African coast but also in Asia Minor. Where most saints were peaceful and contemplative, and overcame evil by prayer, the warlike and courageous St George was appealing to medieval knights and warriors. The story of St George and the dragon appears in a popular collection of saints' lives written by Jacobus de Voragine in the 13th century, called 'The Golden Legend'. By the way, St George is also the patron of boy scouts and I now realize where I have heard this story before: when I was in elementary school, I was forced to be a boy scout for several years as my parents were (rightly) worried that I stayed too much in the house reading books (my family was not Roman Catholic, so I was never familiar with the stories of the saints).

The painting and the painter

Paolo Uccello (Florence, ca. 1397 – 1475) was an important Italian painter and mathematician from the early Renaissance. Uccello was trained under the sculptor Ghiberti from about 1407 to 1414 and worked in Venice as a designer of mosaics (1425-30). He combined an International Gothic figure style and love of decorative effects with a profound interest in single point perspective (using lines that lead to one point to create an illusion of depth within a painting), characteristic of the Early Renaissance. With his precise and analytical mind, Paolo Uccello tried to apply a scientific method to depict objects in three-dimensional space - in the present painting that technique is not perfect: the geometric patches of grass recede towards the horizon, but the rectangular stones of the ground slope up to the right.

Uccello's idiosyncratic style had few followers. His later reputation as an eccentric, perspective-obsessed recluse was mainly influenced by Giorgio Vasari, who painted something of a caricature of him in his book Lives of the Artists, where he wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point.

Saint George and the Dragon dates from around 1460-1470 and can now be seen in the National gallery in London. The website of the National Gallery mentions about this painting: "We don’t know who this painting was for, but its small scale and non-religious feel – it’s more about a magical adventure than Christian virtue – suggest it was intended for someone’s home. It was relatively cheap to make: it’s in oil on canvas and contains no expensive pigments or gilding."

Before it was acquired by the National gallery in 1959, the painting remained relatively hidden in the Lanckoroński Collection in Vienna. It was seized by the Nazis with the onset of the Second World War, only to be consigned to a Swiss bank vault for safekeeping once returned to Count Lanckoroński after the war. So when it was offered to the Gallery in late 1958, few people had ever seen the picture in the flesh.