ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON: WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Above, that's a dragon...though it's a little hard to see.

While researching Uccello and the Renaissance for my previous post, I came across a lot of pictures of St. George and the Dragon. I was surprised to find that most artists had trouble with it. You'd think that after painting all those nativity scenes, they'd have been chomping at the bit to try an adventure theme, and maybe they were, but not this particular one. They just couldn't get a handle on it. Odd, isn't? I thought it might be fun to see if we could figure out why.

Above are modern depictions of the famous fight. Nowadays we seem to take a Marvel comics or UFC view of it. That's okay, but I suspect there was a lot of subtext in the original stories, and I don't see any of that here.

A lot of pictures depict the dragon as being small (above), about the size of a puma. That's odd. I'd have thought they'd want a creature as big as a T-Rex.  Maybe the dragon was supposed to be related to the normal-sized serpent that tempted Eve. Maybe the beast was small to focus our attention on St. George, and what he represented.

Big creatures (above) don't work. The idea that a knight could kill a creature bigger than a house is just too implausible. 

Here's (above) a 19th Century picture showing St. George fighting a creature that's the same size as a Komodo Dragon. George is so much bigger...you almost feel sorry for the poor animal. 

We see the girl who was being saved. She appears almost as big as George, even though she's in the background. I'll bet the client insisted on that. 

Here's a modern gold sovereign that portrays the fight as a Greek myth. You have to admit that the story does feel Greek and no doubt some Renaissance artists treated it that way....

 ...but that (above) seems to trivialize it. Making St. George out to be a Greek hero like Hercules can't be right.

Even when Rubens does it....and does it impressively....the idea of treating St. George exclusively as a hero seems lacking.

Some artists tried to improve on the story. Here (above) the knight, the horse and the dragon all appear to be dead. They gave it their all, and this is the tragic aftermath.  Nice, but it's a big deviation.

Above, the work by the only artist who got it right, in my opinion....Raphael. Only he realized that St. George was a story about hope.

That's a virtue that you can only understand when facing adversity. I'll bet the story originated in the Dark Ages when warlords ravaged Europe and a lot of ordinary people must have wondered if life was worth living. From the pulpits came the admonition to hope. Despair was labled an unforgivable sin. St. George would have been a symbol of the fight that has to be waged against barbarism in the outside world, and a symbol for the fight against despair in the inside world. Heroism, yes, but in the service of hope.

Raphael's style was perfect  for this. A too realistic picture would have turned the fight into an adventure. The iconic black knight on a white horse fighting a black dragon puts it squarely in the realm of hyper reality and myth in the grand style. It fires our imaginations. It makes us want to be brave like the figure in the picture.