Saint George and the Dragon

Saint George and the Dragon

The episode of Saint George and the Dragon appended to the hagiography of Saint George was Eastern in origin, brought back with the Crusaders and retold with the courtly appurtenances belonging to the genre of Romance...

is a painting by Paolo Uccello

Paolo Uccello

Paolo Uccello , born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian painter and a mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. Giorgio Vasari in his book Lives of the Artists wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his...

 dating from around 1470. It is on display in the National Gallery, London

National Gallery, London

The National Gallery is an art museum on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. It was formerly housed in the Palais Lanckoroński

Palais Lanckoronski

The Palais Lanckoroński was a palace in Vienna, Austria, located at Jacquingasse 16-18, in the Landstraße District. It was constructed in 1894-95 for Count Karol Lanckoroński and his family as a personal residence, and it housed the count's enormous art collection. The palace was built in a...

 in Vienna, belonging to Count Lanckoroński and sold by his son and heir Anton in 1959 through Mr Farago. The first mention of it being there is 1898.

Gothicizing tendencies in Paolo Uccello's art are nowhere more apparent than in this painting. It shows a scene from the famous story of Saint George and the dragon. On the right George is spearing the beast, and on the left the princess is using her belt as a leash to take the dragon up to the town.

The eye in the storm gathering on the right of Saint George is lined up with his spear showing there has been divine intervention. The strange patches of grass illustrate Uccello's obsessive concern with linear perspective and his tendency to create decorative pattern. The story is from a popular collection of saints' lives written in the 13th century, Jacopo da Varagine's Golden Legend.

An earlier less dramatic version of the same subject by the Italian artist is in the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris.

The painting is used as the basis for the U. A. Fanthorpe

U. A. Fanthorpe

Ursula Askham Fanthorpe, CBE, FRSL was an English poet. She published as UA Fanthorpe.-Early life:She was educated in Surrey and at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she received a first-class degree in English language and literature, and subsequently taught English at Cheltenham Ladies' College...

 poem, Not My Best Side , and may have served as inspiration for Sir John Tenniel

John Tenniel

Sir John Tenniel was a British illustrator, graphic humorist and political cartoonist whose work was prominent during the second half of England’s 19th century. Tenniel is considered important to the study of that period’s social, literary, and art histories...

's illustration of the Jabberwock in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Through the Looking-Glass

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a work of literature by Lewis Carroll . It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...

.