Art Institute of Chicago

Saint George and the Dragon

Bernat Martorell (Spanish, active from 1427–died 1452)

Date

1434–35

Medium

Tempera on panel

Culture

Spain

Department

Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

As a model of Christian knighthood, Saint George was a popular figure in the Middle Ages. Artists most frequently represented the episode from his legend in which he slays a dragon and rescues a beautiful princess set to be sacrificed to the beast. The Catalan painter Bernat Martorell included a wealth of detail in his version of the story. Animal and human bones litter the foreground. Lizards—or perhaps baby dragons—crawl around the opening of the dragon’s cave. The princess’s parents and throngs of onlookers crowd the town’s battlements to view the action. Martorell enlivened the physical surface of the painting as well: He richly modeled George’s halo and armor and the scaly body of the dragon with raised gesso decoration, and he gave granular texture to the depiction of the sandy foreground. Saint George and the Dragon was the central panel of an altarpiece devoted to the saint and was originally surrounded by four smaller narrative panels showing his martyrdom (now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris). Martorell probably painted the altarpiece for the chapel of the Barcelona palace of the government of Catalonia, a region whose patron is Saint George.

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