Saint George and the Dragon (Raphael)

Infobox Painting

---

title=St. George and the Dragon
artist=Raphael
year=1504-1506
type=Oil on wood
height=28,5
width=21,5
city=Washington, D.C.
museum=National Gallery of Art

"St. George and the Dragon" is a small cabinet painting by the Italian High Renaissance master Raphael, 1504-1506.

The "St. Michael" and "St. George and the Dragon" in the Louvre, and this "St. George" of the National Gallery of Washington, are bound together both by their subject - an armed youth fighting a dragon - and by stylistic elements. All three are assigned to the Florentine period of Raphael and echo those stimuli which the Urbinate received from the great masters who worked in Florence or whose paintings were visible there. The influence of Leonardo - whose fighting warriors from the "Battle of Anghiari" (1505) in the Palazzo della Signoria provided an extraordinary example of martial art (the painting deteriorated very rapidly because of shortcomings in Leonardo's experimental technique and so is no longer visible) - predominates in these works. But references to Flemish painting - particularly that of Hieronymus Bosch (the glaring light and humanoid monsters which populate the St. Michael are characteristic of Bosch) - suggest the environment of Urbino, where Northern influences were still quite vivid.

These small panels are indicative of a moment in which the painter gathers the stylistic fruits of what he has assimilated so far and, at the same time, poses pictorial problems which will be developed in the future.

The painting used to be a highlight of the Pierre Crozat collection which was acquired through Diderot's mediation by Catherine II of Russia in 1772. For a century and a half, the panel hang in the Imperial Hermitage Museum. It was one of the most popular paintings in the entire collection of the Tsars. In March 1931 the Bolsheviks sold the painting to Andrew Mellon, who ceded it to the Washington gallery.

ee also

* Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings