Saint George and the Dragon (1434–35): Artwork and History

Saint George and the Dragon (1434–35) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Bernat Martorell (Spanish, active from 1427–died 1452).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

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.

Object facts

• Title: Saint George and the Dragon
• Date: 1434–35
• Artist attribution: Bernat Martorell (Spanish, active from 1427–died 1452)
• Place of origin: Spain
• Medium: Tempera on panel
• Dimensions: 155.6 × 98.1 cm (61 1/4 × 38 5/8 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1933.786

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Richard E. Danielson and Mrs. Chauncey McCormick

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.