Saint George and the Dragon

Tintoretto's Saint George and the Dragon, painted around 1555–58 and now in the National Gallery in London, is among his most visually inventive treatments of chivalric narrative — a subject that allowed him to combine the violence of combat with a strikingly atmospheric landscape receding to a luminous horizon, the distant figure of the princess fleeing in terror while the battle between saint and monster occupies the foreground. The landscape background, with its extraordinary recession into silvery distance, is among the most beautiful in all of Tintoretto's output and demonstrates the Venetian tradition of atmospheric landscape that descended from Giorgione through Titian. Saint George was Venice's secondary patron (after Saint Mark), and depictions of the dragon-slaying had special resonance for Venetian audiences as civic allegory — the triumph of order and faith over chaos and paganism. The National Gallery acquired this work in the nineteenth century as part of its systematic representation of Italian Renaissance painting, where it joins the Tintoretto Origin of the Milky Way and several other works as documentation of his extraordinary range within the National Gallery's holdings.

The dramatic diagonal of the charging saint and the spiraling dragon create powerful kinetic energy, with Tintoretto's rapid brushwork and dramatic lighting heightening the sense of violent action.