OCA preloader logo
Taming St George - The Open College of the Arts

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

Taming St George thumb

Taming St George

The neat coincidence of Shakespeare, the playwright most associated throughout the world with the English language, most probably sharing his birthday with St George, the national saint of England, is a pleasing one.
This appealing thought has been succeeded on 23 April for many years now by a vexing one: the contradictions I see between the popular story of a national hero, and the rather different version of the story depicted by Paolo Uccello in his painting Saint George and the Dragon. The standard reading of the painting is not at odds with the familiar re-telling: Saint George defeats the plague-bearing dragon which has been terrorising a city, and the rescued princess brings the dragon to heel, using her belt as a leash. This is the interpretation accepted with barely a question.
Its central idea – of the strong male rescuing the helpless female – endures still in the mythology of romantic love. Here, for example, is Alison in John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger, embracing the flawed, bored Jimmy Porter as her knight in shining armour: ‘I’d still be sitting away at home, if you hadn’t ridden up on your charger and carried me off.’
A narrative painting is a snapshot, a moment in time. It does not tell us what preceded the action it depicts, or what will follow it. Both are left to the imagination of the observer. But imagination is directed by what we already know, what we have been encouraged to believe and what we deem to be indisputable.
What I see in Uccello’s painting is not a helpless maiden rescued by a welcome knight in shining armour, but a self-possessed, composed young woman who was doing a perfectly good job of talking the dragon out of his destructive rampage until she was interrupted by the attention-seeking arrival of a man out to prove a point. Perhaps, I speculate, the violence meted out to the dragon was quite unnecessary: another minute, and he would have left strolled off the scene without a murmur, or retreated docilely to the cavern positioned so enticingly in the background of the painting.
There is evidence for this reading in the composition and mood of the painting itself. Divide it vertically in two, and tumult dominates the right-hand (male) side of the canvas: the turbulent storm clouds, the rearing of the horse, the frantic energy of George himself, gripping the red saddle, the painting’s most intrusive colour – even more intrusive than the blood dripping from the mouth of the dragon. On the left (female) side of the canvas, the flowing lines of robes of subtle hue, the gentle arches of the cavern entrance, the clear blue sky behind it. Who or what is the intruder on the left: the dragon himself, or the dragon’s violent unease? I would opt for the latter, planted on the pacific left by the lance which diagonally crosses the vertical axis, straying out of its correct place on the violent right.
Last year, OCA’s former creative writing curriculum lead Jane Rogers told me about Ursula Fanshawe’s humorous take on Uccello’s work. Written in the voice of the maiden, the poem plays with the idea that she was perfectly happy in the company of the dragon:
‘It’s hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon.’
I felt I had been introduced to a kindred spirit.
Many writers have used a painting, actual or imagined, as the basis for fiction. Margaret Forster’s Keeping the World Away is a biography of Gwen John’s A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, bringing to life the European art world of the 19th and early 20th centuries and recreating the painter’s love affair with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. In Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray, a portrait is used to spectacular effect to depict the eponymous character’s terror of growing old.
If you are in London and have a moment to visit The National Gallery on your way through Trafalgar Square, go and have a careful look at Uccello’s painting, and decide which reading of it makes more sense to you. You might combine your visit with a quest for paintings to inspire your own writing too.


Posted by author: Elizabeth Underwood

4 thoughts on “Taming St George

  • I have always fount both Uccello paintings of this subject unsatisfactory (here is the other one) and have constructed all sorts of explanations as to why but none that work as well as this.

  • Thank you for supporting my argument, Peter. The maiden’s hands in the second painting could be seen being positioned in supplication – possibly a stronger vote against the saint’s action that the upturned left hand in the National Gallery painting.

  • “Look what a big lance I’ve got” perhaps?
    The interesting thing for me is the way this illustrates how the important thing with an image is what it says at the time when it is being viewed rather than what it might have said at some other time in its history. But also how the second can actually enhance the first if approached in that order….if you see what I mean!

  • Although it’s interesting to work out what Uccello was trying to say,and that may be important for the art historian, what is perhaps more important for the writer, is what it suggests to the writer now after several hundred years. So it doesn’t really matter whether Ursula Fanshawe got it right or not. What is interesting is what her poem says about life in the 20th/21st century. And how the poem works.
    I think what Ursula Fanthorpe was doing is similar to Angela Carter’s work in The Bloody Chamber where in rewriting the Little Red Riding Hood myth, she reclaims women’s sexuality: women have had enough of cautionary tales, they want to sleep with the wolf, or in Fanshawe’s case with the dragon.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to blog listings