Saint George and the Dragon

A young Raphael, barely past twenty, painted Saint George swinging his sword at a dragon on a panel smaller than a sheet of paper. It once lay folded with a Saint Michael like a little book, bound in leather.

The story behind the painting

Raphael painted this small Saint George around 1503 to 1505. The Louvre version is one of his early works, and its still somewhat naive style, close to his teacher Perugino, points to a date of about 1504. Some writers once placed it in his Roman period because the horse resembles one of the horses of Monte Cavallo in Rome, but Raphael could easily have known that horse from a drawing by one of Leonardo's pupils. A little later he painted the same subject again, the panel now in Washington.

What to look for

The panel measures about 29.4 by 25.5 cm according to Wikidata, so every detail is tiny: the knight, his rearing horse and the dragon fit in a space you could cover with two hands. Notice the horse, the detail that once made scholars think of the ancient statues on Monte Cavallo. The style still carries the gentle, slightly naive grace of Perugino's workshop, which is part of its charm: a young artist trying a heroic subject on a very small scale, before his great Roman years.

Meaning and intent

The painting has a twin. It forms a pair with the equally small Saint Michael in the Louvre, and in Cardinal Mazarin's collection the two were joined into a diptych and bound in leather. Giovanni Lomazzo wrote in 1584 that Raphael painted a Saint George for Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, on a little chessboard. Old catalogues said the Saint Michael, perhaps both, had a draughts board on the back, but X-ray and infrared examination have not confirmed it, and Lomazzo seems to have mixed up several pictures.

Legacy

Louis XIV acquired the pair from Cardinal Mazarin's heirs in 1661, and the panel has stayed in the French royal and national collections, today in the Louvre's Department of Paintings. If Lomazzo's late and muddled testimony can be trusted at all, the two Louvre paintings may have been made for the Duke of Urbino. Towards the end of his life Raphael returned to the theme of the warrior saint with a large Saint Michael, also in the Louvre, so this little panel can be seen as the first step of a long conversation.