Saint George and the Dragon

This small panel, housed in the Musee Jacquemart-Andre in Paris, was painted by Paolo Uccello (c. 1397-1475) late in his career, and it stands among the most concentrated expressions of his preoccupations. Uccello was a Florentine painter consumed by perspectiva artificialis, the geometry of pictorial space, and his pursuit of it is evident even here: the orthogonal furrows of the farmed plain converge toward a vanishing point, and the spiraling concavity of the cave entrance behind the dragon is a miniature exercise in foreshortened volume. Yet Uccello was never a dry technician. His International Gothic training, absorbed under Lorenzo Ghiberti, gave his work a decorative energy that sits in productive tension with his mathematical ambitions. The dragon is heraldic and flat where the horse is modeled in the round; the princess's pose echoes devotional painting while the knight's lance describes a ruthlessly logical diagonal. Art historians have long noted that the painting reads simultaneously as a chivalric narrative and as a diagram of spatial conquest. Uccello's three great battle panels for the Medici are the monumental statement of these ideas; this Jacquemart-Andre panel distills them into a single, almost emblematic image of order overcoming chaos.