Saint George and the Dragon

This small panel, now in the National Gallery in London, dates to around 1470 and belongs to the last phase of Uccello's career, when he had long since established himself as the great theorist of perspettiva among the Florentine Early Renaissance painters. Uccello had treated the same subject at least once before, in a larger and earlier panel now held in Paris, but the London version is the more refined and concentrated statement. By 1470 he was working in relative isolation, his rigorous spatial experiments considered eccentric by contemporaries more interested in the naturalism championed by Masaccio and, later, Leonardo. Giorgio Vasari, writing in the following century, marvelled at Uccello's almost monastic devotion to perspective, describing how he would work through the night on geometrical studies rather than sleep. That dedication is everywhere visible here: the spiral ground markings, the impossibly precise foreshortening of the lance, and the radiating spiral of the cave mouth at the left edge are all devices that subordinate narrative to spatial demonstration. The painting entered the collection of Sir Francis Cook before passing eventually to the National Gallery, and it has become one of the most reproduced panels in early Italian art, recognisable not only for its subject but for its peculiarly modern sense of composition, in which flat decorative patterning and deep recession coexist without apology.