St. George and the Dragon

This painting can be dated to the earliest years in the career of Vitale, a great protagonist of Bolognese painting from 1330 to 1360. Its subject is St. George defeating the dragon and freeing the princess.

Exceptionally for the era, the artist signed the work cryptically, composing a monogram and inscribing one letter inside the other to form the name VITALIS. The signature appears in the horse’s brand (equus in Latin) alluding to the painter's surname: Degli Equi.

Vitale, also thanks to a highly efficient workshop, developed his own artistic idiom, which involves research into expressiveness and attention to detail.

Here, for example, movement is accentuated by the knight’s pose. The knight’s hair blows in the wind and his red tunic flutters under the shirt of iron mail. He is throwing himself onto the dragon, firmly holding the reins of his beautiful and skittish horse. The princess, on the other hand, turns her head to look back, casting a last glance at the scene.

The gilded decorations, stamped onto the work, still survive, for example, in the knee-guards of the armour, the shoes or the saint’s halo, accentuating the three-dimensional effect.

The background, blue rather than gilded, as was usual in fourteenth-century paintings, suggests that the panel was originally set into a frescoed wall, and was intended to blend in with it.

The absence, in the upper and lower part, of the decorative band with geometric patterns, which is present on the sides, suggests that it may have been cut out in the past.