The excellent new website Art and the Country House, edited by Martin Postle and published online by wonderful Paul Mellon Centre, aims to augment the Art Fund's presentation of paintings in public ownership in the UK with a selection from privately-owned collections. One of the latter is Mells Manor, Somerset, where the collection includes many works acquired by William Graham, the great Victorian collector of early Italian and Pre-Raphaelite art which were inherited by his Pre-Raphaelite-loving daughter, Frances Horner.
Among them is this little-known panel painting from the early 1400s depicting St George vanquishing the legendary dragon. The website's description by Paul Joannides
rehearses the evidence regarding possible artists, but factual information on provenance and other aspects is lacking and so despite its lively presentation and skilful rendering of armoured saint, rearing horse and writhing dragon in a constricted vertical space it is hard to guess if this was a free-standing panel or part of an ensemble.
Most striking to me is George' s dark complexion, on facial features that suggest African physiognomy. The most accessible medieval source for details of this Christian saint was Voragine's Golden Legend, which (when Englished by William Caxton in 1483 ) opens its hagiography thus:
S. George was a knight and born in Cappadocia. On a time he came in to the province of Libya, to a city which is said Silene. And by this city was a stagne or a pond like a sea, wherein was a dragon which envenomed all the country.
His deliverance of the king's daughter goes like this:
Thus as they spake together the dragon appeared and came running to them, and S. George was upon his horse, and drew out his sword and garnished him with the sign of the cross, and rode hardily against the dragon which came towards him, and smote him with his spear and hurt him sore and threw him to the ground. And after said to the maid: Deliver to me your girdle, and bind it about the neck of the dragon and be not afeard. When she had done so the dragon followed her as it had been a meek beast and debonair. Then she led him into the city, and the people fled by mountains and valleys, and said: Alas! alas! we shall be all dead. Then S. George said to them: Ne doubt ye no thing, without more, believe ye in God, Jesu Christ, and do ye to be baptized and I shall slay the dragon. Then the king was baptized and all his people, and S. George slew the dragon and smote off his head, and commanded that he should be thrown in the fields, and they took four carts with oxen that drew him out of the city.
Both Cappodocia and Libya in the middle ages were Muslim locations, as was the legendary site of George's body in a chapel between Jaffa and Jerusalem. So it could have been thought that he himself was of 'Moorish' origin. But Western artists were not in the habit of literal historicism. Normally, St George was a pale-skinned European, clad in the knightly armour of the artist's time.
So can one account for a depiction of George as brown-skinned?
I wonder if in this instance there was some kind of confusion or crossover with St Maurice, whom legend describes as a knight of the Roman Empire who was also ruler of Thebes which fancifully was said to be located in 'the parts of the East beyond Arabia', to be 'full of riches and plenteous of fruits' with inhabitants 'of great bodies and noble in arms, strong in battle, subtle in engine and right abundant in wisdom.'
Maurice was martyred along with scores of others who rendered unto Caesar but declined to worship the Caesar's deities and were slain en masse. Iconologically, late medieval images of Maurice depict him as an armoured knight of African appearance, as in the extraordinary painting by Cranach, now in the Met, New York.
Both Maurice and George have such splendid hats.
No comments:
Post a Comment