Today is the feast of St. George. My favorite painting of St. George and the Dragon, by Briton Riviere:
Public Domain, Link
Most paintings of the motif show the saint in triumph, spearing the dragon; a rousing scene. But there's just something about this picture, with the dragon defeated but at great cost, and the saint victorious but dazed and exhausted, that speaks to me.
The dragon-slaying motif seems to have actually begun with St. Theodore Tiron of Amasea in the ninth century, although some have suggested it may have begun a century or two earlier; St. Theodore was, like St. George, a fourth-century soldier-saint, and they were often associated with each other, along with a number of soldier-martyrs of the period, who died when the Diocletian persecution came down heavily on Christians in military service. St. George of Lydda begins to be associated with the dragon in the eleventh century. In both cases the idea is almost certainly derivative from that of Christ victorious over the Serpent, i.e., the devil. St. George became an immensely popular figure -- there are even Muslim legends about him. He became one of several patron saints of England in the fourteenth century, but is the only one whose titular honors really survived the English Reformation -- arguably due to a combination of how early he was, his lack of any historical connection to standard Catholic pilgrimage sites in England, and his popularity in courtly circles. His association with England is his most famous patronage, but he is also a patron saint of Ethiopia, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, Malta, Portugal, and many other places.
