St George and the Dragon IV, 2015-2019

oil, alkyd resin and linseed oil on canvas

60 x 60 inches /

$20,000.

The legend of St George slaying the dragon originated in Cappadocia, a Roman Empire province of Anatolia (present day Turkey), around the 11th or 12th century and evolved in Libya in the 13th century as the Golden Legend. The narrative certainly has pre-Christian origins (Perseus and Andromeda, Typhon, etc.) transmuting and altering within Western Christian and Chivalric romance traditions as its popularity rose among the knights of the First Crusade fighting in Antioch and Jerusalem in the 11th century.

The story mutated and shifted over the centuries into the Golden Legend around 1260 A.D., which basically describes a venomous pestilent dragon who is terrorizing the town Silene and its surrounding countryside. The village, in order to appease the dragon, fed the dragon two sheep daily, then men and children chosen by lottery. In time, the king’s daughter was unfortunately chosen and while the king offered all of his gold and riches to spare her, the village refused. His daughter was dressed as a bride and led out to the lake to become the dragon’s next victim. St George, traveling through Libya on his way to the Holy Land, happens by the lake and see the king’s daughter. She tells him of her plight but demands that he leave, knowing her sacrifice will save her father and the other people of the village. George refuses to leave, and upon seeing the dragon, attacks it and wounds it with his lance. He calls to the princess to throw him her belt, she obliges, and he leashes the dragon who then follows the daughter and St George back into the town.

And here is where the story becomes “Christianized” as propaganda: St George offers to kill the dragon, only on the condition that the entire village, which is Muslim, convert to Christianity. The people are basically forced to consent, he kills the dragon and the daughter and the entire village is spared. St George continues on his crusade and the king builds a church on the spot where the dragon was slayed, where upon a spring begins flowing from the altar within the church with water that cured people of disease.

The narrative obviously harkens back to the old-world struggle between Lightness and Darkness, but I find the mutated inclusion of saving people from deadly threats only by demanding conditions of conversion to be repulsive and abhorrent. Would not the “Christian” act have been to merely kill the dragon, instead of requiring the contingency of converting an entire belief system? The legend has been popularized as a favorite pictorial subject for over ten centuries in Greek, Georgian, Russian, Eastern and Western European Christian art— through Medieval, Renaissance and Modern times. I find it ironic that the invasive power of its bigoted and dogmatic sectarian premise has been the source of inspiration for truly remarkable and art historically relevant paintings and sculpture. I have marveled at the attainment of aesthetic excellence in some of these paintings while being simultaneously plagued by the fact that these works of art endure as evangelical propaganda of intolerance and injustice.

Peter Paul Rubens’ St George Slaying the Dragon was the first painting I appropriated in late 2014. My original intention was not to eradicate the imagery, but after discovering the anatomy of the narrative, I was compelled to eventually obscure and efface this “translation” I had worked on for months. It was an emotional response, intellectually driven, but intuition guided my process. That painting was the beginning of a journey in exploring mythologies, dissecting narratives and then steering those stories forward into a realm of tolerance, respect and dignity within a painterly abstracted vernacular.

—Lawrence Fodor