Countryside of Wood With Saint George Fighting the Dragon

The real subject of this small panel is the forest. Albrecht Altdorfer painted it in 1510 in Bavaria, and he let a wall of dense green woodland fill almost the whole picture, the trees rising in thick, tangled masses of leaf. You have to search for the story. Down at the bottom, tiny, a knight on a pale horse meets a small dragon in a clearing. This is Saint George and the beast he was famous for killing, though here he is nearly lost among the trees. Very few painters before Altdorfer had let a setting matter more than its saint. He belonged to what we now call the Danube School, artists along that river who were among the first in Europe to paint wild landscape for its own sake. Altdorfer hung his monogram and the date on a little tablet among the branches, half hidden in the leaves like everything else.