Return of Saint George

Bernardino Luini was the most admired painter in Milan in the early 1500s, and he owed a great deal to one man who had lived there, Leonardo da Vinci. Luini took Leonardo's soft, smoky modelling and his tender faces and made them gentler still, easier for ordinary devotion, which is why later centuries loved him and even, for a time, credited him with pictures Leonardo himself may have touched. Saint George, the knight who kills the dragon and saves the princess, was a favourite subject in a warlike Italy of shifting duchies and hired soldiers. In Luini's hands the saint tends to lose his ferocity and gain that calm Leonardesque grace, the violence of the legend cooled into something serene and courtly.