Saint George and the Dragon

Around 1605 Rubens was a young Fleming making his name in Italy, in the pay of the Duke of Mantua, soaking up Titian and the Venetians and the muscular drama of Rome. He was in his late twenties, and this Saint George belongs to those Italian years. The saint reins in a white horse and drives his lance into a dragon already writhing on the ground, while the rescued princess waits at the edge with a lamb. Rubens held on to the picture for the rest of his life. Only after he died in 1640 did it pass to a royal collection in Spain, which is how it reached the Prado. You can already see the thing that would make him famous, the sense of a heavy body caught in mid-turn, weight and motion frozen together.