Saint George and the Dragon

When this panel hung in its church, most days of the year you would not have seen Saint George at all. It is the wing of an altarpiece, painted on fir wood around 1445 to 1450, and like every such wing it works on both faces. Closed, it showed the Lamentation of Christ beneath the cross. Only when the altar was opened for a feast did the knight appear, driving his weapon into the dragon at the maiden's feet. So one board carried two moods, grief on the outside and triumph within. In 2025 the Kunstmuseum Basel put exactly this reverse on view, in a show given over entirely to the backs of paintings.