Saint George Fighting the Dragon

In July 1938, four months after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, officials seized this panel from the Vienna flat of the collector Oscar Bondy on the Schubertring. Bondy was abroad and never came back. The board had been the outer face of an altarpiece wing from St Peter's Abbey in Salzburg, and its inner face, with two female saints, had already been sawn away. Hitler personally sent the saints to his planned museum in Linz and this George to the state museum of Carinthia in Klagenfurt. In 1947 his entire collection was released for restitution.

George wears a white surcoat with a red cross, and his lance goes into the dragon's open mouth and out behind its head. A crowned princess in red throws up a hand, and small bones lie among the pebbles under the grey horse.