Saint George killing the Dragon

The dragon is barely the subject here. Saint George charges in from the right on a grey and white horse, his red cloak flying, the beast rears up in the middle of the path, and on the left the princess who had been handed over to it as a sacrifice runs off with her arms thrown up. All three are small. Above them the trees part like the wings of a stage onto a river valley, a walled town and a far mountain. In Rome around 1610, when this was painted, landscape was only starting to be treated as a serious subject in its own right, and painters there were learning it from two sources, the ordered space of Annibale Carracci and the wide views of Flemish artists working in the city, such as Paul Bril. That sense of room, the eye drawn back and back, is what the National Gallery counts among Domenichino's greatest gifts to landscape. Another name has been proposed for this picture, Giovanni Battista Viola, a landscape painter who sometimes worked alongside Domenichino. The gallery keeps it under Domenichino.