St. George and the Dragon

Saint George fights the dragon in the foreground, and behind him the rest of his story plays out in smaller scenes, moments from before the fight and after it. In the legend a dragon has been terrorising a town and is about to be handed the king's daughter when a knight rides up, wounds the beast and frees her. Leonhard Beck painted this panel around 1513 or 1514, in the same years he was designing woodcuts for Emperor Maximilian I, and the museum sees the same late medieval spirit of chivalry in both. It is a big picture for a man who mostly worked at the scale of a printed page, nearly 137 centimetres high, painted on spruce. The panel came to Vienna from Ambras Castle near Innsbruck, the collection built up by Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol, Maximilian's great-grandson.