Saint Georges et le Dragon

Most painters put Saint George dead centre, lance and dragon and all. Tintoretto pushed him and the beast back into the middle distance and threw the rescued princess forward instead, so she comes rushing out of the picture straight at us, her red cloak streaming, one hand flung out and foreshortened until it seems to break the surface. In the sky above, light tears through the clouds where God receives the answered prayer. Tintoretto painted this in Venice around 1555, when the Catholic Church, pressed hard by the Reformation, was growing wary of legends dressed up as miracles, and he seems to answer that by making the divine response the real subject. A pale corpse lies in the foreground, the dragon's earlier victim, half lost in shadow.