San Giorgio e il drago

Carpaccio painted this in 1502 for the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the Venice clubhouse of the city's Dalmatian community — sailors and traders from the far side of the Adriatic, in what is now Croatia. These were years when Venice and the Ottoman Empire were repeatedly at war, and a saint skewering a dragon to free a besieged city carried an obvious charge for men whose home coast sat on that front line. Carpaccio strewed the foreground with the leftovers of the dragon's work, scattered skulls and half-eaten bodies, and off to the left he built the city gate on a real model, the great arched Bab al-Futuh of Cairo. The painting still hangs in the small hall it was made for.