XI. THE PLACE OF DRAGONS 385

shoulders in tendrils of living light.* Had Carpaccio been aware that St. George and Perseus are, in this deed, one; had he even held, as surely as Professor Müller finds reason to do, that at first Perseus was but the sun in his strength-for very name, being called “the Brightly-Burning”-this glorious head could not have been, more completely than it is, made the centre of light in the picture. In Greek works of art, as a rule, Perseus, when he rescues Andromeda, continues to wear the peaked Phrygian cap, dark helmet of Hades,† by whose virtue he moved, invisible, upon Medusa through coiling mists of dawn. Only after victory might he unveil his brightness. But about George from the first is no shadow. Creeping thing of keenest eye shall not see that splendour which is so manifest, nor with guile spring upon it unaware, to its darkening. Such knowledge alone for the dragon-dim sense as of a horse with its rider, moving to the fatal lair, hope, pulseless,-not of heart, but of talon and maw-that here is yet another victim, then only between his teeth that keen lance-point, thrust far before the Holy Apparition at whose rising the Power of the Vision of Death waxes faint and drops those terrible wings that bore under their shadow, not healing, but wounds for men.

225. The spear pierces the base of the dragon’s brain, its point penetrating right through and standing out at the back of the head just above its junction with the spine. The shaft breaks in the shock between the dragon’s jaws. This shivering of St. George’s spear is almost always emphasised in pictures of him-sometimes, as here, in act, oftener by position of the splintered fragments prominent in the foreground. This is no tradition of ancient art, but a purely mediaeval incident, yet not, I believe, merely the vacant reproduction of a sight become familiar to the spectator of tournaments. The spear was type of the strength of human wisdom. This checks the enemy in his attack,

* At his martyrdom St. George was hung up by his hair to be scourged.

† Given by Hermes (Chthonios).

XXIV. 2 B

[Version 0.04: March 2008]