Paolo Uccello, St. George and The Dragon

Andy Warhol Paolo Uccello, St. George and The Dragon is a range of artworks created by artist Andy Warhol.

In his original painting Paolo Uccello shows two episodes from the story of Saint George: his defeat of a plague-bearing dragon that had been terrorizing a city; and the rescued princess bringing the dragon to heel (with her belt as a leash).

In the sky, a storm is gathering. The eye of the storm lines up with Saint George’s lance, suggesting that divine intervention has helped him to victory. Uccello uses the lance to emphasize the angle from which Saint George attacks the dragon, helping to establish a three-dimensional space. The strange patches of grass illustrate Uccello’s obsessive concern with linear perspective and his tendency to create decorative pattern.

The story is from a popular collection of saints’ lives written in the 13th century, called ‘The Golden Legend’. An earlier less dramatic version of the same subject by Uccello is in the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris

When Andy Warhol first burst onto the artistic stage in the 1960s’, he did so by incorporating images that were firmly embedded in the American psyche. His bright and colorful paintings and serigraphs presented images that were commonplace — a soup can or coke bottle — but were transformed by his technique into artistic icons of popular culture. Warhol was most interested in image and not reality, although one could say that by casting these mass produced commercial images in his own unique style, Warhol was making a comment on the reality of living in a world that was dominated by images from the advertising and entertainment industries. Warhol’s prints are in essence images of images. They are at least once removed, and often several times removed, from reality. His famous prints of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, not to mention countless other celebrities, are based on photographs. As in the case with Marilyn Monroe, many of those photographs are of his subjects posing as a character, not as themselves, a subtle reminder that once someone achieves a certain celebrity status, they become further and further removed from their real selves. How many layers must one remove to finally see the real person depicted in a Warhol print?