Portrait of a Man as Saint George

Attributed to Giuseppe Caletti

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the waist up, a pale-skinned man sits in front of the coiled body of a dragon in this vertical painting. The man’s body faces our right in profile, but he turns his head to look off to the right out of the corner of the large, dark eye we can see. He has short black hair, a bushy beard, and a small nose. A dark cap is draped with a feathery or fleecy material around a gold-colored medallion, which may show a person. The man wears a short sleeved black tunic over a raspberry-pink, long-sleeved garment. His right arm, closer to us, rests near the corner of a table, and he holds a staff with a partly rolled-up flag with the other. The lower section of a white cross on the red flag is visible, and the bottom edge is trimmed with a bronze-colored, floral motif. A round, peacock-blue object with gold filigree, perhaps a helmet, lies on the table just beyond his hands. The dragon’s lizard-like head lies on the left behind the man’s back. Greenish-brown scales cover its body, and one glassy, open eye and sharp fangs are illuminated by light from above. Its body forms a hump beyond the head before it curls across the back of the painting. The dragon and man are in front of an ash-brown curtain, which sags in the top left corner to show the canopies of trees and a blue sky.