The most striking work in the spine-tingling show at the National Gallery, ‘Rubens: A Master in the Making’, is the enormous painting of St George slaying the Dragon (Prado). What I like about Rubens is that he always goes over the top. Here, the head of the saint’s charger, and especially the mane, is a creative phantasmagoria of hirsute auxesis, and balancing it is the monster’s crazy head, especially the mouth, already skewered by St George’s lance, and exhibiting catastrophic cavities of such horror that it ought to hang in dentists’ waiting-rooms as an example of what happens if you don’t scour your teeth with a yard-brush.
The dragon is a bestialisation of political correctness, and St George, a ferocious fellow in a magnificent helmet and plume, is giving it hell with his claymore, and rightly so, for the PC fanatics have just declared him Public Enemy Number One. What they particularly object to is not only his dragon-slaying, which is (I quote) ‘a peculiarly nauseating blood-sport, especially since it is aimed at an endangered species’, but, still more, his cross of red-on-white, an emblem of Crusaders and thus ‘unbearably provocative’.
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