“The history of art is itself another concrete mirage, with its stars and superstars of every age, and Warhol absorbed this too into the magma of his imagination.”
I n 1984, Andy Warhol turned his focus away from his ubiquitous silkscreens of everyday, commercial objects and portraits of Hollywood’s elite to focus his attention on the history of art itself through his series Details of Renaissance Paintings. In doing so, not only did Warhol pay homage to the Renaissance masters, but he also placed himself as inheritor and predecessor of their revered lineage by incorporating excerpts of their acclaimed works and thus dramatically expanding the scope of his oeuvre. In St. George and the Dragon (After Paolo Uccello), Warhol appropriates Paolo Uccello’s circa 1470 painting Saint George and the Dragon using vibrant colors in a unique screenprint which acts as a crucial preparatory investigation anticipating the later works in his Details of Renaissance Paintings series. By cropping and distorting the original scale and color palette of Uccello’s original painting, Warhol shockingly transforms the iconic Renaissance painting from the canon of Art History into a remarkable Pop spin-off. Just as Warhol’s earlier silkscreen works from the 1960s radically exalted the commodification of American consumer brands and products, the composition of St. George and the Dragon (After Paolo Uccello) similarly examines and subverts the ways in which we consume artistic masterpieces.
The story of Saint George and the Dragon belongs to a popular collection of saint’s lives written by Jacopo de Vorgine in the 13th century, titled The Golden Legend. The original masterpiece by Uccello features two episodes from the story of Saint George: his defeat of the plague-bearing dragon that had been terrorizing the city, and the rescued princess bringing the dragon to heel using the belt from her dress as a leash. Warhol crops Uccello’s mythical scene down to the princess’s simple yet stoic profile and the dragon’s all-encompassing spotted wing at a drastically enlarged scale, essentially elevating a fraction of this art historical masterpiece into a Pop art model. The subtle and darker palette of Uccello’s original painting is replaced by a cacophony of striking fluorescent colors and asymmetrical linework which delightfully guide the eye and disguise the origins of the source image.
In other works from this series, Warhol borrowed imagery from universally recognizable paintings such as Leonardo da Vinci’s The Annunciation and The Last Supper and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. As Warhol was formally trained as an artist at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, it is not surprising that he turned to these Renaissance masters for inspiration, and soon, appropriated their laboriously detailed and painstakingly painted masterworks into essentialized silkscreens. Subsequently, Warhol transforms the work into easily reproducible commodities, curiously subverting not only Uccello’s artistic intention, but the very principles held so highly within art historical tradition. As such, St. George and the Dragon (After Paolo Uccello) epitomizes Warhol’s illustrious reinvention of history painting and keen awareness of the canonical tradition where he would later cement his inimitable cultural legacy.
