Where to See Paolo Uccello: Saint George and a Battle Split Across Three Cities

The dragon is being stabbed and taken for a walk at the same time. In Saint George and the Dragon, the princess holds its leash while George drives in his lance. Uccello has folded successive episodes into one scene. The princess’s calm makes the arrangement still stranger. She seems to have accepted that this creature can be led away, although the knight has plainly arrived prepared for a fight.

London: a dragon without expensive paint

The National Gallery’s Saint George and the Dragon probably belonged in a home. It contains neither costly pigments nor gilding. Its later history was violent: Nazis seized it from the Lanckoroński collection in 1939, and American troops recovered it after the war. The National Gallery bought it in 1959. The small, almost playful encounter survived an episode of organised theft that had nothing playful about it.

Give the princess a moment before following the lance. Her leash supplies a thin, almost casual connection with the monster, whereas the weapon makes a forceful diagonal through the action. Two different ways of dealing with danger occupy the same little landscape. The scene is readable at once and then becomes harder to explain. That is a useful introduction to Uccello: recognising what is depicted does not exhaust the pleasure of looking at how he has arranged it.

A much larger confrontation belongs to the same museum. In Niccolò da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano, the commander wears a red-and-gold hat while his page carries his helmet. The costume may recall honours awarded after the Florentine victory of 1432. Broken lances form an orderly pattern across the ground. This is a commemorative picture, where a hat can explain a commander’s importance more effectively than sensible protection for his head.

Florence: victory on the wall, coercion at the door

The Uffizi’s Unhorsing of Bernardino della Carda centres on a rider being thrown from his mount. The traditional identification names the opposing commander, though it has been challenged. Look at how the surrounding lances direct attention towards the fall. Metal leaf once made armour and harness glitter. These panels were made for a room in Lionardo Bartolini Salimbeni’s palace, with shaped upper edges fitted to its architecture; the rectangles we know are adaptations.

Their transfer to Lorenzo de’ Medici was less harmonious than their patterns. In 1495 Damiano Bartolini complained that Lorenzo had sent a woodworker to remove the three pictures against his wishes. Damiano’s brother Andrea had agreed to surrender his own share, but Damiano had refused. The National Gallery’s catalogue reconstructs this appropriation, probably in 1484; the Uffizi’s shorter account describes a sale. Keeping the disagreement visible is preferable to imagining a cheerful transaction between collector and owner.

These are the same three paintings now divided between Florence, London and Paris. Their history makes a literal journey out of something once encountered within a single room. When looking at the Uffizi battle panel, concentrate first on the falling rider, then follow a lance away from him. The picture supplies routes through the fighting, even when the accumulation of armour initially makes every figure difficult to separate.

Paris: the final charge passes through a bankruptcy

The Counterattack of Micheletto Attendolo reached France through another collector’s misfortune. It belonged to the Marquis Campana; after his bankruptcy, the French state acquired it from the papal government in 1861. It entered the Louvre in 1863. On our autumn 2026 check it was in room 708, the Salon Carré, on level 1 of the Denon wing. Its horses have crossed more than one administrative frontier since leaving the Bartolini household.

The Paris scene is generally read as the arrival of Florence’s ally with the decisive attack. Try following the angles of the raised lances before studying individual faces. They turn a crowd into a sequence of movements, as though the weapons were registering successive stages of an order. Beside the London commander’s display and the Florentine rider’s fall, this panel gives the battle a different verb. The three pictures need comparison more than they need to be rushed into a tidy chronological strip.

Melbourne and Madrid: two smaller confrontations

Melbourne holds an earlier Saint George Slaying the Dragon in the National Gallery of Victoria. It is thought to date from Uccello’s Venetian period, when he worked on the mosaics of San Marco. Here the white horse confronts a dark, spiky creature under the gaze of God the Father. The NGV suggests that the subject’s popularity in Venice may have related to tension with the Ottoman world. The suggestion remains a possibility, not a known explanation of this commission.

Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza has a quieter assembly in The Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saints. Its low format suggests the centre of a predella, the sequence of smaller pictures beneath an altarpiece, but the rest has not been identified. The figures stand apart, each directed towards Christ rather than towards a neighbour. Here the missing pieces concern an altar, whereas the scattered battle scenes can still be traced to three museums.

Start with London if you want the widest change of scale within one collection. Before travelling on to Florence or Paris, save reproductions of the other battle panels so you can compare them with the one before you. Look first at the horses and the direction of the weapons; matching every commander’s name can wait.