Die drei Reiter II: Hl. Georg

Hans von Marées's Die drei Reiter II: Hl. Georg (St. George of the Three Riders, 1885) completes the triptych with the most famous of the mounted saints — St. George slaying the dragon, the archetypal narrative of Christian heroism triumphing over evil. Von Marées treats this most conventionally dramatic of the three subjects in his characteristic anti-dramatic manner: the dragon-slaying reduced to its essential structural encounter — rider, horse, and vanquished beast — without the theatrical movement and detail of traditional dragon-slaying compositions. The result is archaic and monumental rather than dramatic.

The St. George panel maintains the series' formal language: monumental simplified forms, warm limited palette, broad planes of color rather than descriptive detail. The dragon, whether shown in struggle or defeated, is rendered with the same structural simplification as the rider and horse — transformed from conventional monster to symbolic form. The compositional challenge of showing rider and dragon in relation to each other is resolved through Von Marées's characteristic reduction to geometric essentials.