St George Fighting the Dragon

A knight in dark plate armor battles a dark-scaled dragon in a rocky, open landscape. To the right, a princess in a pink gown flees toward a distant hill, looking back at the struggle. The painting captures the climactic moment after the knight's lance has shattered, forcing him to finish the beast with his sword.

The motif of the dragon-slayer was frequently adopted in Renaissance Neoplatonism as an allegory for the triumph of the rational soul over base, material impulses. This chivalric ideal of the 'Soldier of Christ' (miles Christianus) was a central theme in the moral philosophy of humanists like Erasmus, who sought to internalize the battle between virtue and vice.