Italian, North, 'Saint George and a Female Saint', about 1510-20

Saint George, with the remains of the dragon he has slain beside him, and an unidentified female saint kneel with their hands on their hearts in reverence. A rough Crucifix made from two bound sticks has been propped up inside a broken tree stump. Usually in Italian religious art of this period a tree stump with new growth symbolises Christ’s resurrection; here the Crucifix is an unusual variation with the same meaning.

This painting is a fragment of a larger work, probably of the Virgin and Child with saints. The Virgin and Child would originally have been to the left, with Saint George and the female saint facing towards them. There was probably another pair of saints on the other side of the Virgin and Child. The infant Saint John the Baptist is usually depicted holding a small Crucifix like the one in the tree stump, which suggests that he may originally have been included in the central group of the Virgin and Child. We do not know the locations of the other missing parts of the painting. The picture was originally painted on a wooden panel but the National Gallery’s fragment has since been transferred to canvas. The panel was probably damaged, which may explain why this surviving fragment was separated from the rest of the painting and why it is in such poor condition.

This type of single-panel devotional image of the Virgin and Child with saints is known in Italian as a sacra conversazione, meaning ‘holy conversation’. Although the holy figures are not usually shown speaking to each other, the term implies a psychological connection between them. This was not so evident in earlier altarpieces in which the saints were represented on separate panels from the Virgin and Child. The original painting would have been wider than it is tall. This landscape format sacra conversazione is a type of devotional image that was developed and became popular in Venice in the first half of the sixteenth century.

A complete work of this type by Palma Vecchio is in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and the National Gallery picture is clearly in his style, but the damage and heavy repainting it has suffered makes it difficult to say for certain who it is by.