Andy Warhol – Uccello, St. George and the Dragon (1984)

Uccello, St. George and the Dragon (1984) belongs to Warhol's celebrated series of screenprints after Old Master paintings — works in which he subjected canonical images from Western art history to the same chromatic transformation he applied to Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong, and Campbell's soup cans. The source is Paolo Uccello's iconic fifteenth-century panel painting, one of the most recognisable works in the National Gallery, London. In Warhol's hands, the chivalric narrative is stripped of its moral weight and reborn as pure visual sensation: the dragon's coiling body blazes in orange and gold against a deep magenta ground, while the princess stands calm and luminous in profile — the scene simultaneously mythic and psychedelic.

The screenprint medium — Warhol's signature tool — is ideally suited to the flatness and graphic intensity of Uccello's original composition, itself renowned for its almost diagrammatic treatment of perspective and form. By pushing the palette into acid pinks, teal, and amber, Warhol collapses the distance between the Renaissance and the 1980s, finding in a five-hundred-year-old dragon hunt the same consumable spectacle he located in celebrity and commodity.

Produced in a strictly limited edition of 50 and referenced as Feldman & Schellmann II.325 in the authoritative catalogue raisonné of Warhol's prints, each impression is signed and numbered by the artist. A rare and significant work from one of Warhol's most intellectually ambitious print series.