Rubens’s Landscape with St George and the Dragon: Relating Images to their Originals and Changing the Meaning of Representation at the Court of Charles I

This article argues that the least studied and understood of the works that Rubens painted at Charles I’s court, Landscape with St George and the Dragon (1629–30), is in fact the most important for understanding Charles’s strategies for representation during the period of his personal rule. The article shows that the painting identifies St George as the original and the King as his exact image. In this way, the article suggests, Rubens endorsed Charles’s anti-Calvinist policies, especially his reform of the Order of the Garter. The article also shows how Rubens’s painting took from masques both the license to represent the King as someone else, as well as a new narrative structure that figured Charles as the herald of peace. It concludes by suggesting that Rubens’s painting reinvigorated court masque performances in the early years of Charles’s personal rule