The fight: St George kills the dragon VI

More commonly an excuse for high drama and dynamic design, the legend of St. George inspired in Edward Burne-Jones a typically lyrical response. This image presents the viewer with something akin to a dream. The knight is hardy enough, dispatching his beastly (but undernourished) enemy with assurance, yet this St. George is a creature of the mind. The blurry sfumato of the forms — Burne-Jones had yet to perfect his brittle manner — and the elegance of the poses encourage reverie, not alarm. Burne-Jones was the least ideological of the Pre-Raphaelites and yet the most enduring, always keeping faith with a moonlit world of bloodless damsels and epicene saints; Henry James called the Burne-Jones type "pale, sickly, and wan." No progressive, the English artist loathed the Impressionists, preferring their symbolist contemporaries, whom he admired and greatly influenced. 

Thank God, the weekend is coming.