A Lion Confronting a Dragon

At first glance, this spirited confrontation between a winged dragon and a crouching lion may seem to be a product of the artist’s imagination. Yet the author of the work appears to have borrowed the composition from a well-known Florentine engraving of the 1460s (British Museum, London), which may itself have been modeled on a pattern book of animal poses. Descending from classical mythology and medieval allegory, fantastical creatures captivated Renaissance artists. The motif of the lion and dragon fighting was common in medieval bestiaries, moralizing manuscripts featuring real and fictional beasts. Though the draftsman derived the overall design from the print, he rendered the figures and landscape elements with greater naturalism and detail. The modeling of the forms with dense parallel and cross-hatching to create a sculptural chiaroscuro suggests that this is an early sixteenth-century work.