One of the great joys of being a medievalist is to explore how aspects from the Middle Ages - such as ideas, literary topoi or iconography - continues to work in culture long after the end of the medieval period (even by the most liberal estimate). This longevity of cultural aspect is of course unsurprising given the continuity in cultural transmission, or the occasional rediscovery which brings something back to the cultural consciousness after a period of oblivion. Moreover, this continuity is yet another example of how periodisations are fictions of practicality rather than natural entities, and continuity thus reminds us how cautious we should be in dividing time too neatly into compartments.
Leaving aside the definition of the Middle Ages, and its problems as a scholarly construct, it is very clear that because there exists an idea of the medieval, that idea can be used aesthetically to connect with the period meant to be covered by that term. This connection can be serious or playful, or a mix of both, and it can serve a number of different purposes, all depending on the combination of author/sender/transmitter and audience.
One medieval iconographical topos that has had a substantial impact on modern popular culture is that of the dragonslayer, which can be found in a range of media, from commercial fantasy to church art. I have touched on the development of this topos in earlier blogposts (here, here, and here), and I recently came across one scene that reminded me again how this ties into the cultural output of the medieval period. What the scene in question reminded me of was the famous depiction of Saint George and the dragon by Paolo Uccello, completed around 1470. In the contemporary imagination, this is perhaps one of the best known and most resonant renditions of the motif, and I was struck by the similarities between this and the scene by which I was reminded of Uccello's painting
National Gallery, London, NG6294
Courtesy of Wikimedia
The scene in question is part of a dream sequence in the comic book El estropicio meteorológico (The meteorological fracas), which was serially published in 1987. The comic book is an instalment in the classical series Mortadelo y Filemón by Francisco Ibáñez, a series in which several famous works of art and literature have been parodied through the characters of this fictional universe. The similarities between the scene in the dream of Mortadelo and that of Uccello's dragonslaying are notable, especially the lance piercing the dragon's nose. Naturally, I cannot claim that it is Uccello who has provided Ibáñez with the model for the scene in El estropicio meteorológico - the scene might be inspired by any number of Saint George renditions, so we should be cautious in pinpointing influences too exactly. Even if the connection between the painting from c.1470 and the drawing from 1987 might be indirect at best, the scene with Mortadelo as the typical dragonslayer points to the impact of the medieval imagination on the modern, and we are reminded that so much of our modern cultural output is in some way part of a continuity that goes back centuries into the past.
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