XI. THE PLACE OF DRAGONS 387

eel,* carries out the portraiture. For this, loathsome as the body is full of horror, takes the place of the snails ranked by Spenser in line beside his urchins. Though the monster, half rampant, rises into air, turning claw and spike and tooth towards St. George, we are taught by this grey abomination twisting in the slime of death that the threatened destruction is to be dreaded not more for its horror than for its shame.

227. Behind the dragon lie, naked, with dead faces turned heavenwards, two corpses-a youth’s and a girl’s, eaten away from the feet to the middle, the flesh hanging at the waist in loathsome rags torn by the monster’s teeth. The man’s thigh and upper-arm bones snapped across and sucked empty of marrow, are turned to us for special sign of this destroyer’s power. The face, foreshortened, is drawn by death and decay into the ghastly likeness of an ape’s.† The girl’s face-seen in profile-is quiet and still beautiful; her long hair is heaped as for a pillow under her head. It does not grow like St. George’s, in living ripples, but lies in fantastic folds, that have about them a savour, not of death only, but of corruption. For all its pale gold, they at once carry back one’s mind to Turner’s Python,¹ where the arrow of Apollo strikes him in the midst, and, piercing, reveals his foulness. Round her throat cling a few torn rags, these only remaining of the white garment that clothed her once. Carpaccio was a diligent student of ancient mythology. Boccaccio’s very learned book on the

* The eel was Venus’ selected beast-shape in the “Flight of the Gods.” Boccaccio has enlarged upon the significance of this: Gen. Deor., IV. 68. One learns from other sources that a tail was often symbol of sensuality.

† In the great Botticelli of the National Gallery [No. 915], known as Mars and Venus, but almost identical with the picture drawn afterwards by Spenser of the Bower of Acrasia [Faerie Queene, ii. xii. 77], the sleeping youth wears an expression, though less strongly marked, very similar to that of this dead face here. Such brutish paralysis is with scientific accuracy made special to the male. It may be noticed that the power of venomously wounding, expressed by Carpaccio through the dragon’s spines, is in the Botticelli signified by the swarm of hornets issuing from the treetrunk by the young man’s head.

¹ [No. 488 in the National Gallery.]

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