This one’s mostly straightforward. Early (for north of the Alps) Renaissance painting of St. Liphard, a legendary 6th century French churchman who slew a local dragon. I can understand fudging the bishop’s robes for something more recognizable, but I have no fuckin’ clue why Jean Bourdichon decided to paint the dragon as a pissed-off housecat on a leash rather than, y’know, dead. We will need someone with far more skill in relating the mindset of the average French painter circa 1500.
I crack up at the idea of the catholic church to this day accepting that this guy did indeed defeat a dragon, and therefore indeed is a saint
Really makes you think just how culturally biased wikipedia can be. Any other culture outside of Europe has a crazy story about monks slaying dragons, and wiki will pretext the story as mythology, or religious allegory. This article seems to adopt the position that France once had a Dragon problem…
Wikipedia reflects the editors. This page was made by 2 guys and a citation not. The type of people who bother to create a page about an obscure Catholic saint are usually Catholics themselves.
Meanwhile, the stories about far-off non-Western cultures are usually written by *philes (Japanophiles (aka weebs) write a lot of crap about Japan, for instance) or anthropologists. These are not the sort of people to actually believe in dragons.
I guess he slew the dragon and tamed its offspring
