Perhaps it’s a painting I once saw in London that stuck with me, because the princess depicted is holding a ferocious dragon bored on a leash as if waiting for her Chihuahua to finish pooping, and not just from a horrific death- door-dragon is rescued by Joris, who is still toiling next to her to subdue that monster. But since then I’ve noticed that if you see a woman in a painting with a dragon, that woman often looks quite blasé. So also this one, in a 15th-century manuscript. Yes, I have two dragons in my fists. So? Like she does it every Monday morning, squeezing dragons. A dragon thrashes so nervously that it bites itself in the wing. Her eyebrows are high and her eyelids low, adding to the indifferent look. In the meantime, her skirt has been fashionably raised so that the blue underskirt and her fine black pointed shoes are visible. You’re a nemesis or you’re not.
Women and dragons together form a pleasant kind of contrast: they are a beauty and often also virtuous, next to a destructive monster. Fertility and destruction, beauty and terrifying horror all together. When that virtuous, beautiful lady also has control over the monster with the greatest effort, the viewer is quieted; the satisfaction that purity is more powerful than violence.
By the way, according to the story these are not dragons but snakes. It’s about king Athamas, whose wife was so jealous of her own stepchildren that she wanted to kill them. To prevent this, the goddess Juno sent the fury Tisiphone to him, who drove him mad with the poison of two snakes. He then killed his wife, then his two children and jumped into the sea and drowned, which can also be seen in the background in this performance. A strange story, because for those children the whole operation made little difference, they were killed in any case left or right. It comes from a story that was wildly popular in the 15th century: L’Epistre D’Othea by Christine dePizzan. In the Royal Library of Brussels it is now on display as one of the beautiful manuscripts of the Dukes of Burgundy in a fine exhibition.
Christine de Pizan was a much-loved author who also wrote about the power of women in mythology and history in her other work, which was exceptional for the time. Female saints always face evil coolly and bravely. In a kind of reversed version of the story of Eve in paradise, Tisiphone has control over the snakes, just like Pizan’s own nominal saint Christina, whom she also describes, who after many tortures remains upright and who even two poisonous snakes meekly at her feet their heads. let bend. It is clear that Christine de Pizan had a special bond with the female-reptile combination. In this illustration, the fury with the dragon snakes is also central, while normally Athamas plays the leading role in images of this story. As a loose detail, Tisiphone here is a rather emancipating image: the woman who easily controls two deadly monsters.