aint George, a central figure in the medieval Christian imagination, is inextricably linked to the dragon: a creature that is defeated, certainly, but above all a mythical presence that points to far older stories and traditions.

The spread of the dragon’s image in Europe between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is vividly illustrated by the exhibition “SAINT GEORGE. The Myth of a Knightly Saint from the East to Genoa”: yet before symbolizing the enemy to be vanquished in the Western tradition, the dragon was in fact an ancient and layered presence, bearing cosmological, royal, and apotropaic meanings in many cultures of Asia and the Islamic world.

This cycle of lectures invites participants to reverse their perspective: not to begin with the hero, but with the fantastic creature.

It retraces the dragon’s Eastern origins, follows its iconographic and symbolic transformations along the Silk Road, and observes how this figure reaches the West—and Genoa—through precious textiles, ceramics, manuscripts, architecture, and luxury objects.