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Thanks to their typecasting as villains in fairy tales, dragons are visually linked to the Middle Ages.
Dragons appear in a lot of medieval art from around the world, and they have a long and varied visual history.
The bestiary, a sort of European encyclopedia of animals, describes the dragon as the greatest of earth’s serpents, with a powerful tail and the ability to make the air shimmer as it flies.
As a symbol of the devil in the Christian tradition, dragons often feature in the stories of saints.
St. Margaret was supposedly swallowed by Satan in the guise of a dragon, from whom she miraculously emerged. In the image above, you can see the edge of her red cloak sticking out of the dragon's mouth.
Dragons offered medieval artists lots of opportunity for creativity. Some are winged and scaly, others are multicolored, or have curly tails.
Many fearsome serpent-like dragons also appear in adventure epics of Persian literature from Iran and India.
And in East Asia, the dragon was associated with imperial power, and is an auspicious symbol of strength and luck—as in this example, the Eleven Dragons handscroll dated to the Chinese Ming Dynasty.
The Fantasy of the Middle Ages
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