Who Created This Peculiar Painting of a Drooling Dragon? Nobody Knows—but a Museum Just Bought It for $20 Million Painted around 1510, the mysterious altarpiece by an unknown artist features unusual details, including a slobbering dragon and an angel playing the mouth harp The Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret, circa 1510 The National Gallery, London London’s National Gallery recently purchased an enigmatic artwork called The Virgin and Child With Saints Louis and Margaret for $20 million. Despite the painting’s high price tag, there is no consensus among experts about who painted the altarpiece, where it was commissioned or even what country the artist was from. Last exhibited in 1960, The Virgin and Child With Saints Louis and Margaret is a mysterious painting that the National Gallery has had its eye on “for decades,” Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the museum, tells the Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey. The gallery purchased the painting earlier this year as part of its bicentenary celebration. The work will go on public display starting on May 10, 2025. Museum officials hope that prolonged viewing will help move scholars closer to a consensus about the details of this expensive painting’s provenance and creator. The National Gallery in London The National Gallery, London The first clues about the altarpiece’s origins come from the wooden panel it’s painted on. The gallery used dendrochronology to date the wood to around 1483. The wood is Baltic oak, frequently used in the Low Countries. (French artists of the era used locally sourced wood.) The altarpiece was first documented in 1602 at the Premonstratensian Abbey of Drongen in Ghent, Belgium, according to a statement from the National Gallery. Experts don’t know if that was the painting’s original location, but some of its subject matter suggests that it could have been. Consider the characters in the painting: the Virgin, baby Jesus, St. Margaret, St. Louis, two angels and a dragon. Although St. Louis is the French king Louis IX, he was revered among the Premonstratensians for allowing the Catholic order to use the fleur-de-lis—a symbol of French royalty—in their coat of arms. Another detail relating to St. Louis helped art historians narrow down the date even more. While the dendrochronology sets an early limit at 1483, the design of the chain worn by St. Louis was modified in 1516, meaning that the altarpiece was likely painted before that date. “A dating of about 1510 seems appropriate on stylistic grounds,” the National Gallery says in the statement. It suggests that the painting’s “plasticity, monumentality” and lighting are reminiscent of French painter Jean Hey, while its “composition and versatile execution” reveal artistic debts to Jan van Eyck and Hugo van der Goes of the Netherlandish tradition. But beyond these stylistic similarities, The Virgin and Child With Saints Louis and Margaret is truly one-of-a-kind. Emma Capron, a curator at the museum who was responsible for the acquisition, describes the altarpiece as “wildly inventive” and “full of iconographical oddities,” per the Art Newspaper. Start with the dragon and its bizarre dog-like face, exaggerated fangs and dripping drool. According to tradition, Satan, disguised as a dragon, swallowed St. Margaret whole. His stomach rejected her and there she appears in the painting, kneeling in prayer, totally unfazed by the event.hymn by the English composer Walter Frye but now identified as musical gibberish. The other angel plucks her mouth harp, “a sound hardly associated with celestial harmony,” as the National Gallery says in the statement. With Old Testament references hidden in the columns’ capitals, as well as solemn details like a goldfinch and the nails of the crucifixion interspersed throughout, it’s easy to lose sight of the centerpiece of the painting: baby Jesus and the Virgin “draped in blazing sports-car red,” as Richard Whiddington writes for Artnet. These elements mix humor and gravity into a rich, dynamic scene on a wooden panel that’s roughly four feet tall. In the 1950s, art historian Denys Sutton described the altarpiece as “one of those delectable items that defies the ingenuity of scholars,” per the Art Newspaper. Decades later, its mysteries remain. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.