Summary

Throughout the course of time the dragon has always been present in the human’s imagination. It is fascinating to realize that for the majority of time people thought this beast to be an actual creature, that though they had most likely, never seen one they still believed on their existence. It is also interesting to see how these creatures, due to their mysterious nature, took on so many different attributes and forms.

The most important thing that I learned from this study about dragons during the Renaissance was the fact that they were monsters of ambivalence. At times they would portray Interestingly, while they possessed so many different attributes they did always have the association with power, but what it came down to was how they used their power. For sometimes they used their might to be guardians of something positive, but at other times they used their forces to protect selfish desires. No one knew or knows exactly what a dragon looks or acts like and because of the amounts of artists and writers that were present during the renaissance, this ambivalence was only amplified. Because if a painter depicted a dragon in his work, or if a writer wrote about the terrors of a dragon there was no one present who could refute them saying by saying “No, that is not a dragon”. So, the idea of the dragon’s ambivalence only grew.

However, like most of everything that was once scientifically confusing to the peoples of the Renaissance the dragon became for of a defined creature. This definition lead to the realistic destruction of the dragon. For when the monster was created through scientific examinations and writings, more science came to state that dragons did not exist.

The dragon was an important fixture that was very common in the minds of everyone during the Renaissance. It had many traits which made it very distant and mystical, but still possibly living in the hills or under the sea. Yet, like most ideas that were believed as true during those times, the dragon began to leave our breathing world and enter the world of fantasy, fiction and mythology, where it lives today, still possessing many of the attributes that it maintained during the Renaissance.