In the article, on the basis of scientific literature, the author presents an overview of rulers’ portraits as Saint George in the West European, Eastern Christian and Russian art for the first time. The tendencies of studying the portrait-identification revealed by this example, such as striving for cataloguing and classification, clarification of sources and evolution, specification of terminology in the European science and emphasis on the interpretation of such images in contemporary written sources in the domestic science, open up prospects for further research of this important phenomenon in the context of monarch power sacralization.