This week’s two articles about reading visual art go in quest of one of the animals in the extensive bestiary of classical mythology, the Chimera. It has since come to refer to a creature with multiple sets of DNA of different origins, which only seems appropriate for these mythological composites.
The original Chimera was a Greek mythological beast, a fire-breathing monster in Lycia, Asia Minor, consisting of body parts from several different species. Although opinions varied, the popular depiction of the Chimera in classical art was of a lion with the head and neck of a goat rising from its back, and a tail ending with a serpent’s head. It was finally slain from the air by Bellerophon, who was riding Pegasus the winged horse, another composite creature of myth.
The Chimera is distinct from the Sphinx, a mythical creature with the head of a human, the haunches of a lion, and sometimes a bird’s wings. Two varieties of Sphinx are described in the classical literature: the Greek, based on a woman and typically shown with human breasts, and the Egyptian, based on a man’s upper body. The only example of the Greek Sphinx was that guarding the entrance to Thebes.
Gustave Moreau’s justly famous painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864) elaborates this tense visual story with intricate symbols, and is painted in an archaic style resembling that of Andrea Mantegna. As for his Sphinx, she has the hindquarters of a big cat, wings of an eagle, and the head and bust of a woman.
Fernand Khnopff’s Art, or Caresses from 1896 is a more modern interpretation, with an androgynous youth standing cheek-to-cheek with a leopard with a young woman’s head.
Renaissance art shows few examples of the Chimera, but many of other composite creatures, usually in the role of devils tempting Saint Anthony.
Michelangelo’s Torment of Saint Anthony (c 1487–88) shows the saint being held aloft by ten or so devils, including a weird fish with many spines and a trunk-like snout. The devil at the lower right of the group has breasts and a face in its perineum, which almost makes it double-ended, but none meets the specification for a Chimera.
Bellini’s Allegory of Winged Fortune (1490) shows a composite creature assembled from contemporary symbolic associations, rather than a Chimera. The following symbolic devices can be read here:
- the blindfold represents Fortune’s salient characteristic, her blindness in dispensing good fortune and misfortune;
- ill fate is normally associated with a peacock tail, wings, and lion’s paws;
- the two pitchers represent the dispensation of good and bad fortune;
- abundant and long hair at the front of the head, and little at the back, symbolises Kairos, the moment of opportunity, which can be seized by the hair when approaching, but once passed cannot.
Perhaps the richest source of weird creatures are the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
In the lower right corner of Bosch’s Saint John on Patmos, there is a curious creature resembling a cross between an insect and a bird, with a human head and face wearing spectacles (pince-nez); this is presumably a caricature of the artist as a devil.
The foreground of the left panel of his Hermit Saints triptych features a complete zoo of weird creatures, mainly assembled using a mixture of parts of real creatures. At its centre, for example, is a bird with human legs, a peacock-like posterior, and the bill of a spoonbill. None of these is quite a Chimera, though.
Bosch’s nightmare menagerie lived on in the work of other painters, such as Maerten de Vos’s Temptation of Saint Anthony from 1591-4. One of the creatures in the right foreground is a portmanteau of human and bird, wears an inverted funnel on its head, and is reading sheet music, all features developed by Bosch almost a century earlier.
Tomorrow I’ll look at more recent paintings, continuing this quest for a true Chimera.