Hybrids and Imaginary Creatures
Monsters, chimeras and invented beasts that combine what nature keeps apart.
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Imaginary creatures combine what nature keeps apart, and most cultures have made them to embody power, danger or the sacred. Guardian figures with human heads, bulls' bodies and eagles' wings, called lamassu, flanked the gateways of Assyrian palaces from the 9th century BC, and the Great Sphinx at Giza joins a king's head to a lion's body. Mesoamerican peoples carved Quetzalcoatl as a feathered serpent, and Chinese dragons coil across bronzes, ceramics and robes.
Medieval bestiaries and margins teem with griffins and basilisks, and Martin Schongauer's engraving The Temptation of Saint Anthony (c. 1470–75) lifts the saint into the air among scaly, spiny demons. Odilon Redon drew The Smiling Spider (1881) with a human grin, and Leonora Carrington filled her paintings with hybrid horses, birds and half-animal beings. Sophie Ryder models hare-headed women in wire and bronze, and Matthew Barney's Cremaster films (1994–2002) include satyrs and a four-horned ram.
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