This post was originally published in 2002 - it is reproduced here with minimal modifications.
The
Chimera (or Chimaera) is an ancient myth, well known to our days. A
monster, part goat, part lion and part snake, it was fought and
killed by the hero Bellerophon. The modern way to see the myth has
led to several attempts to revisit it in figurative art. Of these
attempts, several have not been very successful, others, however,
tell us something not only about the Chimera, but about ourselves in
the way the myth affects us. In the image, you can see A modern version of the
Chimera, by Arturo Martini. Transformed from a female into a male,
this piece conveys all the rage and madness of our times
Ancient myths have fared with
varying degree of success in our times. Mermaids, for instance, have
become a common theme of Hollywod movies while the Sphinx has
inspired a whole generation of painters, the Symbolists
of 19th Century. In comparison, Chimeras are much less common and rarely
appear in modern figurative art. Nevertheless, that of the Chimera is
a myth strictly related to that of the Sphinx, as old as that of
the mermaids, and just as common (perhaps more common) in ancient
art.
The classic Chimera is a creature with the body of a lion, the
tail of a serpent, and a goat's head sprouting out of the back. In ancient images what we
find is a great uniformity, clearly the result of an attempt to
show the same thing. Not only the proportions are always about
the same, but also the chimera is shown always in a similar
posture. Angry, with mouth open, often with the back arched in a
position of impotent rage. Against this roaring monster sometimes
we can see (or sometimes just imagine) the shining hero
Bellerophon on his winged steed carrying out his monster slaying
business.
The
setting and the shape of the Chimera in ancient times was a
representation of a well known story, with characters that people
expected to be able to recognize. In a way, we can think of something
similar to Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. The artists drawing comic
books are not expected to exercise their creativity in order to produce an
original version of the concept of mouse (or duck) dressed in human
clothes. So it was for the Chimera; it was a character in a well
known story: the epic fight of the hero Bellerophon against a fire
breathing monster.
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The Chimera was,
actually, a reflection of much older stories, stories that went
back to the ancient middle east, to the Sumerian age when a
winged lion named, perhaps, "Anzu" was the steed and
the pet of the great goddess Inanna, the giver of joy and the
mistress of fertility.
That lion, later to become a chimera, was
one of the many incarnations of the storm beast, the creature
that makes lightening and thunder. A few millennia later, in
1930, a Japanese painter living in France, Tsoguharu Fujita,
unknowingly painted (image on the right) again Inanna and her lion, an example of how
myths and the images associated to them never really disappear
from human consciousness.
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Back to Sumerian times,
over the centuries Inanna's name changed into Tiamat and she was
killed by her son Marduk with an arrow shot straight into her
mouth, just as the Chimera was killed by Bellerophon by thrusting
molten lead into her throat. With time, the goddess and her steed
faded away from human consciousness, they lost their separate
identities and the story was transformed into what Hesiod and
Homer reported to us: a few lines describing the slaying of an
ugly beast, a monster that in some places became known as
"Chimera".
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As
a last injury, the Chimera lost her wings, her link to the sky, to be
substituted by a lowly earthen goat. Classical writers already didn't
know exactly what to do with the myth. Plato himself in his
"Phaedrus" dismisses the Chimera as something unworthy for
a true phylosopher to lose time with. The myth became
crystallized, frozen into something that nobody could understand any
more. So had its images. Over the whole classic period, Chimeras were
painted and sculpted always in the same way, probably intended as
little more than decorative elements.
As
the classical age slowly faded away, the myth of the Chimera faded,
too, but it never completely disappeared. The concept was preserved
in literary terms and it was used in Middle Ages as a way to represent the wickedness of women, as it
had been popular with late Classical writers. However, its graphic
aspect could not be recovered
simply from the literary descriptions of Homer and Hesiod, which are
very schematic or from those of the later classical writers,
Plutarch, Valerius or Anaxilas who are only concerned with the
symbolic aspects of the myth. Very few images of Chimeras were
painted or sculpted in middle ages. It seems that in some areas the classical/etruscan
image of the myth did survive, as in the 11th century
mosaics of the cathedral of Aosta, in Italy.
Although this Chimera (shown here on the left) is not exactly the same as the
Etruscan or Classical version, some details (e.g. the heads aligned one after the other)
could not be derived simply from the literary version, so it is almost inescapable here
to assume a certain continuity with the classic tradition (as discussed
in a paper by Guido Cossard ).
On the whole, however, the numerous monsters shown in medieval art, griffins, dragons,
gargoyles and others, do not seem to be related to the ancient chimera image. As late
as in 16th century, even though by that time many Etruscan
images of the Chimera had been found, the graphic aspect of the myth
was still unfamiliar. So in the illustration for a book printed in
Bologna in 1574 (Quaestiones de universo genere, by Achilles
Bocchi), the Chimera was clearly drawn on the basis of the textual
description only and the result has nothing to do with the way it had been
represented in classical times.
Rediscovering
the aspect of the classical Chimera was a slow process that took
centuries, starting, roughly, with 15th Century AD in
Europe. It was the waning of the middle ages with their mystic bestiaries
and the start of what we call today the Renaissance, the age of
reason, of enlightenment. With the Renaissance there came a keen
interest in the ancient world. It was the time when the first
archaeological excavation started on a large scale. Everywhere in
Europe, people dug out ancient tombs to recover coins, jewelry,
statues, bas-reliefs, frescoes. Out of this great binge of
discoveries, a whole world was rediscovered and of this world what
was perhaps most impressive was its wealth of imagery. The admiration
for Greek and Roman art deeply influenced Renaissance, some say that
it was its very root. Renaissance artists looked to the ancient as
their models in sculpting and painting human figures, where the
concepts of beauty and perfection was at the center.
But not
everything that came out of ancient tombs was beautiful and perfect.
A very different set of images appeared, too. We know that the
ancient Mediterranean civilization was not just what we call the
Apollinean one, with its cult for beautiful bodies. It had a dark
side, the Dyonisian one, with deformed deities, monsters and
grotesque shapes. These grotesque figures were discovered everywhere, but perhaps in the largest numbers in the land of the Etruscans,
modern Tuscany. The Etruscans, those "most religious"
people as they were described by the ancient, were, perhaps, more
inward looking, more concerned with the other world of the Gods. They
did sculpt and paint beautiful bodies, but there was a definite streak
of grotesque and supernatural with their art.
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The treasure hunters who
kept digging tombs in these times did not keep careful records of
what they were doing. Their finds are today dispersed in museums
and private collections. Chimeras were found, and with them
a plethora of different monsters: sphinxes, harpies, sirens,
serpents, devils. These images are still here, today, but in most cases we
have no idea of exactly when a given piece was dug out of the
ground. There are exceptions, though, and one is outstanding: the
Chimera of Arezzo. It was discovered in 1553 near one of the
doors, of the city of Arezzo, some 50 km south of Firenze. This Chimera,
nearly the size of a real lion, was something too big to be
ignored. Its discovery was recorded. The news was so widespread
that the Duke of Tuscany himself, Cosimo 1st, wanted
the statue for himself.
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And
yet, by looking at the figurative art of that period you would not be
able to guess that all these discoveries (and the Chimera of Arezzo
in particular) had been taking place. Renaissance artists,
working mainly in Tuscany, had carried out a revolution in figurative
art that today we still admire, yet they seem to have largely
neglected the subjects of the large number of Etruscan images that
were arriving from underground. They were so concerned with the human
figure that they hardly ever worried about showing animals, more
exactly they had wholly lost the medieval (and earlier) attitude of
seeing animals and monsters as symbols, graphic icons for
concepts which were perhaps impossible to express in words.
So,
Michelangelo and Donatello are said to have been influenced by
Etruscan art in some of their pieces, but just in the composition and
perhaps in the somatic traits of the faces. They surely were aware of
the many facets of Etruscan arts and must have seen at least some of
the mythological creatures that were so often depicted. Yet, there is
no trace of these figures in their paintings. When the Chimera of
Arezzo surfaced in 1553, some artists of the time, Vasari and
Cellini, reported the discovery in their books and diaries. However, in the paintings of Vasari and in the sculptures of Cellini you won't
be able to see any Chimera, nor anything that even vaguely looks like
a Chimera. Mid 16th Century is, actually, the
apotheosis and the waning of the Renaissance at the same time, the time
of its last school, that of the Mannerists: Pontormo, Rosso
Fiorentino, Bronzino; they all brought figurative art to near
perfection. But there was no place among the beautiful bodies they
painted for an ugly, screaming monster, such as the Chimera.
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There may have been an
exception, though. In mid 16th Century, Agnolo Allori,
nicknamed "Bronzino", painted the "Triumph of
Venus and Cupid" a painting still well known today. A
visually startling paintings, it has a visionary element in its
symbolism that is quite unlike anything that Renaissance painters
had ever painted. And the dark creature in the background, the
little monster with a human face, lion's body and snake's scales
may just be a reinterpretation of the Chimera of Arezzo, which
had been discovered just in these years.
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Bronzino's
Chimera may well be the first representation of the ancient myth by a
modern painter and, as such, it turns out to be a symbol of almost
bewildering complexity. Bronzino had worked out a synthesis of the
literary meaning of the Chimera, as it was at his time, and the
figurative one, for which he was inspired by Etruscan motifs. The
Chimera, an evil female, as an unnatural creature, a monster, in
Bronzino's times it had come to be considered also as a symbol for
something also considered unnatural: homosexuality. With this
composition, Bronzino had shown the contrast of homosexual and
straight love, giving a new meaning to a timeless myth.
The
case of Bronzino is an interesting glimpse of how the dead Etruscan
culture could have interacted with the living one of the Renaissance.
But, with the end of Bronzino's generation and with the end of 16th
Century, Renaissance in Tuscany faded away. Economic crisis, wars and
dictatorship moved Tuscany from the cultural center of Europe to its
suburbs, where it has remained ever since. As a consequence, the
Chimera of Arezzo, and Etruscan art in general, ended up also
isolated in a relatively poor and remote area of Europe. With that,
there was little chance that the main currents of European art were
to be affected and inspired by them. Tuscan artists who lived after
the Renaissance still had a chance to learn something from Etruscan
art, but it seems that they did in a very indirect way. By the end of
the Renaissance, another school of artists became popular in Tuscany,
the school of the grotesque. Gone were the beautiful bodies of
the Renaissance, the artists of the time seemed to be interested mainly
in monsters. Out of their brushes, there come out hundreds and
hundreds of square meters (perhaps thousands and thousands) of
grotesque frescoes, of which many are still visible today. Grotesque
art may have been in part inspired by Etruscan art, but, out of these
thousands of vaporous monsters, you wouldn't be able to find anything
that has the features of the classic Chimera. It seems that
Renaissance and post-Renaissance painters could certainly look at the
Chimera statuary that was in front of their eyes, but to really "see" it took a true genius,
Bronzino. The others, saw it as if they were using
old and dirty glasses, darkly and out of focus. The results were those
curiously deformed monsters which populate post-Renaissance walls and
ceilings in Tuscany.
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As far as I can say, the
only grotesque image that vaguely looks like to the original
Chimera is one that appears on the frescoes of the first
courtyard of Palazzo Vecchio, in Firenze. Painted by Marco
da Faenza around 1565, more than ten years after the Chimera
of Arezzo was discovered, it is a creature with the body of a
lion, a serpentine tail and the head of a goat. Not exactly a
classic Chimera, but you can't avoid to think that it may have
been directly inspired by it (after all, the original Chimera of Arezzo
was just
upstairs at that time). But, as we said, that fresco was painted
when the novelty of the discovery was still felt. In the later years
of the post-Renaissance period there is no visible influence of
the Chimera of Arezzo on European art. |
It
was only in 18th -19th Century that a wave of
interest in everything classical reached again Tuscany and the
Etruscans, This wave of interest was something that had been ongoing
since the Renaissance but that in 18th and 19th
Century picked up further momentum. It was a time of major
excavations, also a time when the interest in ancient art reached
perhaps its maximum in modern times. It was also a time when it was
felt that ancient mythology had to be popularized for the masses.
Bullfinch in Europe and Hawthorne in the United States set up to do
just that. Both described the myth of the Chimera and, although
neither one went beyond just rewriting what ancient authors had
written, they revived an almost forgotten myth. In Tuscany, Robert
Dennis, British amateur archaeologist, explored a countryside that in
those times was as remote and exotic as today Afghanistan or Thailand
may appear to us. He wrote a book "Cities and Cemeteries of
Etruria" that became fairly popular in English speaking Europe,
something that rekindled, in part, the interest for Etruscan art in
Europe. Despite all this interest, there does not seem to have been
any chimera painted by a major artist in Europe during 19th
Century. In a certain way, this is surprising since the wave of
interest in ancient mythology had reached not only literates but
artists as well. The European "symbolist" school, which
flourished in Victorian times was very much an offspring of the wave
of interest in everything mythological, everything which had to do
with Gods and monsters of classical antiquity. At that time, Alma
Tadema, Dutch painter living in Britain, painted exquisitely detailed
scenes of life in classical Greece and Rome (or, some say, life in
Victorian times with people dressed as ancient Greeks).
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In the late 19th
century, Alexander Sèon painted "Le
desespoir de la Chimere" (the despair of the Chimera) which
seems to have been hugely successful and which became
relatively well known. Despite the title, though, what Seon had
painted was not a Chimera, but a Sphinx (actually, a Sphinx with a
hairdo typical of Seon's time). As we know, the Sphinx and the
chimera are closely related myths (some say that the Chimera is
sister to the Sphinx, some that she is her daughter). However,
in figurative terms they are completely different and no
confusion is possible. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ingres and
especially Philippe Moreau painted haunting and beautiful images
of the Sphinx, but no Chimeras. It seems that the symbolists had some
general idea of what a Chimera was, but they lacked the key to
understand the myth. In an age without photography and with the
Etruscan images mainly located in far away Tuscany, they also
lacked the necessary knowledge that would have permitted them to
integrate the creature in their paintings.
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And
we arrive to our times, times that we call contemporary. Do
contemporary artists paint or sculpt Chimeras? Not often, but,
occasionally, yes. It would be hard to say that Chimeras are a major
element of contemporary figurative art, but they do exist, and with
the development of recording and reproduction, the image of the
Chimera of Arezzo has become relatively familiar. It is by now "the"
Chimera, an image that artists may choose to neglect or repudiate,
but which they cannot ignore.
So,
who and why is nowadays painting Chimeras? For one thing, there is
the simple purpose of illustration. Evolving from the intellectual
intoxication of 19th Century, our interest in ancient
myths has been popularized and somewhat trivialized. Mythological
encyclopedias are, of course, common. Each one must show at least one
image of the ancient Chimera. This image may be as simple and banal
as the "explanation" of the myth in the text. Just as
classical writers, modern encyclopedias don't really know what to do
with the myth and chase it away as a childish fantasy. This lack of
understanding is often reflected in the illustrations. It is either
the Chimera of Arezzo, pure and simple, or a rendition of it where
the artist felt he/she had somehow to demonstrate his/her freedom of
expression by changing something, the proportions, or - more
radically – the way the creature is assembled or looks like. The
results may not be especially successful.
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An example is the book "Gods, Men and Monsters"
written by Michael Gibson and illustrated by Giovanni Caselli.
This is a book of eerie images, often of stunning beauty, but
this Chimera, well, it is difficult to say. It is not a complete
failure, but it is hard to say that it is a success, either. An
ungainly beast, the proportions somehow seem not to be right,
with the goat's head seeming not to belong to the creature at all
and the lion's mane looking as if just arranged by a
hairdresser. Yet this image still captures something of the heavy
and outlandish nature of the ancient Chimera.
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These
two images by Caselli also illustrate a problem that seems to be
typical of modern renditions of the myth: the difficulty of getting
together Bellerophon and the Chimera, something that, instead, the
ancient seemed not to have problems with. Caselli's Bellerophon is
not just on another page, it looks like he is on another planet, so
different the graphic style. Bellerophon is not just a graphic
problem: whatever he was, hero, monster slayer, or pest exterminator,
he remains a baffling figure for us, just as perhaps he was for
himself.
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Unlike Caselli's Chimera, not much of good can be said of other attempts. This one by Kye
Carbone for the book "The Chimaera" by B. Evslin is an
especially unsuccessful one. Come on, this ain't no Chimera, this
is a rat! And even a rat would probably feel offended to be
represented in this way. The only good thing that can be said
about this potato sack is that it is not really much worse than
the text of the book. The same kind of graphical disasters take
place in the many "monsters manual" of role playing
games, where the Chimera is just another monster to be thrown
against the players' characters. Here, again, the quality of the
imagery matches the depth of the interpretation and here the
collector of graphical ugliness may find truly precious gems. |
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But it is not always like
that. It seems indeed that the rule that graphical and textual
quality are matched is often followed, so that interesting texts
are illustrated with interesting images. The example here is John
Barth's "Chimera", an outlandish and elegant novel
where a disillusioned Bellerophon tells his story and how
he slew the monster. The dancing dinousaurish creature on the
front cover is perfectly adequate to the text. Strangely, in the
Ballantine Books edition I have, the name of the artist author of
this image is never stated. Another one of the many Chimerical
mysteries. |
In our times, chimeras are not just painted as illustrations of books. The image of a
chimera may be required as the logo of a company or of an institution, as a symbol for the
several scientific areas which are somehow named after the chimera (in biology or
computer science). There are also other cases, and it seems that there are at least a few
people on this planet whose last name is "Chimera" and Mr. John Chimera has been so kind
to give me permission to reproduce here his tattoo. This image shows one more of the
several graphical ways to represent a Chimera. This one, clearly derived from the graphic style
of modern comics, has a certain freshness and originality, showing the creature
in an aggressive posture which seems to be perfectly adequate for what we know to
be the essence of the story and of the myth.
These
examples deal with illustrations, a case when an artist was told
something like "we need a chimera painted". A different
case is when, instead, the artist freely chooses the subject of
his/her art. Here, it seems that the Chimera has had a modest impact
on art in our times. There are, to be sure, contemporary artists who
have made themselves a reputation with Chimeras. Thomas Grunfeld, for
instance, has a production of "composite animals" which he
calls Chimeras. I must confess that I am not sure I can understand
what is exactly the point of Mr. Grunfeld's art, but that does not
matter much here. Rather, Grunfeld art is another case of a change in
perception, a case in which the name "Chimera" is applied
in modern times to something that is wholly unrelated to what the
ancient perceived as a Chimera. The same is true for the work of
another contemporary artist. Annette Messager, whose "Chimeras"
are – I think – delightful, but which, again, have nothing
to do with the classical concept.
The production of figurative art in
our times is prodigious, and it is impossible to locate more than a
minor fraction of images which, one way or another, can be classed as
Chimeras. I will show you now a few examples which seem to me
significant, without pretending of being exhaustive.
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First
of all, here is a nice example of an interpretation of the theme
goat+snake+ lion. It is, apparently, the simbol of a college
fraternity and it does not have to be taken as anything like a major
work of art. However, it is a little gem in showing how the concept of
Chimera may look when examined with fresh eyes.
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Another
example is "Kinshasa, the African Chimera". The
author, Mr. Boulton, told me that it was intended to be a
character for some comics he and the others were planning to
develop, but apparently the project was never completed. I don't know where the authors got this idea of an African
Chimera, but the results are, in my opinion, fascinating. I have
no idea of what role Kinshasa should have played in the comics,
nor what kind of stories would have been told. Most likely, it
would not have been related, or only vaguely related, to the
original Chimera story and if any kind of African Bellerophon
were to appear I can only imagine that this delightful Kinshasa
would have kicked his ass out of the strip. Whatever the case,
there is something in this three-headed creature that looks
right. That is, somehow, exactly the way a modern African Chimera
should look. And the human sexuality aspect of the creature is
also somehow just right. We said that the original Chimera is a
corruption and a debasement of the goddess Inanna. In modern
times, is the Chimera turning again into a woman? Perhaps. And
perhaps this Kinshasa is a step in the right direction.
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The
two images we just discussed are examples of the lighter side of the
Chimera, a Chimera that may poke fun at herself, or a Chimera that
may take a sensual aspect. But, on the whole, the myth of the Chimera
has little that is fun or sensual. It is a violent myth, the brutal
story of a life and death struggle, one where the winner never gave
to the vanquished a chance to explain or defend herself.
The ancient myth of the Chimera
is, actually, a good metaphor or our times, so violent and so brutal
as perhaps no times in history have been. Arturo Martini may have
understood well this aspect when he rethought the Chimera in his own
terms. His sculpture still shows the same monster, but transformed
into something even more brutal. Here, the change to beast has gone
all the way to the end, with all traces of the sensual goddess Inanna
disappeared. This chimera is a male, it has lost even the vestiges of
her former wings. It has little of the lion, a noble beast after all.
It is, rather, more of a dog. A brutish, rabid, angry dog, a perfect
image of our times of senseless slaughter. And perhaps we have
re-enacted the very same ancient story with the attack to the twin
towers of New York in 2001. Senseless and brutal as many other things in our
recent history, it had many of the elements of the mythical fight of
Bellerophon and the Chimera, with the towers sprouting fire, just as
the Chimera was said to have done, and with flying creatures hitting it,
a hint of Bellerophon and his flying horse.
The madmen who organized the attack to the towers saw their
targets as monsters. In their madness, they could not see that the towers had
a human side: the innocents inside who were sacrificed to a vision of the
world that left no space for human feelings. It was just the same for Bellerophon,
who could not see anything in the Chimera but an ugly monster.
He could not see her ancient role of fertility goddess, her human side.
Bellerophon, as many others after him, acted
on the principle that what he did not understand he destroyed. The result was, as it
still is, misery and pain.
The true Chimera is, it seems, that humans will ever learn to live in peace.
The images in this
page are believed to be in the public domain for personal use (if
not, please alert the author). Feel free to use this text as you
like. If you cite me, I am happy, if not, enjoy. We do not own ideas,
at best we are owned by them.
