Labyrinth - 40th anniversary

Gods, Monsters and Meanders

The archaic gorgoneion seen head-on: tongue out, fangs, snakes knotted at the belt. Unicursal labyrinths from coinage, square and circular, and the meander fret that spawns them. Plus a very specific repertoire of scenes: the eagle at Prometheus's liver, Cerberus with two heads rather than three, Charon leaning on the pole of his boat, the spindle and the cut thread of the Moirai, the frontal owl with its crescent moon and the letters ΑΘΕ, the laurel crown and the fluted Doric shaft with no base.

Grimm, Perrault and Andersen

A wolf in a nightcap in the bed, a house that gets eaten, a spindle, a single slipper — gold in the Grimms, glass in Perrault — a mirror that answers back, a split apple and a hazel tree with two doves on it. In the nineteenth-century plates all of that arrives in black and white: Gustave Doré's wood engraving, Neureuther's etching on steel, Arthur Rackham's ink and watercolour, with knotted-root trees and silhouettes cut out against the clearing. There are literal scissors too: Andersen's symmetrical paper cut-outs, with swans, ballerinas and theatre figures.

Los cuentos son dominio público. Los disenos de Disney NO. Trabaja desde las ilustraciones originales del XIX.

A Bestiary of Folklore

What you see here is specific and strange before it is symbolic: the belt that turned a man into a wolf and the breaking wheel from the Cologne pamphlet of 1589, the bullet cast from a medal, the hooded procession with candles and cross of the Santa Compaña, the wicker basket, the birch rods and the cowbells of the Krampus, the three-legged planchette and the alphabet set in two arcs on the 1891 board. On the print side, the skeleton taking a man by the arm in Holbein's The Dance of Death (Lyon, 1538) and the winged monsters of Goya's Capricho 43. Not one generic skull: every object comes from a plate or from a dated court record.