Here Be Dragons: A Fantastic Bestiary
It could be more elegantly written, but this worldwide, ages-spanning history of pictures of imaginary animals surely couldn't be much better looking. After a rather plodding assessment of animals in art as dream imagery and religious symbols, the Delacampagnes' five subsequent chapters consider, respectively, the evolution of the bestiary of nonexistent creatures, portrayals of unicorns and partially human beasts, images of four-footed flying things and dragons, the issue of influence versus coincidence in accounting for the similarity of fantastic animals in disparate cultures, and fantastic animals in contemporary art. Each chapter seems better than its predecessor, but it is often an open question whether that is because the writing improves or because the pictures of everything from the two-horned unicorn (twonicorn?) on the walls of the Lascaux caves to a yeti from the pages ofTintin au Tibet(1960) are invariably gorgeous. In the last chapter and conclusion, the matter is settled, for the pictures triumph over several eruptions of elitism and angst. Text: B-minus. Art: A-plus.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved