A monstrous footnote

We had heard that a monster had been born at Ravenna, of which a drawing was sent here; it had a horn on its head, straight up like a sword, and instead of arms it had two wings like a bat's, and the height of its breasts it had a fio [Y-shaped mark] on one side and a cross on the other, and lower down at the waist, two serpents, and it was a hermaphrodite, and on the right knee it had an eye, and its left foot was like an eagle. I saw it painted, and anyone who wished could see this painting in Florence.


It was March 1512, and a Florentine apothecary named Lucca Landucci was writing up his diary. He had much to write about. Northern Italy was engulfed by war. Maximillian of Germany and Louis XII of France were locked in combat with the Spanish, English and Pope Julius II for control of the Venetian Republic. City after city was ravaged as the armies traversed the campagna. Ravenna fell eighteen days after the monster's birth. 'It was evident,' wrote Landucci, 'what evil the monster had meant for them! It seems as if some great misfortune always befalls the city when such things are born.'

Landucci had not actually seen the monster. It had been starved to death by order of Julius II, and Landucci's account is of a drawing that was on public display in Florence. That image was among the first of many. Printed woodcuts and engravings spread the news of the monster throughout Europe, and as they spread, the monster acquired a new, posthumous, existence. When it left Ravenna it had two legs; by the time it arrived in Paris it had only one. In some prints it had bat wings, in others they were more like a bird's; it had hermaphrodite genitalia or else a single large erection. It became mixed up with the images of another monster born in Florence in 1506, and then fused with a medieval icon of sinful humanity called 'Frau Welt' - a kind of bat-winged, single-legged Harpy who grasped the globe in her talons.

As the monster travelled and mutated, it also accreted ever more complex layers of meaning. Italians took it as a warning of the horrors of war. The French, making more analytical effort, interpreted its horn as pride, its wings as mental frivolity and inconstancy, its lack of arms as the absence of good works, its raptor's foot as rapacity, and its deformed genitalia as sodomy - the usual Italian vices in other words. Some said that it was the child of a respectable married woman; others that it was the product of a union between a nun and a friar. All this allegorical freight makes it hard to know what the monster really was. But it seems likely that it was simply a child who was born with a severe, rare, but quite unmysterious genetic disorder. One can even hazard a guess at Roberts's syndrome, a deformity found in children who are born with an especially destructive mutation. That, at least, would account for the limb and genital anomalies, if not the two serpents on its waist and the supernumerary eye on its knee. (here)