A Fantastic New Exhibition Of Fantastical Animals Reveals The Ancient Wisdom Of Dragons And Griffins

29.09.2023 - 12:05 / forbes.com

During the Age of Enlightenment, French savants set out to eradicate the unicorn. Words being their weapon of choice, they staged their attack in a book. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert categorized the unicorn as a “mythical animal” and noted that horns shown in natural history collections were made of ivory or fish teeth.

Within half a century, the Romantic movement sought to revive the storied creature, as well as the griffin and dragon and basilisk. It wasn’t that they denied 18^th century science. Their motivation was more subtle, and also more noble. In much the same way that John Keats bemoaned Isaac Newton “because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism”, they lamented the extinction of fantastical beasts because each loss threatened to extinguish the imagination.

Fantastic Animals, a magnificent new exhibition at the Louvre-Lens Museum, shows how important the Romantics were as a counterforce to Enlightenment literalism, how deftly they handled the process of deextinction, and what they couldn’t fully accomplish. In contemporary popular culture, breakthroughs in genomics and neuroscience can hardly compete against sagas of dragons and unicorns, as witnessed in comics and movies and video games. But are the creatures taken seriously?

To appreciate the role fantastical animals can play in the present, it’s crucial to understand their status in the past, before they were attacked by the Encyclopedists. As the eminent historian Michel Pastoureau explains in his preface to the Louvre-Lens exhibition catalogue, “For our ancestors, reality was one thing, the truth was another, totally different”. Truth didn’t depend on empirically grounded reality as it does in modern science; finding truth in the unknown or unknowable was intellectually rewarding and laudable.

Although ancient authors described fantastical creatures such as griffins and dragons alongside eagles and lions, the animals’ habitats were often situated off the map, or their attributes included invisibility. Their physical inaccessibility was not troubling because their value had little to do with their physicality. “The important thing is to consider the significance of a fact and not to dispute its authenticity,” instructed St. Augustine in his Commentaries.

Fantastical creatures came into the world in myriad ways. Unlike natural animals, their attributes weren’t constrained by the process of evolution or even the laws of physics, but were limited only by people’s imaginative capacity. They were not so much beings as inklings.

Many were hybrids, combining known attributes of familiar creatures such as the griffin’s terrifying cross of lion’s claws and eagle’s beak, or the chimera’s befuddling mix of