Fairy-Tale Dragons and DIY Monsters in Early Modern Italy

Dragons are quintessential fairy-tale monsters. Inordinately large, with incendiary or venomous breath and an insatiable appetite for fair maidens, they function as formidable foes whose defeat proves the hero’s valor. Unlike for today’s readers, however, for early modern Italians dragons did not dwell exclusively on the pages of literary fairy tales. They also appeared on the shelves of natural history collections and were exhibited in public squares by charlatans.

Figure1

In late sixteenth-century Bologna, the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi displayed a petite dragon [fig 1] in his museum, while visitors to Count Lodovico Moscardo’s collection in Verona could view a basilisk [fig 2] . Where did collectors obtain these fairy-tale beasts? The Swiss naturalist Konrad Gesner provided do-it-yourself instructions in his Historia animalium: dragons and hydras could be easily shaped from the skins of skate fish and parts of other animals. Gesner even included an engraving of the sort of dragon one could create using this method [fig 3].

In The Tale of Tales (1634-36), a collection of 50 fairy tales written in Neapolitan dialect, Giambattista Basile (1575-1632) playfully blurs the boundary between the fairy-tale monster and the natural history specimen. Cienzo, the protagonist of Basile’s dragon-slayer tale “The Merchant,” kills a hydra, saves the princess, and wins her as his bride. Basile describes Cienzo’s foe in detail: “It had the combs of a rooster, the heads of a cat, eyes of fire, the mouths of a Corsican hound, the wings of a bat, the paws of a bear and the tails of a serpent. This description, as well as the tropes Basile uses to describe Cienzo’s efforts to slay it, purposefully recalls a well-known ‘fake’ hydra described and depicted in a variety of texts, from books of marvels to treatises on natural history [fig 4]. Ultimately, Basile’s engagement of scientific depictions of this hydra leads to a comic deflation of the epic struggle between hero and dragon, for the protagonist of “The Merchant” does battle with a manufactured monster instead of a ferocious beast.

–Suzanne Magnanini, University of Colorado, Boulder

1. Ulisse Aldrovandi, De piscibus (Bologna, 1613). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.
2. Benedetto Ceruti and Andrea Chiocco. Musaeum Franc. Calceolari (Verona, 1622). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center. Count Moscardo, obtained the basilisk from the estate of another local collector, the apothecary Francesco Calzolari whose collection is catalogued in Ceruti’s and Chiocco’s book.
3. Konrad Gesner, Historiae animalium, Vol 2 (Tiguri, 1551). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.
4. Giambattista Basile, The Tale of Tales, Trans. Nancy Canepa. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2007. P. 95.
5. Konrad Gesner, Historiae animalium, Vol. 3 (Tiguri, 1551). Courtesy University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.

For more on these manufactured monsters and Basile’s use of them in his tales, see my Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile
(Toronto UP, 2008).

Enter for a chance to win The Tale of Tales here.