Myth-Land

Where the creatures of legend came from: the dragon, the phoenix, the unicorn, the mandrake, the barnacle goose and the salamander, traced through bestiaries, herbals and travellers' lies. F. Edward Hulme was a botanist and a lecturer on ornament, and he treats each monster as a natural-history error with a pedigree. The chapter on the barnacle goose, believed to grow on trees, is the best example of his method. Forty-nine plates of myth and metamorphosis from Rubens and Luca Giordano, painted 1620 to 1775, give these old errors the visual company they kept.