In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges writes that “a monster is nothing but a combination of the members of real beings, and the possibilities of variation reach infinity.” In this book, originally published in Spanish in 1957 as A Handbook of Imaginary Zoology, the author travels through the imaginal library and folklore and creates a small encyclopedia of the world’s cryptozoology. Its pages are a parade of monsters so diverse that we even find creatures born of Kafka’s imagination.

However, the Argentine master of fantasy followed the old ways. He went not only in the dark and exciting footsteps of G.F. Lovecraft, but also another, much older one, which began to be carved in Europe in the 16th century by the versatile Swiss Conrad Gesner. A symbol of the spirit of his time, this multi-faceted humanist was the archetypal man of the Renaissance: he was (among other things) a physician, naturalist, bibliographer and philologist and left behind some groundbreaking works such as a catalog of all the writings of the then-living authors called “Bibliotheca Universalis” (1545-1555) and his impressive Historia Animalium, a four-volume monumental work in which he compiled everything that had been written in the past (from the Greeks and Romans of the classical and Hellenistic periods to the Arabs and writers of the Middle Ages) for the animal world.

This gigantic pantheon divided animals according to the teachings of Aristotle, and during the life of its creator four books were printed: the first spoke about four-legged mammals, the second about amphibians, the third about birds, the fourth about “birds”. fish and other aquatic creatures.”

The four volumes are filled with very intricate, attractive woodcuts that immediately catch the eye. But our attention is drawn to those which represent imaginary beings appearing here and there among real ones. Water – the most impressive of them.

It is impossible not to be amazed and awestruck by this nameless, indeterminate creature with twelve legs, four pig snouts, and the tail of a fish, which was allegedly seen swimming on the Mediterranean coast of France, between Nice and Antibes, around 1562. As for the indescribable sea monk, who poses reverently next to the Bishop of the Sea, on page 174 of the book “Sea Animals”, then they look together as a grotesque couple, from a sick imagination, bordering on horror, farce and comedy. And it always seems that the sea makes these fantastic creatures even more strange. As if only through it they could arise.

But there is also the legacy of Gessner’s contemporary, the writer, cartographer and bishop Magnus Olaus, a Swede who lived in exile in Italy and left behind two important works that tell in legendary words and images about the places of his origin. One of them was the Description of the Northern Tribes, printed in 1555 in Rome, in his own printing house, a work so huge and large that in the vast history of human printing activity it looks like a giant firework: 815 pages, divided into 22 books, accompanied by 480 woodcuts. An ethnographic masterpiece with no shortage of monsters: sea reptiles, werewolves and armies of dwarves fighting cranes in Greenland. Expected, as much of his material comes from local legends.

They gave the face and appearance of the vastness of unknown waters until the 17th century, when merchant ships began to ply them.

A map he made a few years ago, in 1539, in Venice, appears to have been enriched with the same folkloric material of the imagination. It was called the “Carta Marina” (“Sea Chart”), which, as its Italian description eloquently expressed, was “a map of the Scandinavian cold, lying beyond the German sea, depicting some extremely strange things, unknown even to the Greeks and Latins, miracles nature.”

Looking carefully off the coast of Norway, in geographical parallels relating to the “end of the Earth”, strange creatures appear in cold and unknown waters: whales that look like wild boars, monstrous reptile fish with whiskers and a cetacean that has on its back … two sailors smashed camp.

Magnus used the testimonies of sailors from a time when navigation had not yet sufficiently explored the Scandinavian seas, which are the natural habitat of most whales, as a result of which they remain unknown, mythical creatures whose unimaginable size is enough to inspire the worst fantasies. This map (innovative and unique for its time and somewhat scientifically accurate even by today’s standards) is a document of an era when the study of natural science in Europe was taking its first steps.

The creatures of fantasy that appear on the “Marina Map” created their own transitory “fashion” in the 16th century and became an important aesthetic element of each map. They even say that when King Henry II of France ordered a map of the world, a “talented expert on sea monsters” was specially invited to develop it. The monsters, which, as the American cartographic historian and medievalist Seth van Duzer wrote in his book Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps (2015), remained for many years “cartographers’ best friends.”

The sailors themselves, of course, did not consult nautical charts adorned with scaly monks and winged dragons. These were the games of cartographers, scientists, countrymen, who dreamed in the safety of their library of the boundaries of the world as they knew it, and of encounters with the “wonderful” that lay beyond the horizon. These monsters were a way to give the face and image of the vastness of the unknown waters, which, with the advent of the 17th century, merchant ships began to plow, depriving them of secrets – and with them the monsters.

And yet, looking today at the naval bishop from Gessner’s book, it seems that the mystery has not left his form, as if there is still something new, fresh and alive in the wonderful lines of his engraving on a piece of wood. It could have inspired 400 years later the legendary American animator Ray Harryhausen or Marvel comics. There is something frighteningly modern about the visual language of these old monsters – as if they were the forerunners of science fiction.