The following is the first in a series of inside looks at the current exhibition in Princeton University Library's Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery in Firestone Library - “Monsters and Machines: Caricature, Visual Satire, and the Twentieth-Century Bestiary.”

“Monsters & Machines: Caricature, Visual Satire, and the Twentieth-Century Bestiary” examines the global use of bestiary in visual satire during the period from the beginning of World War I through the end of the Cold War. The exhibition is curated by a team of PUL librarians: Thomas Keenan, Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Librarian; Lidia Santarelli, (formerly) Metadata Librarian, Modern Greek Specialty; Deborah Schlein, Near Eastern Studies Librarian; and Alain St. Pierre, Librarian for History, History of Science, and African Studies.

An illustration from an edition of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” published 170 years after the author’s death (1491) provides context for 20th-century specimens of the bestiary genre. Dante represents a link between late-Medieval European culture, with its renewed interest in the literature and iconographies of Greco-Roman antiquity, and modernity. In the “Divine Comedy,” Dante re-elaborated the iconographies of Roman poets Virgil and Ovid, among others, and fused them with Judeo-Christian iconography to create human-animal hybrid figures representing different varieties of moral excellence and degradation. The Dante illustration is displayed in this section alongside early 20th-century works of visual satire where the targets are depicted as human-beast monstrosities, including some that are explicit re-elaborations of figures from the “Divine Comedy.”

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The exhibition is open and free to the public during Milberg Gallery hours of operation, September 12 through December 8, 2024.

Discover more through the accompanying digital exhibit.

Media Contact: Stephanie Oster, Library Publicity Manager