The Chimaera was placed in foreign Lycia,[8] but its representations in the arts was wholly Greek.[9] An autonomous tradition, one that did not rely on the written word, was represented in the visual repertory of the Greek vase-painters. The Chimera first appears at an early stage in the proto-Corinthian pottery-painters' repertory, providing some of the earliest identifiable mythological scenes that can be recognized in Greek art. The Corinthian type is fixed, after some early hesitation, in the 670s BCE; the variations in the pictorial representations suggest to Marilyn Low Schmitt[10]a multiple origin. The fascination with the monstrous devolved by the end of the seventh century into a decorative Chimera-motif in Corinth,[11] while the motif of Bellerophon on Pegasus took on a separate existence alone. A separate Attic tradition, where the goats breathe fire and the animal's rear is serpent-like, begins with such confidence that Marilyn Low Schmitt is convinced there must be unrecognized earlier local prototypes. Two vase-painters employed the motif so consistently they are given the pseudonyms the Bellerophon Painter and the Chimaera Painter.
In Etruscan civilization, the Chimera appears in the "Orientalizing" period that precedes Etruscan Archaic art; that is to say, very early indeed. The Chimera appears in Etruscan wall-paintings of the fourth century BCE.
Robert Graves suggests[12] that "the Chimaera was, apparently, a calendar-symbol of the tripartite year, of which the seasonal emblems were lion, goat and serpent."
In Medieval art, though the chimera of Antiquity was forgotten, chimerical figures appear as embodiments of the deceptive, even Satanic forces of raw nature. Provided with a human face and a scaly tail, as in Dante's vision of Geryon in Inferno xvii.7-17, 25-27, hybrid monsters, actually more akin to the Manticore of Pliny's Natural History (viii.90), provided iconic representations of hypocrisy and fraud well into the seventeenth century, through an emblemmatic representation in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia.[13]
Over time, the Chimera has also been lifted from mythology to represent not only the fantastic, but that which cannot be--a concept originating from the quixotic physical representations of the Chimera as impossible amalgam. In this way its usage was extended by classically-educated botantists: see Chimera (botany).
Reply
![[The Nameless One]'s avatar](https://a1cdn.gaiaonline.com/dress-up/avatar/ava/4b/33/405515a332334b_flip.png?t=1248248986_6.00_00)
