Left: French School, Circe Changing the Men of Odysseus into Swine, late sixteenth century. Black chalk. Gift of János Scholz, 1980.73
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion, 1979. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
In 1974, Gowin salvaged this book cover from the ruins of a Virginia farmhouse. Two years later, he adorned it with a dozen stretched frog skins. The hybrid object—a marriage of organic and manmade elements—finds formal echoes in a sixteenth-century scene of transformation from The Odyssey. Odysseus’s crewmen are turning into swine after consuming drinks laced with a magical potion. They appear as grotesque hybrids, neither human nor entirely animal: “others” even unto themselves.