---
title: "Fantastic bestiary: how painting invents an animal"
description: "Wings like flowers, feathers with eyes and fish with patterned skin: Chico da Silva, Gustave Moreau and Maria Augusta invent their animals in paint."
canonical: https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/fantastic-bestiary-painting/
lang: en
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
translations:
  en: https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/fantastic-bestiary-painting/
  fr: https://chicodasilva.org/fr/articles/bestiaire-fantastique-peinture/
  pt: https://chicodasilva.org/pt/artigos/bestiario-fantastico-pintura/
---

Art and artists

# Fantastic bestiary: how painting invents an animal

Wings like flowers, feathers with eyes and fish with patterned skin: Chico da Silva, Gustave Moreau and Maria Augusta invent their animals in paint.

A wing can open like a flower and still belong to a bird. A fish can carry eye-like markings and remain recognisable by its mouth and tail. Between recognising an animal and losing our certainty about it, painting finds room for invention. This is where a fantastic bestiary begins to take shape.

Medieval bestiaries brought familiar animals and fabulous creatures together in illustrated books, with stories that also conveyed religious lessons.[^bestiaries] Today, speaking of a painter’s bestiary can mean the creatures that recur across their work. In each case we need to discover what holds those creatures together: a shared story, a way of building bodies or the repetition of certain gestures.

In birds by Chico da Silva, chimeras by Gustave Moreau and a fish by Maria Augusta, these possibilities take different paths. The question connecting the paintings is a physical one: at what point does a head, a wing or a marking change the animal we thought we knew?

## How much bird can a wing contain?

[![A tall fantastical bird with a spoked, wheel-shaped wing, a small chick, and a striped butterfly above. Fantastic Birds and Butterfly, Chico da Silva, c. 1967, gouache on paper.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-073/chico-da-silva-fantastic-birds-and-butterfly-undated-gouache-on-paper-55x76cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-073-chicodasilva.org-1280.jpg)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-birds-and-butterfly-073/)

*[Fantastic Birds and Butterfly (c. 1967)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-birds-and-butterfly-073/), Chico da Silva João Cunha Collection.*

In *Fantastic Birds and Butterfly*, painted around 1967, Chico gives the larger bird a long neck and a small, downward-facing head. Its open beak reaches towards the other bird. The silhouette lets us follow this gesture before we identify the internal patterns. The wings interrupt that continuity: broad pink areas open around small circles, like petals seen from the front. Their junction with the back keeps these shapes attached to the animal.

The wing holds two readings. We can see it as part of a body capable of moving, although its radial arrangement recalls a flower. Dark edges and ribs help sustain both. This ambiguity has consequences: what might have been a surface covered in feathers starts to resemble a structure opening outwards. The invention changes how we imagine movement.

The smaller bird on the left also has feathers extending into threads. The butterfly above divides its wings into green fields bounded by waves of orange and blue. Across creatures of different sizes, similar operations recur: a dark axis supports a coloured surface; small strokes fill it; tips extend beyond what would be needed to identify a wing or a tail.

We can recognise a pictorial family without assigning the animals a species. The comparison happens where parts meet, and the collective title leaves their coexistence open. Even the smaller bird, almost reached by the larger one’s beak, keeps the room it needs to display both wings.

[![A peacock-tailed bird on a dark mound, with a second blue head, a butterfly and a cut branch. Peacock and Fantastic Bird, Chico da Silva, c. 1969, gouache on paper.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-086/chico-da-silva-peacock-and-fantastic-bird-undated-gouache-on-paper-50x72cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-086-chicodasilva.org-1280.jpg)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/peacock-and-fantastic-bird-086/)

*[Peacock and Fantastic Bird (c. 1969)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/peacock-and-fantastic-bird-086/), Chico da Silva João Cunha Collection.*

*Peacock and Fantastic Bird*, from around 1969, takes the question into feathers. On the right, they descend in long bands ending in eye shapes. Each band has a central axis and diagonal lines, like a leaf with a vein. In the centre, the lower bird’s body is divided into interlocking cells. Above, the other bird’s dark back contains spirals and small strokes. One painting accommodates different ways of organising an animal’s skin.

These divisions help separate the overlapping bodies. The dark neck rises to the red crest; the blue neck passes behind it and reaches the head facing left. Following patterns alone can make us lose one bird inside the other. Retracing each neck clarifies the arrangement. One bird’s feet stand on the small green support, while the other’s claws rest on its neighbour’s body. One bird’s weight depends on the presence of the other.

A peacock already gives the painter plumage that seems to contain eyes. Chico extends this repertoire, brings feather and leaf together and changes the drawing within each area. The MANAS account of his work describes this transformation of recognisable animals through added imaginary elements.[^manas] Here, transformation continues after we recognise the bird: we have to work out how the parts connect and where each body ends.

## Moreau: creatures that carry stories

![Women and winged or serpentine creatures spread among plants, rocks and a city drawn in fine lines; dark trees frame the upper part of the composition.](https://chicodasilva.org/editorial/fantastic-bestiary/moreau-chimeras-1280.jpg)

*Gustave Moreau. The Chimeras (Les Chimères), 1884. Oil on canvas, 236 × 204 cm.

Gustave Moreau. Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, Cat. 39. Photograph: RMN-GP / René-Gabriel Ojéda. [Musée Gustave Moreau record](https://musee-moreau.fr/fr/collection/objet/les-chimeres).*

In *The Chimeras*, Moreau scatters encounters across a landscape. Dark trees enclose the top of the canvas; below, a city, rocks and bodies accumulate in delicate drawing. Painted passages stand beside large areas of exposed lines. The work, dated 1884, remained unfinished.[^moreau]

We have to find animals among people. A wing may belong to a creature we recognise only after following the curve of its back. Elsewhere, a human body approaches serpentine shapes or settles on an animal. The drawing lets us follow these connections, but each passage leads to another encounter. The bestiary is spread through a network of relationships.

The museum identifies a human-headed serpent embraced by a woman and a figure sitting on a winged bull. It places these creatures within a moral allegory of the passions.[^moreau] Recognition adds a narrative: the animal has an extraordinary anatomy and participates in a story whose human gestures need interpretation.

This repertoire also changes the title’s role. “Chimeras”, in the plural, gathers different beings within a shared field of imagination. The creatures have their own positions and functions; watching them requires moving between episodes. In Chico’s birds, the meeting of feather, leaf and flower can itself produce the fantastic animal, without our having to locate a character from an earlier narrative.

Physical scale intensifies the difference in reading. Moreau’s canvas is over two metres high; Chico’s gouaches fit on a sheet of paper. In reproductions of equal width, Moreau’s small figures can look like mere marks. Enlarging the image restores whole bodies, wings and gestures. The painting calls for successive approaches before its bestiary stops merging with the landscape itself.

## Maria Augusta’s fish and eyes that cannot see

[![A large fantastic fish in profile, its dark body stippled with spirals and marked by three eye-like discs. Fantastic Fish, Maria Augusta, 1973, gouache on canvas.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-084/maria-augusta-fantastic-fish-1973-gouache-on-canvas-40x60cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-084-chicodasilva.org-1280.jpg)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-fish-1973-084/)

*[Fantastic Fish (1973)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-fish-1973-084/), Maria Augusta João Cunha Collection.*

In *Fantastic Fish*, painted in 1973, Maria Augusta concentrates almost everything in a single figure. The pink mouth opens on the left to expose long teeth. The tail splits into two points on the right. Between these extremes, fins form a fringe of red, green and blue lines. The pale ground and green forms set apart from the body leave its whole silhouette visible.

The fish has an eye near its mouth, but three large yellow and red ovals occupy its flank. Their dark centres and borders make them look like eyes; they also recall flowers or markings in plumage. The distinction can be read in the painting. The eye in the head is placed to orient the animal. The ovals on the body organise its surface and draw our attention from point to point, without turning towards anything beyond it.

Around them, spirals of coloured dots gather against black. On the head, pale strokes settle into curved bands. Pattern distinguishes regions of a body held together by its silhouette. The fish carries a repertoire we recognise in other beings, with peacock eyespots and fringes that might be feathers, although the open mouth keeps returning us to the image of a fish.

The comparison with Chico becomes precise here. Both use lines and small marks to build a surface, and forms can migrate from one animal to another. In this painting Maria Augusta keeps the large figure isolated and fully available to examination; what was a tangle between two birds becomes concentration within one body.[^collection]

Looking at this fish after Moreau’s chimeras changes our question about monsters. The serpent’s human head supplied a narrative identity. The ovals on this fish’s flank can multiply the impression of eyes without creating three new organs. Painting works in the interval between a recognisable sign and the function we imagine for it. The fantastic animal is still taking shape as we look.

[^bestiaries]: J. Paul Getty Museum, [*Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World*](https://www.getty.edu/news/getty-presents-book-of-beasts-the-bestiary-in-the-medieval-world/), introduction to the 2019 exhibition: illustrated bestiaries, real and fabulous creatures, religious readings.

[^manas]: MANAS, Musées de Laval, [*Francisco da Silva*](https://musees.laval.fr/manas/francisco-da-silva/), account of the transformation of real animals.

[^moreau]: Musée Gustave Moreau, [*Les Chimères*](https://musee-moreau.fr/fr/collection/objet/les-chimeres), Cat. 39: object data, unfinished state and identification of figures.

[^collection]: João Cunha Collection records: [*Fantastic Birds and Butterfly*, jcc-073](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-birds-and-butterfly-073/), [*Peacock and Fantastic Bird*, jcc-086](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/peacock-and-fantastic-bird-086/) and [*Fantastic Fish*, jcc-084](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-fish-1973-084/). Visual readings come from the reproductions. For the painter’s life, see [Maria Augusta, the girl who signed](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/maria-augusta-the-girl-who-signed/).

## Related reading

-   [Chico da Silva and Brazilian Naïve Art](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/brazilian-naive-art/)
-   [Primitive, Naïve, Indigenous](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/primitive-naif-indigenous/)
-   [Baya: women, birds and instruments in her paintings](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/baya-paintings/)
-   [Collecting naïve art: looking at a painting and its history](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/collecting-naive-art/)