Name/Title
CE 1669 Conrad Gessner, Sea Monsters: “Schweinwall” and “Bärwall”Description
Conrad Gessner (1516–1565)
Revised and expanded by Georg Horst (1626–1685)
From Gesnerus Redivivus … oder: Allgemeines Thier-Buch
Frankfurt am Main: Wilhelm Serlin, 1669
Woodcut and letterpress on laid paper with hand coloring
p. 124
This leaf from the 1669 German edition of Gessner’s zoological encyclopedia depicts two marine creatures within the surrounding natural-historical text. The upper animal is headed “Von dem Schweinwall” and the lower “Von dem Bärwall.” Their hybrid forms combine features recognizable from terrestrial mammals and fishes.
Gessner’s marine animals drew upon a mixture of specimens, classical and medieval texts, travelers’ reports, contemporary naturalists, and earlier printed images. Particularly important to European representations of northern marine life were the writings and images of Olaus Magnus. The resulting creatures should therefore be understood within an early modern attempt to record reports about poorly known marine animals rather than simply as illustrations of imaginary monsters.
The page is useful for tracing the movement of particular monster types through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural history. Images and descriptions could be copied, modified, renamed, and incorporated into successive encyclopedic works, gradually acquiring the authority of an established visual tradition.
This leaf comes from the expanded German Allgemeines Thier-Buch published at Frankfurt in 1669.Create Date
June 27, 2026Update Date
October 4, 2026
