Monsters, Demons, and Winged-Beasts: Composite Creatures in the Ancient World at The Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory

February 5 - June 19

The abundant imagination of the ancient world gave birth to a vast array of monsters that inhabited a rich world of myth, legend and high adventure. This exhibition, drawn from the permanent collections of the Carlos Museum and loans from private collections, explores the menagerie from the Greek perspective, focusing on the ways in which the Greeks borrowed imagery from Egypt and the ancient Near East, and developed a vast repertoire of richly-imagined creatures that proliferated the Greco-Roman world.

From the siren, the human-headed bird whose call is fatal, to the cannibal cyclops Polyphemus, to the winged horse Pegasus and the Chimera, the fire-snorting lion with a serpent’s tail, this exhibition traces the development and dissemination of “monstrous” imagery through works in gold, silver, precious and semi-precious stone, terracotta, papyrus, and more.

Michael C. Carlos Museum is located at 571 South Kilgo Circle, Atlanta, GA 30322