What Corneille had hidden in the niche was not forbidden books. Though many men of letters of that era owned such things, what he had collected were engravings—more precisely, pamphlets circulated in Brittany at the time. They had all been printed as engravings, but their illustrations did not promote humanism or popular science.
Veela could be described as marsh fairies. They wore gauze and danced beneath the moonlight on Midsummer nights. When angered, they transformed into bird-headed creatures with a cluster of scaled wings growing from their shoulders.
Harpies had the faces and breasts of maidens, while the rest of their bodies resembled birds. They had lovely hair, while their nonhuman parts were covered in bird feathers. Their human arms and legs bore sharp claws on both hands and feet. People called them swift Marauders, ravenous hounds, hunters of the sky. In Homer's eighth-century BC epics, it was they who abducted Pandareus's daughters and delivered them before Nemesis.
They were spirits of raging winds. When hungry, their faces became gaunt and haggard, but after a full meal, they regained the tender, delicate skin of young girls.
Compared with the richly colored Venetian School, Florence was actually more skilled at drawing.
Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts on dissecting corpses were almost entirely sketches. Color was rarely seen, even for red muscles.
Like the Madonna of the Harpies, the engravings that recorded the horrific aftermath of harpy attacks were black and white. That made Georgiana feel a little better as she looked at them by candlelight.
If Maria holding the Christ child represented sacred maternal love, then harpies represented another side of women—cruelty, jealousy, vengeance, and so on.
Maria standing upon a harpy pedestal could be understood as Maria using maternal love to suppress the dark part of her own nature, or as