Fictitious & Symbolic Creatures in Art: With Special Reference to Their Use in British Heraldry

For centuries, the shields and banners of Britain were guarded by beasts that never existed in nature: dragons coiled around crosses, phoenixes rising from flames, griffins rampant beside lions. John Vinycomb, an Irish banker and amateur heraldist, spent decades cataloguing these impossible creatures as they appeared in the formal language of coats of arms. The result is part art book, part historical excavation: over a hundred illustrations render the serpentine hydra, the death-gaze of the basilisk, the composite body of the sphinx, alongside heraldic interpretations of real animals transformed into symbols (the pelican in her piety, the dolphin that meant swiftness). Vinycomb traces how medieval artists inherited these figures from Greek, Roman, and Eastern mythologies, then adapted them into the rigid conventions of heraldic art, where a creature's pose and attitude carried specific meanings. The book works both as a reference for historians and as browsing treasure for anyone who has ever wondered why a medieval knight bore a wyvern into battle.