Exposed

Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) published about dragons in 1558, in the fourth part of a more general description of fauna, the Historia Animalium (Natural history of animals). Gessner was interested in all kinds of subjects, from philology and religion to medicine and natural research, and was in contact with multiple scholars all over Europe.

From one of these many contacts, he received a drawing of a dragon with accompanying description. He included this illustration - again a slightly different model than what we’ve been seeing up till now - and the description in his work. This made him the first person to explicitly refer to the creature a man-made object. He describes the production process in great detail:

"In order to mislead regular people, apothecaries and others dry the rays and deform them into all kinds of weird postures, so that the animals look like snakes or winged dragons. They bend the body, reshape the head and the mouth, and cut off parts of the body to deform the animal. The lower half of the animal is cut off, and what remains is pointed up, so that the animal appears to have wings."

What Gessner is saying here tells us a lot about the culture surrounding dragons, who were apparently seen as real by what he describes as ‘regular people’. He places quite a lot of emphasis on the fact that this kind of fakery was most often done by apothecaries. And of course it would have been of interest, especially to an apothecary, to have such an animal on display in their store. A scary creature like that would certainly attract customers, enabling the apothecary to display his knowledge of nature – and medicine. Or could the whole thing have been in reference to Belon, who started out his career as an apothecary?