Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Echidna.
The gallery
Echidna (Sacro Bosco / Parco dei Mostri)
Pirro Ligorio, c. 1555
Carved from the living volcanic peperino rock of the Sacro Bosco (Sacred Wood) of Bomarzo in Lazio, this Mannerist sculpture realizes Hesiod's 'mother of monsters' exactly as the Theogony describes her: half a fair-cheeked maiden, half a vast speckled serpent. The figure rises from a coiling double tail flanked by lions, fusing the beautiful upper body of a nymph with the awful chthonic snake that, in myth, dwells in a hollow cave beneath the secret parts of the earth. Commissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini and attributed to the architect-antiquarian Pirro Ligorio, the colossal figure is part of the deliberately strange, emblematic garden begun around 1555 — one of the few monumental Renaissance treatments of a goddess who, despite her central place in Greek genealogy as the consort of Typhon and dam of Cerberus, the Hydra, the Chimera and Orthrus, has almost no surviving ancient image of her own.