Many of you are no doubt familiar with the children's game Telephone, where a whispered sentence or phrase gets passed on—and garbled—from one person to the next, often with hilarious results (hilarious for children, that is).
Well, that is the only way I can explain certain highly imaginative artworks that I have stumbled across from previous centuries. The first is a print from the Sixteenth Century in a series on the Wonders of the World that claims to portray the Pyramids of Egypt. While some of the Wonders of the Ancient World no longer exist, such as the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the artist might be allowed more leeway in a depiction based on unfettered imagination, the Pyramids were—and are—still around. So presumably, the artist either visited it or used accounts of visiting it.
This seems to not have happened at all. Or it was based on a thirteenth-hand description. Below is one of the pyramids, depicted as incredibly steep and tiered:
And this might be the artist's rendering of the Sphinx, though it's more clearly an old man's head placed onto a worm:
The complete print is visible here.
The second print that embodies this highly creative approach to reality is the late-Nineteenth Century "The Rocky Mountains" of Currier & Ives, where the mountains look nothing like the Rockies, and the buffalo appear, in one commentator's view, as "something like a cross between African lions and poodles."
Here's a lion-poodle below:
The full print can be seen here.
Of course, these could simply be great instances of artistic license, but I would prefer to imagine the garbled paths that the descriptions of the Western United States and the Pyramids made on their way to their respective artists.
Top image:Wes Peck/Flickr/CC
