PEGASUS COULD NEVER GET OFF LIGHTLY. Born of Poseidon’s salt sea and blood dripping from Medusa’s severed head, the winged horse was saddled with the task of bearing Zeus’s thunderbolts, then tamed by Bellerophon and ridden into battle against monstrous foes. Despite such gruesome origins and burdensome service, he has been visualized countless times over the millennia as the embodiment of purity and freedom—a lily white stallion, exceptional and ethereal, whose wings triumph over zoology and physics alike—but not here. In this imagining by Odilon Redon (1840–1916), Pegasus is hefty, grounded, yet still yearning to soar, humbled by the lofty aspiration he usually represents.

The poignancy of Redon’s image lies in the naturalistic rendering of an unnatural
creature: the horse’s body is modeled in such a way that the weight he struggles to overcome is believable. With the suggestion of a light source from the upper right, shading through crosshatching and stippling helps conjure the illusion of volume in two dimensions. Close framing and the shallow space—and the horse’s compressed, backward-tilting pose—enhance the figure’s implied mass, that is, our perception of his heaviness. One stiff wing extends behind him while the “impotent wing” of Redon’s evocative title flops awkwardly to the side, feathers swept back. Along with the slight torsion of the body, this foreshortened wing further creates a sense of three-dimensionality, of credibility.

How to represent this mythological hybrid in a convincing manner has been an ongoing riddle ever since Pegasus emerged from the Greek sea cave of lore. To that end, Redon would have loved the “Anatomically Correct Pegasus” thread in the Worldbuilding community forum on the Q&A website Stack Exchange. The top-voted contributor analyzes the British Trust for Ornithology’s data on bird weight and wing length, then applies it to Thumbelina, the smallest miniature horse on record at fifty-seven pounds; they conclude that tiny Thumbelina would need thirty-eight-foot-long wings to fly. Another user imagines winged horses as having branched off the family Equidae with reptilian features; based on evidence about soaring dinosaurs and gliding lizards, they argue that Pegasus could only have offered a short and bumpy ride. Others address the vast wing surface area needed according to aerodynamic principles. While I can’t comment on the soundness of the science in this thread, I can testify to its wonderfully geeky sincerity in facing the Pegasus problem logically.

World-builder Odilon Redon responded to science in his own way. His Darwin-inspired lithograph series Les Origines (1883), of which L’Aile impuissante is a part, envisions primordial forms with mammalian faces creeping along the floor, eyes blooming from plants, centaurs and a cyclops; each is an evolutionary dead end, an aberrant failure. During this earlier phase of his career dominated by his so-called noirs—sooty charcoals and lithographs whose subjects are the stuff of unsettled dreams—Redon specialized in evoking pathos alongside monstrosity. Sometimes, as here, the illusion of volume in an unlikely beast who fills the picture plane adds to the perception of weightiness, underscoring the melancholy. It’s heavy, lonely, hard work to be strange.

It’s hard, too, to depict a heavy form surrounded by darkness, because dark colors appear denser than brighter ones. Here, the stifling “black space” of the title is not a void but an active entity, pulsating with the artist’s gestures as it presses Pegasus down.

Redon created his image with wax crayon transferred and drawn onto a lithography stone, then refined the shading and detail by scratching some of that darkness away. Artist Michelle Avison, director of the South London printmaking studio Hausprint, talked me through this additive and subtractive mark-making (and let me feel the incredible mass of the heavy limestone slabs used in the process). As Avison explained to me, lithography depends on the chemistry of attraction and repulsion: the positive image on the limestone attracts the oily printing ink and repels water, while the blank space is treated in such a way that it does the reverse. L’Aile impuissante similarly relies on the tension between opposites: the insurmountable weight of a beast born to fly—and the pity aroused for an enviable creature.