PINGPONG#7: fantastic creatures
Summer ping-pong: each week, a treasure from our collections will face a work from the “icons by Susan Kare” exhibition, according to a specific theme!
The sea bishop
We can find many mysterious and hybrid monsters in legends and myths : sirens, centaurs, sphinx… The museum has several imagery of these fantastic beasts. Here is one : the sea bishop pr bishop-fish. Legend tells that this sea animal looks like a man, understands us but doesn’t speak, and most of all, wears bishop’s clothes. He would have been presented to the King of Poland in 1431 before being set free never to be seen again.
While the first printing wood block depicted a bishop to illustrate the beast, then it evolved to become a true half-fish-half-man creature. This is how it is represented in De piscibus, a book written by the 16th century scientist Guillaume Rondelet. According to a cryptozoologist, the sea bishop could actually be a wounded Grimaldi scaled squid. So, true animal or fantastic beast ?
The Dogcow
Which animal can you see? A dog? A cow? A goat? Anything else? That’s what many people from the Macintosh team wondered when they saw this icon. While it was created for the Cairo font (entirely made of dingbats to pay tribute to hieroplyphs) designed by Susan Kare, Clarus got itself talked about! It became the Macintosh team’s mascot and they named it and invente dits whole story. So what is it really? A dog or a cow? Both ! It was supposed to be a dog when it was first designed, but many saw a cow because of the low screen resolution at that time. One day, an employee insisted so much to his boss to know what the animal was that the latter, a bit annoyed, answered : « It’s a dogcow! ». From this joke was born a whole folklore around the Dogcow. Its name is Clarus (for Claris, a branch of Apple) and its cry « Moof » a blendword for « Moo » and « Woof ». By the way, while the font doesn’t exist anymore, Clarus has remained. If you have an Iphone, enter Moof or Clarus on the keyboard; 2 emojis appear: a dog and a cow!
