Lycaon Transformed into a Wolf - oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The first werewolf of the Western tradition: the king of Arcadia punished by Zeus for his cannibalism, his human form dissolving into the form of a wolf.

Manticore - Bodleian Library MS Bodley 764, fol. 25r, c. 1240-1250 CE. One of the finest medieval bestiary illustrations: the human face, the lion's body, and the scorpion tail clearly rendered.

Gruss vom Krampus - "Greetings from Krampus," vintage Austrian greeting card, c. 1900. The tradition of Krampuskarten (Krampus cards) reached its peak in the early 20th century: the horned demon carrying bad children in a basket, bundled birch rods in hand, was considered an entirely appropriate festive greeting in the Alpine world.

Fenrir and Odin - Lorenz Fr lich, 1895. The god who will be swallowed by the wolf he helped imprison: the inescapable encounter at the end of the world between the king of the gods and the monster born of his enemy's blood.

The Chimaera of Arezzo - Etruscan bronze, c. 400-350 BCE. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence. One of the supreme masterworks of ancient metalwork, and the defining image of the Chimera in Western art.

Baba Yaga - Ivan Bilibin, 1900. The definitive visual image of the great Slavic forest witch: ancient, bone-thin, commanding, seated in her mortar with the pestle in hand - simultaneously terrifying and magnificent.

Theseus and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth — tile design by Edward Burne-Jones, 1861. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.