Face of a Bird, Legs of an Eagle: The Hybrid Venus in Medieval Texts of Image Magic and the So-Called Talisman of Catherine de’ Medici
ICO Iconographisk Post Nordisk tidskrift för bildtolkning – Nordic Review of Iconography July 6, 2026 Lauri Ockenström
The goddess Venus appears in medieval astrological magic as a bird-like hybrid with avian head and feet. This motif survived into early modern printed sources and talismans, most famously an 18th-century medallion called Catherine de Medici's talisman, which shows a classical Venus on one side and a seated Jupiter with a bird-headed hybrid on the other. Previous scholarship traced the hybrid to Cornelius Agrippa and the Picatrix, but this article demonstrates it appears in several older medieval sources independent of both. The text De sigillis, attributed to Arnoldus Saxo, likely provided the direct model for depicting two distinct Venus figures on one talisman. The avian hybrid Venus was a dynamic figure among non-classical hybrids, appearing in diverse contexts where astrological hybrids were rare.