A Fairy Tale Town — From Medieval Text to Etching
by Diana Bychkova
Nov 2025
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The story of this etching began as part of a series of detailed drawings inspired by my fascination with Italian medieval towns — their narrow stone streets-corridors, arches, rustic brick walls, delicate metal wind-vanes... I studied how fairy-tale elements appeared in medieval European manuscripts: the fantastic architecture, ornamented pages, and handwritten texts that transformed into vines and mythical beasts.
Source of inspiration # 1: a 15-day bike trip across Piemonte and Liguria, 2007.
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Source of inspiration # 2: Italian folk fairy tales, in an adaptation by Italo Calvino. Having read many fairy tales, I started to comment visually on the characters, one by one, without connecting the drawings to any specific text, but rather by adhering to a general fantastic style. I also did some research: I studied fairy tale elements and their graphical representation in medieval European books, the page ornamentation, their relations with handwritten text, and how the text intertwines and transforms itself into elements to become the heads and tails of fantastic beasts.
Such a project developed from both the historical study and creative word-picture interpretation of fairy tales on many levels (contextual, medieval spirit, literary style, mood, and a contemporary dynamic composition).
Source of inspiration # 3 and project background: studies of medieval manuscripts. Scroll through pictures 👉
This project can be understood as a practice-based inquiry at the intersection of manuscript studies, visual semiotics, and printmaking. Rather than approaching the medieval page as a decorative or purely illustrative surface, I treat it as a complex signifying field in which script, ornament, marginalia, and architectural framing operate together to generate meaning. In many manuscripts, text does not merely transmit narrative; it produces image — letters unfold into vegetal scrollwork, initials become inhabited spaces, and marginal figures mediate between sacred, literary, and everyday worlds. My drawings investigate this permeability between word and image, translating the structural and rhythmic logic of the manuscript page into a contemporary visual idiom in which textual flow informs compositional structure. The subsequent hand-engraved etching extends this inquiry into materiality: the slow incision of the zinc plate, the layering of lines, and the calibrated pressure of the press echo the labor-intensive processes of medieval book production. In this sense, the work is not an illustration of medieval culture but a hermeneutic and material dialogue with it — an exploration of how meaning migrates from text to image, and from past to present, through embodied studio practice that resonates with both art history and codicology.
The result was thirteen large drawings filled with fairy-tale characters, each reflecting the medieval spirit in a contemporary interpretation. Later, these drawings became an illustrated book. One of them I transformed into an etching — a delicate, intricate work that reflects my love for the fantastic and for traditional techniques. My artistic aim was to create passages between different temporal and spatial worlds.
In this picture (no. 1/13 in series), the textual line says: "A king screamed throughout the kingdom that he will reward richly anyone who brings back his missing daughter." She was kidnapped one night, and despite searching everywhere, no one can find her...
The figure of a king is placed into an empty town square. The town is moved away from him, so the emptiness emphasizes his tragedy: he knows that his little daughter has been stolen by a sea monster. At this point, his (and the reader’s) imagination sees everything in the town like something transformed into sea objects. The houses bob up and down like waves and have elements of sea beasts, and even the square is surrounded by seaweed. It seems that the sea together with the monster has absorbed and dragged the entire town to the bottom (the tentacles have surrounded some houses and become parts of the city walls). But at the same time, something common is happening beyond this: the birds are in the sky, and the boats are at the pier — because the sea beasts are only born out of the king’s imagination.
Sometimes, the imagination is more important than reality. Thus, such transitions between the real and the fantastic, between this world and another one create the effect of simultaneity of the past-present-future and of the presence of real and imagined dimensions.
Proceeding this way, one can find such temporal-dimensional transitions in each drawing — where they create additional levels of the non-verbal story.
Created almost twenty years ago, this etching has been exhibited and awarded internationally, yet it has never before been made available to collectors. It is now offered in a limited edition as part of a broader research and preservation initiative.
The techniques used in A Fairy Tale Town — slow hand engraving, layered plate work, and traditional printing — are the same processes studied through the Rare Collections Project, our growing nonprofit educational platform dedicated to documenting and making accessible rare books, bindings, and works of book art. Each order contributes to its development.
Making the print available is therefore not separate from the research; it extends it.
In practical terms:
One etching — one rare book digitized, described and presented online.
A full edition would enable the publication of an entire collection on the database, preserved and made public.
Watch how A Fairy Tale Town came to life — from drawing to zinc-plate engraving and to the final print.
For those interested in both the artistic inquiry and the preservation of material book culture, further details about the edition are available here 👇
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