Kop van de eenhoorn van een antiek standbeeld before 1914

This is Thiebautz's print of a unicorn's head – or rather, the head of a horse, from a classical statue. Look how the cross-hatching teases out the play of light on the sculpture, like a dance of shadows. The lines are so finely drawn, you can almost feel the cool, smooth surface of the stone. See how Thiebautz uses darker, denser marks around the mouth and eye to suggest depth and volume. The way the light catches the curve of the neck is just *chef's kiss*, right? It reminds me of some of Piranesi’s etchings of Roman ruins, how they use line to capture a sense of the monumental and the melancholic. But here, it’s not a ruin, but a fragment, a fragment of a myth, a fragment of a dream.