The Monster of Ravenna was a possibly apocryphal late Renaissance-era monstrous birth whose appearance in early 1512 near the city of Ravenna was widely reported in contemporary European pamphlets and diaries. Images of its grotesque features were interpreted symbolically by opponents of both the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation, although a more common explanation at the time was that the beast was an omen regarding the outcome of the Battle of Ravenna (1512). Modern medical consensus identifies the monster as a child with some variety of severe congenital disorder. History The earliest account of the monster's existence is from the diarist Sebastiano di Branca Tedallini, who recorded on March 8 that news of a strange infant's birth had reached Pope Julius II in Rome. According to his account, the child was said to have been born of a nun and a friar, and was marked by a horned head, the letters YXV on its chest, and with one leg hairy and cloven-hoofed while the other leg's midsection grew a human eye. On March 11, the apothecary Luca Landucci documented how word of this incident had reached Florence; having apparently received a drawing of the monster, Landucci described it to possess features such as a single horn, the wings of a bat, hermaphroditic genitalia, an eye on its right knee and a clawed left foot like an eagle's. The tale was subsequently immortalized by further chroniclers of the era, including Johannes Multivallis, Jacques Rueff, Conrad Lycosthenes, Caspar Hedio, Pierre Boaistuau, Fortunio Liceti, and Ambroise Paré. Landucci's physical description seems to have been considered authoritative, as later chroniclers, particularly Boaistuau, largely reproduced his account word-for-word. In medieval Europe, it was common practice for malformed infants, especially those with little chance of survival, to be abandoned and left to die by starvation; this was done in Ravenna on the order of the Pope. Even after its reported death, however, news of the monstrous birth continued to sweep Europe, often in stories greatly embellished by the storyteller. In a popular poem given by Marcello Palonio relatively soon after its birth, the monster is implied to possess two heads. With more time, the description of the Ravenna monster evolved, changing its number of legs from two to one and eventually syncretizing with the morality figure of Frau Welt. Giovanni Battista Bissoni was contracted to design the illustrations for the second edition of Fortunio Liceti's