held at the Dia Art Foundation in New York. In these colorful and sometimes vividly brushed canvases, executed in 1976, a photo-based image of a human skull casts a shadow in an otherwise empty space. I considered the series in the context of the artist’s morbid predilections and his overarching sense of irony. My argument, based in visual thinking, incorporated: the Death in America series he talked up in the early 1960s; the role of the prominent “blank” elements he used in numerous projects; the late Camouflage paintings that were an ambiguous blend of the abstract and the specific; and the eerie work in the Myths series in which Warhol assumed the guise of an old-time radio character called The Shadow. Warhol had posed partially nude for aa lively figure in an early-seventeenth-century British encyclopedia called The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents. The illustration shows the lamia to be a leaping, lion-like animal that has two breasts, a cock and balls, and a somewhat bushy tail. The head is that of a woman with straight shoulder-length hair, and the body, with the exception of the bosom, has a covering of serpent-like scales. Its hind feet are hoofed and its front feet have cat-like claws. Edward Topsell, the clergyman and scientist who wrote The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents, had never seen a lamia, but he included one in his book because he deferred to the authority of certain early Christian writers. Topsell also accepted the word of the Greek historian Dio Chrysostom, who