Drawings for “The Mystery of San Gottardo”
“The Mystery of San Gottardo” revolves around the Gotthard Pass (also known as the St. Gotthard Pass, and the Passo del San Gottardo in Italian), a famous mountain pass in the Swiss Alps thattraditionally served as a crucial link between northern and southern Europe. Packed with historical, mystical and cultural meaning, it intrigued and inspired Giger. He combined his fascination with ancient myths, legends and the eerie atmosphere of the Gotthard area in an evocative project full of mysterious symbols and unsettling landscapes.
Giger started developing the project in the early 1960s, but “The Mystery of San Gottardo” was not published until 1998, after more than three decades of work. The book is about a man who falls in love with a freak of nature called Armbeinda, which is really a sentient limb combining an arm and a leg. The idea for the creature stemmed from a 1963 sketch entitled The Beggar, which showed a leg and an arm holding a hat. He subsequently filled various sketchbooks with versions of it. The story reveals that this race of biomechanoids was created by a military organization and it takes a grotesque look at what might happen if our arms and legs – which normally do our bidding – had a mind of their own and were “set free”.