Bellerophon, Shôwa period, dated 1965?

Bellerophon — the Greek hero who tamed the winged horse Pegasus and slew the Chimera — appears here as part of a mythological series Hagiwara produced around 1965, alongside prints titled Herakles and Glaukos. Rather than illustrating the narrative directly, Hagiwara characteristically abstracts the subject into elemental forces: the dynamism of flight, the tension between mortal ambition and divine limitation. Forms associated with Bellerophon — wings, trajectories, the vertical surge of ascent — translate into Hagiwara's vocabulary of overlapping color planes and directional carving marks. The [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) method gave him latitude to treat Greek myth as a vehicle for purely visual inquiry, uncoupled from the illustrative traditions of Western academic art.