Striped hyaena by Vincenzo Cohen (Original Painting)

Striped hyaena, Hyaena hyaena (2019) oil on canvas, 70×50
The artwork illustrates the striped hyaena, one of the four most endangered hyaena species.
Hyaena was known in the ancient world and was one of the first animals to be represented in the cave painting of primitive man and to represent the ancestral human fears. Ancient Romans called it Crocuta and they knew its nocturnal laughter, from which the term hyaena ridens comes. The striped hyaena evokes many superstitious fears because of reputed and documented cases of injuries to humans, killing of children and grave robbery. The species is often illegally killed because of supposed medical properties, therefore high prices are paid to be traded on the black market. It is widely exploited as an aphrodisiac utilized for traditional healing and killed because of damage inflicted on livestock. Indigenous cultures and folklore have always attributed magical properties to hyaena body parts used in witchcraft. The false beliefs about the hyaena’s deadly nature and the contempt towards its eating habits have led to an indiscriminate persecution with an a regression in the species throughout its range (Hofer-Mills 1998b). Causes of mortality are poisoning, poaching, depletion of food sources, combat sports and hunting by nomads (HoferMills 1998, I. Khorozyan, A.Malkhasyan, M. Murtskhvaladze, 2011). Hyaenas are clever, inoffensive, shy and elusive animals, compared to what does generally people think. Nowadays, people kill hyaenas for the generalized hatred towards the gender. The love for this animal born in the childhood, when the artist saw for the first time the image of the animal on the alphabet book. The striped hyaena represents the power of matriarchy and the survivability in hard places, far from social aggregation conventional habits. The elusive and recurrent image of the hyena wandering along foggy coasts becomes a symbol of extinction, the central motif of both the collections Extinction (painting collection) and the Coast of skeletons (poetry collection). Her ravenous figure embodies the image of ancestral human fears which force her to a wandering existence in remote and desolate areas to escape the persecution of man.