Zodiac

The story of Zodiac

A woman in profile, her hair piled with jewels and falling in loops, is framed by a halo of gold on which the twelve signs of the zodiac run in a ring. Mucha designed it in 1896 as a calendar for La Plume, the Paris literary magazine, and it sold so well that it was reissued without the calendar as a decorative panel. It is the most elaborate thing he ever drew: three separate circles of ornament, a mosaic band, a sunburst, and the woman's profile cutting through all of it like a cameo. Every tarot deck and astrology poster since has borrowed from it.

On a wall, Zodiac is warm and precious, more like jewelry than a picture. The dominant colors are old gold, copper, dusty rose, and a deep teal in the background band, and it suits a bedroom, a dressing room, a bathroom, a reading corner, or an entryway, and it fits Art Nouveau, boho, maximalist, and jewel-toned interiors. It is a vertical image with a lot of fine detail, so it rewards close viewing. We offer it in the Mini at 8 × 10.8 in and the Petite at 11 × 14.8 in. The Petite is the one for a wall of its own; the Mini works on a vanity or a shelf.

Mucha's Gismonda is the poster that made him famous two years earlier, and The Four Seasons is the set that followed. Hilma af Klint's Swan No. 17 is another circle-within-a-square, done twenty years later with everything stripped away. More from Alphonse Mucha.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of an original lithograph, keeping the soft ink and paper tone of the 1896 printing rather than sharpening it into a digital illustration.