Gustave Doré's Baron Münchhausen Before the Mountain Fortress, 1862

A Napoleonic-era officer in full plumed regalia gestures with authority as he surveys an impossibly sheer mountain fortress piercing the clouds, its walls dotted with figures and crowned by a distant flag. Before him, a curious assembly of barely-clothed attendants and mounted horsemen stand at attention on a flat plain dotted with distant ships. The scene crackles with absurdist grandeur — the hallmark of Münchhausen's outrageous tall-tale adventures rendered in Doré's virtuosic cross-hatched pen-and-ink style.