How it's built
The whole image is one gesture: a vertical, roughly pyramidal column of bodies that leans slightly off its axis, which is what keeps it from reading as a static pile. It reads as motion, either a slow collapse under gravity or an updraft pulling everything upward, and the ambiguity between those two is a large part of why it holds you. The dense, near-black mass sits in a mostly empty sheet, and that emptiness does enormous work. There is almost no ground and no horizon, just a few faint horizontal drifts of tone, so the mass has no stage to stand on. It floats, monumental and isolated, and the eye has nothing to do but climb it.
The internal logic is accumulation rather than story. There is no protagonist and no single readable action. The forms are stacked and fused: at the top, long limbs stretch up and thin out into loose, searching line, so the figure literally dissolves into drawing at its apex; through the middle it thickens into a knot of flayed musculature, tendon and sinew and a coil that reads like viscera; at the base it gathers weight and resolves, just barely, into a heap of sighthound-like dogs with a couple of half-buried human figures folded among them. Top to bottom the image runs the arc you respond to, bodies emerging from and dissolving into one another as a vertical sequence.
The approach to the body
This is an écorché sensibility, the body seen as flayed anatomy, muscle and connective tissue rather than skin and portrait. That points to real academic anatomical training, the Vesalius and Leonardo inheritance the Italian print tradition sits on top of. The animal and human hybridity, especially the dogs, brings in the other great source, the Renaissance and Baroque hunt, deluge, and last-judgment compositions where flesh is treated as one continuous churning material regardless of species. That is why the poster's true relatives sit as much in the deep-roots branch (Signorelli, Rubens, Géricault) as in the Italian postwar core.
What the process likely looked like
Everything about the surface says intaglio worked hard over many states, not a clean line etching pulled in one pass. The contour is nervous and reconsidered, the kind of line you get from drawing directly into the ground and then biting, proofing, regrounding, and drawing back in. The tone is built almost entirely from directional cross-hatching that shifts angle as it turns each muscle, with the darkest passages carrying a soft, velvety burr that reads as drypoint accents over the etched structure. Open, slightly mottled areas look like foul bite or a light aquatint, giving atmosphere without line.
In studio terms, the plate probably began as separate studies of figures and dogs drawn from casts, from life, and from imagination, then assembled into that leaning column, almost collaged into place. A copper plate would be grounded and the linear architecture drawn through and bitten, then proofed. The density is the record of repeated returns: rebiting to deepen darks, adding hatching, cutting drypoint for the blackest cores, proofing again. It is a plate allowed to get dark and complicated rather than kept clean, which is the expressive strategy that makes it feel alive. That assembly-from-studies method and refusal to let any one body stay separate is the through-line straight into the Mosh Pit work.
One caveat
Some of the loose horizontal streaks and scattered flecks in the upper field may belong to the poster's typographic design rather than the plate itself, since the title is set in brushy, distressed lettering that bleeds into the image. If the catalog ever surfaces with a clean reproduction, the first thing to check is whether that atmospheric noise is bitten into the copper or added by the designer.
