A small strange mystery:

JW Rinzler in The Making of Star Wars erroneously describes the third image in my previous post as a sketch for a droid “in the bottom-left corner” of McQuarrie’s painting of the Death Star prison-block elevators. But one look at those threatening mandibles (not to mention the needle in the droid’s right claw) reveals that this is an early iteration of the torture droid used on Princess Leia.

This seems to be deliberate obtuseness (or censorship?) on Rinzler’s part… since the droid’s two pincer arms in McQuarrie’s sketch were almost certainly inspired by the early Christian legend of the martyr Saint Agatha (a frequent subject for Renaissance painters). During the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire, Agatha, a convert from a Roman noble family, was tortured and had her breasts cut off by red-hot pincers.

And what’s on the very same page of The Making of SW, in the bottom left corner? Ralph McQuarrie’s pencil storyboards of a bare-breasted Princess Leia.