I don’t think that in paleo-human culture
anyone was generally doing any one thing all day.
But that hunts, when they did happen, probably took several days.
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Yes. It was described in Pliny but interpreted as more horselike by medieval Europeans who had no experience with African animals.
On the one hand medieval Europeans were hampered by not knowing what some of these animals looked like, and relying upon increasingly “wrong” representations to shape their ideas. But on the other, one of the aspects of 12th and 13th c. art that is delightful is the deliberately fanciful use of line drawing which is not trying to be literally realistic. This is clearly evident in human representation, since obviously the artists knew full well what people looked like!
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Eventually they all got jobs writing stories about places other than Manhattan for the New York Times.
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Can’t recommend this bad boy enough for those of us enjoying these images!
Gimme some T. H. White anyday!
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Absolutely relevant:
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For those who want to see some me of those in full glory: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/
The cool thing about medieval studies is that so many manuscripts are freely available online these days.
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Yeah, there’s more going on than just ignorance of what things look like. It’s actually only fairly recently in art history that small critters like snails and insects got accurately portrayed, for example. Yet artists must have been familiar with them. And you can see how artistic conventions make, say, dogs and cats look weird (to modern eyes, anyways), but how snails, for example, get turned into…that just seems inexplicable.
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I guess it’s no more odd than some modern artists’ whimsical depictions of mollusks.
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I am reminded of the taxidermists’ attempts at walrus.
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Also inexplicable for other reasons, yet still more accurate than the medieval painting, though…
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I’m seeing this a lot more with all the “cutesie” children’s book illustrations I’m exposed to, but never underestimate the ability of people to look at things without seeing them.
My mother always taught me that to draw from life was to really see a thing, and that’s a skill most people don’t even realize they lack, and a large number of commercial artists clearly can’t be fucked to do.
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Having been forced (taught) to measure, scale and look at something for hours at a time before even putting pencil to paper, yup, can confirm.
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I used to wonder about the artists’ inability to say, “Sorry, there’s no way I can paint what you want. How about a nice rabbit?” Was it pressure from patrons/guilds, fear of losing income, or hubris?
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“If I say I can’t draw this they’ll make me work in the garden…”
*invents unicorn squirrels riding snails
True story.
Probably.
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the reason we stopped so suddenly was as we came around that last corner the ranger that raised them was walking along the road looking for them. They went from chasing our vehicle at full tilt to a skidding stop and then casually walking up to her and greeting her. Amazing experience.
Talk about a video that ends too soon. Would have loved to see that part.
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Erotic carvings are not uncommon.
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The artist would have known exactly what an oyster or a snail looked like – they were eating them.
The bestiary focussed on the allegorical and morality, Pliny the Elder is frequently the source for the descriptions that the artists interpreted. There were exotic animals in Medieval Europe Henry I of England had a zoo.
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