The Medieval Artists Who Had Absolutely No Idea What Animals Looked Like

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There is a particular pleasure in looking at medieval art.

Not because it is always beautiful. Not because the perspective is flawless. And certainly not because the animals look anything like the animals we know today.

In fact, sometimes the animal is the best part.

Take the elephant.

If you or I were asked to draw an elephant, we would probably manage something recognizable: four legs, enormous ears, a trunk, some tusks. Maybe we'd accidentally make it look like a potato, but the general idea would survive.

A medieval European artist, however, might produce something that looks like a horse, a boar, or a particularly anxious dragon wearing a trumpet on its face.

And this wasn't necessarily because medieval artists were bad at drawing.

The problem was that they were sometimes drawing things they had never seen.

The elephant problem

Medieval Europe was not exactly overflowing with elephants.

There were occasional exceptions. Charlemagne famously received an elephant, named Abu al-Abbas, from the Abbasid caliphate in the early ninth century. Much later, Henry III of England acquired an elephant that was kept at the Tower of London.

But for most medieval artists, an elephant was an exotic creature described in books rather than something standing in front of them.

So an illustrator might have to work from a written description, another illustration, or an account passed through several people who had also never seen the animal.

The results could be magnificent nonsense.

In illustrated bestiaries, elephants sometimes have strangely shaped feet, oddly proportioned bodies, and trunks that look more like decorative trumpets than functioning noses. Some even appear to have castles or fortifications on their backs.

And here's the important bit:

Accuracy wasn't always the point.

Medieval bestiaries were collections of descriptions and stories about animals (both real and imaginary including creatures like dragons and unicorns).

They inherited material from older traditions, particularly the Physiologus, and medieval authors added Christian interpretations and moral lessons. An animal wasn't merely an animal. It could be a little theological teaching aid with fur.

A lion could represent courage.

A snake could represent sin.

A phoenix could represent resurrection.

And the elephant, with its enormous size and exotic nature, could be turned into a symbol of things like strength, devotion, kindness, or redemption.

This changes how we should look at the weird pictures.

Imagine an artist being told:

At that point, perhaps anatomical accuracy is no longer your primary concern.

You've got a story to illustrate.

There is something wonderfully human about this.

Suppose Artist A has actually seen an elephant.

Artist B reads Artist A's description.

Artist C copies Artist B's illustration.

Artist D copies Artist C.

Artist E has never seen an elephant, but has seen Artist D's picture.

By the time Artist E paints his elephant, we may have travelled quite a long way from the original animal.

And then Artist E's version gets copied by Artist F.

Congratulations. You have invented a new species of elephant.

This is one reason medieval animal imagery can look so strange to us. Some artists were working within established visual traditions, copying or adapting earlier representations rather than independently reconstructing an animal from firsthand observation. The elephant could therefore become less a portrait of an actual creature and more a portrait of what an elephant was supposed to mean.

And that distinction matters.

Calling these pictures simply "bad art" misses something fascinating.

And then there are the margins.

Medieval manuscripts could contain elaborate illustrations around the main text, what we now call marginalia. These could relate to the text, comment on it, provide visual jokes, or simply introduce wonderfully bizarre scenes. Scholars still debate the precise purpose of particular examples.

This is where medieval artists seem to have occasionally decided that the page needed a rabbit fighting a knight.

Or a creature with the body of one animal and the head of another.

Or an animal doing something that makes absolutely no sense.

The result is one of the great traps of looking at medieval art through modern eyes.

We see an anatomically questionable creature and think:

"They didn't know what that animal looked like."

Sometimes, yes.

But sometimes the artist wasn't trying to make a natural-history illustration at all.

The medieval imagination had a very different relationship with the boundary between the real and the fantastic. Bestiaries could put lions, elephants, dragons, unicorns, and other creatures into the same conceptual menagerie.

The question wasn't always:

"Does this creature actually look like this?"

It could instead be:

"What does this creature tell us?"

Occasionally?

Absolutely.

But that's not really the interesting answer.

Medieval artists could produce remarkably sophisticated and observant images of animals they actually knew. The problem becomes much more interesting when the subject was distant, exotic, legendary, or inherited from an earlier source.

An artist could be perfectly capable of drawing a horse while having absolutely no practical knowledge of an elephant.

And even when better information became available, older visual traditions could persist.

In other words, the medieval elephant wasn't necessarily a failed attempt at an elephant.

It was an elephant according to the information, traditions, stories, symbols, and artistic conventions available to the artist.

Which means that the bizarre creature staring back at us from a 13th-century manuscript isn't merely evidence that someone couldn't draw.

It's evidence of how information travelled.

And how easily it changed.

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Thank you for reading this edition.
Until next time, stay curious and remember: if you've never seen an elephant, perhaps don't volunteer to draw one.

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