Snails wielding swords and fighting off knights. Elephants that look like oversized golden retrievers. Dogs with uncanny proportions and hauntingly human eyes. Cats wearing clothes and playing musical instruments.
These are part of a treasure trove of medieval animal illustrations that has taken the internet by storm.
From listicles about “super ugly medieval dogs” to Instagram accounts devoted to “weird medieval guys”, it seems people can’t get enough of these pictures — the stranger, the better.
That’s something Matthew Ponesse knows well. An associate professor in history at Ohio Dominican University, he runs a medieval meme Instagram account, @medievalistmatt, with over 160,000 followers.
Dr Ponesse says animal imagery is “a go-to that just always connects” on his Instagram account. (Supplied: Matthew Ponesse)
“When I first started this account [in 2018], it was simply a means to connect with students,” he says.
“My students felt so sorry for me, [like] ‘He’s trying, we should follow him out of pity’. It never even occurred to me to create anything, especially [something] that wasn’t historical or educational.”
But soon he realised he could capture his students’ attention with memes, even if they weren’t necessarily from the early medieval texts that were his area of expertise.
“Social media is meant to be an escape, a diversion — it’s clearly a place where my students didn’t want to be further burdened with academic content,” he says.
“So I started challenging myself … I [would] pour myself coffee, give myself an hour, just stare at images and wait for something to hit.
“Most of it is just absolutely absurd and idiotic.”
The account grew slowly until last year when it “completely skyrocketed”.
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“For some reason, this medium and this content really connects [with] a modern audience,” Dr Ponesse says.
“I’m kind of amazed at just how far medieval history can go mainstream.“
And animals, it seems, are key.
“Animals are just an easy area to go to if I want to post something that I know is just going to immediately be popular and get passed around,” Dr Ponesse says.
So, how did these artworks make their way from niche historical archives to Instagram feeds? And why do they look so bizarre to us today?
Where do these images come from?
The medieval period, often known as the Dark Ages, is generally understood to have spanned about 1,000 years, from the 5th century to the start of the Renaissance in the 15th century.
Most of the animal depictions that have made their way into the mainstream are from Western European manuscripts, often in the form of marginalia: small illustrations around the borders of the text.
During this period, books were for “the medieval 1 per cent”, explains Larisa Grollemond, associate curator of medieval and renaissance manuscripts at the Getty Museum.
This Dutch prayer book from the late medieval period features detailed miniatures to accompany the text. (Public Domain)
“They’re created for a really elite readership … A high-ranking nobleman might own a handful of religious texts, including books to guide personal prayer — that’s where you see a lot of these funny animals and marginalia,” she says.
“There are also secular books, like romances, histories, in some cases, music.”
The artists behind the marginalia — known as illuminators — ranged from monks to secular craftspeople in professional ateliers.
Dr Grollemond says the purpose of marginalia has been long debated by medieval art historians. Some say they’re satire, others say they demonstrate the ideas of the manuscript, and others say they’re purely for fun.
“Medieval people were still people, they had senses of humour. They found a lot of the same things funny that we find funny,” Dr Grollemond says.
“A medieval person loved a poop joke, a fart joke, just like we do. It turns out that is an element of the human sense of humour that has not been lost over centuries.”
This illustration from a 14th-century manuscript clearly demonstrates a sense of humour. (Public Domain)
Why so many animals?
The medieval preoccupation with animals comes down to how people lived during this period, says Julia Perratore, associate curator in the Department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“People lived their lives side-by-side with animals in a way that we do not,” she says.
“The vast majority of people lived in rural settings and worked on the land, so that meant working with domestic animals.
Images of knights warring against snails are common in marginalia, but historians aren’t certain why. (Public Domain)
“People often lived physically closer to animals. It was not so unusual for the human inhabitants of a house to live on the upper storeys and the animal inhabitants to be on the lower storeys because the more you can keep bodies together for warmth, the happier you’ll be.”
As a result, animals turned up “in any possible context where art would be made”, from wall paintings and carved doorways to clothing and coats of arms.
So why do the animals look … like that?
It’s no secret that medieval animal paintings don’t exactly resemble their real-life counterparts. In fact, it’s the subject of most viral memes on the topic.
But Dr Grollemond explains that this wasn’t a lack of skill on the part of the artist, but a stylistic choice.
“Medieval artists were not trying to depict animals accurately,” she says.
“They’re not trying to do photorealism. They’re trying to communicate certain things about the world around them through the depiction of animals.”
Dr Perratore points to a fresco housed at The Met Cloisters. It features a painting of a camel on the wall of a 12th-century Spanish monastery, which uses flat forms, stylised lines, and bold colours.
“[The artist] is using the stylistic language of the day,” she says.
“I think some people might look at this and say it’s quite simplistic or the person who made it wasn’t skilled. I think they’re actually highly skilled.
“They are being creative with it. They’re doing their own thing.“
Dr Perratore says the artist behind this camel created “a form that’s quite dynamic, but they’re doing it in their own way”. (Public Domain)
This creative licence is more pronounced in depictions of exotic animals. While some medieval courts had menageries, where wild animals were kept for show, most artists were unlikely to have come across a lion, elephant or jaguar.
Dr Perratore says it was like a game of “telephone”, where a description becomes further from the truth the more it’s passed on.
“It’s not that they were unskilled, it was that they were making artistic choices based on the information that they had,” she says.
“They’re not trying to be super naturalistic here. It’s not their artistic goal.”
This depiction of an elephant from the 15th century suggests the artist wasn’t all that familiar with the animal. (Public Domain)
Evidence of these medieval artists’ creativity can be seen today. Many of the dragons we find in pop culture — in the popular television series Game of Thrones, for example — are based on medieval interpretations.
What about those human-looking eyes?
That was intentional, too.
“There is such a care, I think, among medieval artists and illuminators to make animal faces say something and a lot of that does happen with the eyes,” Dr Grollemond says.
The more human-looking animal depictions, like this one from a late medieval altarpiece in Switzerland, make for popular memes. (Public Domain)
“I think they’re going for humour in some ways, making things a little bit eye-catching, but especially in cases where animals stand in for moral exemplars, you’re supposed to see yourself in that animal.”
This is particularly the case for animals depicted in bestiaries: medieval encyclopedias of real and imagined creatures steeped in Christian theology.
“[The artists] are using animals as examples of Christian lessons and to teach Christian theology, essentially, so all of the animals are imbued with particular behaviours or characteristics that are given to them by God,” Dr Grollemond says.
Creatures like tigers, stags, pelicans, and panthers — like this one from a 13th-century bestiary — were often symbols of Christ. (Public Domain)
Dr Perratore points to a collection of Western European fables called Reynard the Fox, which was hugely popular in the late medieval period.
“[It] was a great storytelling tradition in which animals essentially played out human social roles,” she says.
“Animals became ways of telling stories about people, which is universal but was no less loved in the Middle Ages than it is today.”
In every Reynard tale, the fox is summoned before a court of his animal peers for his bad behaviour, only to outfox them with his cunning. (Public Domain)
So what can furious snails, uncanny cats and smiling lions teach us?
Well, perhaps the Dark Ages weren’t so dark, after all.
“[We had] 1,000 years of history where humanity didn’t hide out in a cave while the barbarians ravaged the world. That’s not what happened. What really happened was, we kept developing, we kept evolving, we kept creating,” Dr Ponesse says.
“This is an age that was supposedly barbaric and backwards and ignorant and intolerant, and yet the way they depicted animals is sweet, beautiful, playful.
“We expect it to be dark, and it’s so bright and lively and dynamic.“
Animal imagery, like this much-circulated image from a Bavarian coat of arms, was often playful. (Public domain)
While Dr Ponesse says art historians are likely “rolling their eyes” at his memes, Dr Perratore and Dr Grollemond are big fans of his Instagram account.
“The sheer inventiveness of a lot of what we encounter in these memes is really a source of continual delight,” Dr Perratore says.
“I think it’s important for people to be exposed to art of the past, no matter how they encounter it … It does help to humanise the past.”
Dr Grollemond thinks the artists behind these memes would have enjoyed them, too.
“It is my fervent belief that medieval people would have loved the internet. The repurposing of [their] art I think would have been very gratifying to illuminators,” she says.
On his desk, Dr Ponesse has a small paperweight, which he had specially made. On it is written a Latin expression, which translates to: “The soul is rejuvenated with laughter”.
“I think the world needs a little bit more lightheartedness. It needs a little more cheer,” he says.
“If I can go back into an age that is supposedly so dark and violent [to] show the lighter side of that, who knows? Maybe it’ll make people reconsider the age that we live in and see some of the positive things.”
