You may not hear it every day, but Chimera The word remains an evocative one, perhaps even more so because of its rarity. it is derived from Greek chimeraLiterally “year-old she-goat”, it is indeed the name of a fire-breathing mythical creature with the body of a goat, but also the head of a lion and the tail of a dragon. Today, the word broadly refers to something usually bizarre, combining parts drawn from a variety of sources, and its usage dates back to the Middle Ages. If you look at the illuminated manuscripts of the time, you will find many chimeras. You’ll find a slew of beastly mashups that look so exciting and funny that they translate straight into 21st century internet memes. Most of them seem to have originally been intended to depict real individual animals.
The video above is from Curious Archive Here’s a gallery of medieval chimeras, intended and unintended. These include spiny sea turtles, small tigers without stripes, hippos with dorsal fins, elephants carrying entire stone castles on their backs, carnivorous cow-like hyenas, ostriches that eat iron horseshoes, and scorpions with mammalian faces.
This kind of mistake may have been inevitable, given that in medieval Europe it was difficult to obtain such rare animals, even for artists who had access to the courts. Most people would have had to rely on the dictation and depictions of bestiaries, documents that functioned as both “natural history and a set of moral and religious precepts.” According to the Metropolitan Museum of Artand also incorporated “stories about the existence of strange and hideous creatures.”
As in many areas of the pre-Enlightenment world, reality and fantasy coexisted in ways that are difficult for us to understand today. For example, we are not always aware that the traditions of the time tended to associate Jesus Christ with the lion, a locally extinct animal even before the beginning of the Middle Ages. Therefore, “for artists, the lion’s symbolic aspects were as important as its actual physical characteristics.” Jane Alexander of Mental Floss writes:and in any case, “medieval artists were not usually concerned with realism.” Allergy friendlyElaine Verrie quotes Shirin Fauzi, associate curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as observing: in medieval times, and they’re actually laughing and middle ages. We might be surprised to think that our ancestors also had a sense of humor, and that the cultural concept of “funny animals” has been around much longer than we imagined.
Related content:
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One of the great illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, the Aberdeen Bestiary, has been digitized in high resolution and is now available online
Why knights fought snails in medieval illuminated manuscripts
Cats in medieval manuscripts and paintings
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A field guide to strange medieval monsters
Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages ​​and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
