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It amuses me that nearly every comment in this thread advances the same theory that the article discards as inaccurate: that the artists had never seen an eleph
by Dove 10y ago
It amuses me that nearly every comment in this thread advances the same theory that the article discards as inaccurate: that the artists had never seen an elephant and were working from description only. It notes that the accuracy does not seem to improve when there is a real, local elephant they can use as a model.
The article irritatingly answers its own question mainly by saying, "we don't know why", but suggests that medieval artists may have been less interested in realism than in convention and what the art communicated symbolically. That seems reasonable to me. Compare medieval babies: http://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8908825/ugly-medieval-babies http://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8908825/ugly-medieval-babies
This seems like a strange thing for an artist to do, but if you think about it, we do it, too. Here are some representations in modern entertainment dominated by convention rather than realism: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect
- aisofteng 10y agoMy first reaction was "probably because elephants sound like I'd like trumpets," and indeed that's the main theory (more of a guess) floated at the end of the article.
- kbart 10y ago"It notes that the accuracy does not seem to improve when there is a real, local elephant they can use as a model." The single specimen mentioned in the article was kept inside the Tower of London which was off-limits to the vast majority of population. I doubt many artists had access to it and had a chance to see a real elephant. Even if it was on display publicly, mostly London artists could see it anyway, as people didn't travel much back then.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoAbout those medieval babies, this line jumped out at me: > In some of these images, it looks like he had male pattern baldness. My kid was born nearly bald, and as her hair slowly grew out, her head looked a lot more like Sir Patrick Stewart's than the traditional golden curls of babies in other paintings that we take as stock images of babies. And some of those paintings barely get the humans right, either - in the sliding-example image, the woman seems to be missing her chin, and the rest of her face looks more like Pepe the Frog than a realistic huma.