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At least these artists had actually seen a cow. There are some hilarious medieval artworks of lions where the artist had clearly never seen a lion. https://www.sadanduseless.com/medieval-lion-art/

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throwup238 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Someone made a timeline of European drawings of elephants after they disappeared from Europe: https://www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anthropogenus/index.html

	▲	hermitcrab 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's amazing. Thanks.

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defanor 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Sounds like a fun fact, but were those drawn by people who can draw cows and humans, and aim to draw realistically? Middle Ages were quite a dip in art generally, AFAICT, with humans often not looking realistic, either.

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hermitcrab 5 days ago | parent [-]

I guess it possible that these were just terrible artists, But it seems more likely that they just didn't know what a lion actually looked like. Afterall, if you were an English medieval monk, how likely were you to see an actual lion? They were no photos to go off.

Check out this Cambodian lion: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/a-guardian-lion-281362 The craftsmanship is quite impressive. But it doesn't look anything much like a lion IMHO.

	▲	defanor 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I guess that Cambodian lion is rather like the Chinese lions, which "are intended to reflect the emotion of the animal as opposed to the reality of the lion" [1], falling into the bucket with intentionally unrealistic (non-lifelike) art. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_guardian_lions#Appeara...
	▲	gilleain 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There were a few English artists who might have had the opportunity of knowing what they looked like, given there were lions at the Tower of London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_London "Records of 1210–1212 show payments to lion keepers" - although who was allowed to visit the lions is a different question ...