Their bond with their solitary children represented devotion, while stories of elephants taking care to be gentle around smaller animals symbolized kindness to others. Such depictions appeared alongside biblical stories and in extraordinary illuminated manuscripts-including illustrated bestiaries-created by hand before printing became dominant in the 16th century.Īnd among the earliest medieval European representations of fantastic beasts were elephants. What mattered most was what such creatures represented in Christian spiritual terms-and so a lion might represent the virtues of strength and courage, while a snake and its venom could represent sin. For illustrators in medieval Europe, depicting animals like elephants that they’d never set eyes on was a key part of their task to shape the morality of humankind.
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