Elaine Velie

I stumbled across a viral Twitter thread alleging that Medieval artists had never seen their animal subjects, as evidenced by a string of wildly inaccurate drawings. But had a Dutch draughtsman really never laid eyes on a snail? I interviewed two scholars to get to the bottom of it. We talked about Medieval beliefs about the real versus imaginary world, the centuries-old problem of convincing people to pay attention to Bible stories, and the celebrity of a 13th-century elephant. It turns out that for the most part, we’re laughing with, and not at, Medieval artists.

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