I’m so extremely tired of the “weird-looking medieval animals in art” trope that I dedicated two entire classes to dissecting how these representations actually convey useful scientific or moral information to their viewers despite their stylization. https://twitter.com/dannydutch/status/1313211950738870272

Medieval people weren’t “bad” at art or naively inventing representations of animals they hadn’t seen. These are generally luxury works by educated people for educated people, and they provide and perpetuate knowledge, albeit in a visual system different from ours.

Michael Camille’s excellent article “Bestiary or Biology” is a really underrated study. Also, I get that these kinds of threads are well-intentioned and supposed to be fun, but they perpetuate old stereotypes and poke fun at sophisticated systems of knowledge...

...simply because they differ from our own. It’s also just bad art criticism and lazy to be like “this isn’t naturalistic and is therefore silly and we don’t need to take it seriously.”