I don’t know about you, but bestiaries always amuse me. It’s incredible see how the imagination of artists work, registering the images of animals very known of us and imaginary creature very diffuse in the Medieval age through manuscripts as real animals. The exhibition Bestiaire du Moyen Âge (Medieval Bestiary) has a fabulous collection of bestiary images in medieval illumination.
Through the illuminations, this virtual exhibition tells the story of bestiary, the first of them, the importance of those images to illustrated books, to the science and human knowledge in epochs where the distances kept it limited. The second part can be even more interesting, with bestiary’s interpretation. The French version has extra parts with details of manuscripts. the animals symbology, demons and the satiric books with animals.
More beasts and illuminations: Enluminures : base de données, The Medieval Bestiary, The Aberdeen Bestiary, Books of Hours, The illuminated Middle Ages, The Fantastic in Art and Fiction and Medieval Macabre.
