Every time you draw it again you tend to cut corners, subconsciously or deliberately until eventually, via mannerism and other factors, style emerges. Once you've drawn something from life and you're happy with it, it's more likely you can do the same image again and again but not from a different angle, unless you return to the subject or compromise credibility by making things up. Reference meaning either something that has been drawn before (since there were no photographs) or sitting down in front of the subject and making sense of it from life. In other words, to draw or paint something life-like requires a) reference to reality and b) drawing process with said reference.
Just considering snails in 13th and 14th century art alone: Yves et Françoise Cranga, "L'escargot dans le midi de la France: Approche iconographique" and Lillian Randall, "The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare" offer twelve different possible explanations between them.Īs an artist I'd like to point out that seeing something daily or living amongst a phenomena does not automatically translate into knowing what it looks like visually when you attempt to draw it. The illuminations in the original manuscripts of two of 12th century renaissance woman Hildegard of Bingen's great visionary treatises, Scivias and Liber divinorum operum, depict how she describes her visions, but with additional elements that are the interpretations she (God speaking through her) provides of what she saw.Īs for the truly weird-ass art? Well.in a lot of cases, scholars aren't sure. In some cases, iconography or illustration incorporates both the object/scene being drawn and its allegorical meaning or an interpretation. Obviously, in the case of unicorns, griffins, and other fantastic beasts that were treated right alongside real animals in bestiaries and encyclopedia, no one knew the animals firsthand-yet they still had well-developed iconography. And later artists copied the tradition, regardless of whether or not they knew the animals firsthand. So somewhere along the way, various animals got stylized. But in late medieval art, the iconography for the side wound of Christ (where the spear of Longinus pierced Jesus' side while he was hanging on the cross) looking like.let's just say "something else entirely".
Medieval people definitely knew what stab wounds/cuts look like. In a lot of cases, the iconographic value of something, for recognition purposes, was more important in medieval art than realism. Or it can be uniform-the apostle Paul always looks kind of like an Ood. So you can represent the entrance to hell as a "mouth", but via Hellmouth 1, Hellmouth 2, Hellmouth 3 &c. Medieval art is very iconographic, both in terms of themes and in terms of specific images within the theme. A modern example would be the iconography of "play" for a song or video. This is basically what an image stands for or means, and usually, it's used with respect to a particular image used over and over to represent something.
When it comes to animals that look.not like their natural equivalents, the most important thing to keep in mind is iconography.
But they were in manuscripts less likely to be preserved, and far less likely to be promoted by modern libraries digitizing their collections. Less skilled drawings and illuminations absolutely exist. The first thing to keep in mind is that basically all medieval art that you're familiar with is by highly skilled artists. Ooh, weird medieval art, everybody's favorite.