Beauty and the Bestiary: Understanding God Through Animal Imagery
In medieval art, especially in Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines, animals were used as symbols of moral lessons and events in the life of Christ and other holy figures.[4] Students could understand these stories with a Bestiary—a book that presents collections of illustrations, descriptions, and moral or religious stories about a variety of animals.[5] As the importance of religion heavily outweighed the importance of accuracy, it didn’t matter that Bestiaries were often scientifically incorrect. The students who studied the animals were generally clerics and monks, and thus concentrated on how it related to their religion. They saw it fit to learn about God through the natural world, as the natural world was the work of God Himself.[6] As Philippe de Thaun, a poet and author of The Bestiary(c. 1135), argued, “we ought to worship God, and thank him very much, when he made everything for people to take example; there is nothing in this world which does not give example, if one knew how to ask, inquire, and prove it.”[7] Interested in the examples the animals set, I consulted J. Romilly Allen’s Bestiary to understand the animals depicted in Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines.
Citations:
4. Ross, Leslie. Medieval Art : A Topical Dictionary. Westport, US: Greenwood Press, 1996. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 28 April 2017. Pg. 14
5. Allen, J.Romilly. Early christian symbolism in great britain and ireland before the thirteenth century. Place of publication not identified: Cambridge Univ Press, 2014. Print. P. 334-393
6.James, Montague R. The Bestiary. Macmillan and Co., Limited London, 1932. Pg. 1-11
7. Nigg, Joe. The Book of Fabulous Beasts: A Treasury of Writings from Ancient times to the Present. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. Pg. 134