Medieval Bestiary

A bestiary, or Bestiarum vocabulum is a compendium of beasts. Bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals, birds and even rocks. The natural history and illustration of each beast was usually accompanied by a moral lesson. This reflected the belief that the world itself was the Word of God, and that every living thing had its own special meaning. For example, the pelican, which was believed to tear open its breast to bring its young to life with its own blood, was a living representation of Jesus. The bestiary, then, is also a reference to the symbolic language of animals in Western Christian art and literature.
Bestiaries were particularly popular in England and France around the 12th century and were mainly compilations of earlier texts. The earliest bestiary in the form in which it was later popularized was an anonymous 2nd century Greek volume called the Physiologus, which itself summarized ancient knowledge and wisdom about animals in the writings of classical authors such as Aristotle's Historia Animalium and various works by Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Aelian and other naturalists.
Following the Physiologus, Saint Isidore of Seville (Book XII of the Etymologiae) and Saint Ambrose expanded the religious message with reference to passages from the Bible and the Septuagint. They and other authors freely expanded or modified pre-existing models, constantly refining the moral content without interest or access to much more detail regarding the factual content. Nevertheless, the often fanciful accounts of these beasts were widely read and generally believed to be true. A few observations found in bestiaries, such as the migration of birds, were discounted by the natural philosophers of later centuries, only to be rediscovered in the modern scientific era.
Two illuminated Psalters, the Queen Mary Psalter (British Library Ms. Royal 2B, vii) and the Isabelle Psalter (State Library, Munich), contain full Bestiary cycles. That in the Queen Mary Psalter is in the "marginal" decorations that occupy about the bottom quarter of the page, and are unusually extensive and coherent in this work. In fact the bestiary has been expanded beyond the source in the Norman bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc to ninety animals. Some are placed in the text to make correspondences with the psalm they are illustrating. 
The Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci also made his own bestiary.
The Aberdeen Bestiary (that i've used for this video) is one of the best known of over 50 manuscript bestiaries surviving today.
Music by J.S.Bach, 'Praeludium et fugue in a, BWV 543'.

Un bestiario, o bestiarum, è un compendio che descrive gli animali, o bestie. Nel medioevo si trattava di una particolare categoria di libri che raccoglievano brevi descrizioni di animali (reali ed immaginari) accompagnate da spiegazioni moralizzanti e riferimenti tratti dalla Bibbia. Altre raccolte, simili per l'impostazione ma di diverso argomento, sono riscontrabili nei lapidari (che raccoglievano le proprietà delle rocce e dei minerali) e negli erbari (spesso di carattere medico, descrivevano le virtù delle piante).
L'origine remota di questi testi, che non hanno alcuna valenza scientifica o naturalistica, è da ricercarsi nell'opera greca Physiologus (il fisiologo, cioè lo studioso della natura) che offriva l'interpretazione degli animali e delle loro caratteristiche in chiave simbolica e religiosa (quindi, per esempio, il leone, re degli animali, è associato a Cristo). Il testo fu tradotto anche in latino e nel corso della storia si è arricchito di dettagli ed immagini sviluppandosi nei bestiari veri e propri. Altre fonti sono invece da ricercare in autori latini tra cui Plinio il vecchio, Solino, S. Ambrogio. Benché normalmente incluse nel testo dei bestiari le sezioni sugli uccelli possono, in qualche caso, essere estrapolate e conservate in manoscritti i cui testi sono detti aviarii.
I bestiari si diffusero soprattutto tra Francia e Inghilterra nel XIII-XIV secolo anche se non mancano testimonianze posteriori tuttavia molto inferiori dal punto di vista della realizzazione artistica.
Tra i bestiari decorati più importanti si segnala quello della Aberdeen University Library (che ho usato per questo video), preparato in Inghilterra nel XIII secolo.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Medieval
• Bestiary
• bestiario
• medioevale

[CupisHomines]

1:28 what does that say? i have a hard time reading thru those anglo-saxon fonts.

[shivabel]

@CupisHomines 'Bonnacon'. It is a mythical animal from Asia. It has curled horns and emits burning dung. The legend may be based on a type of bison in reality.

[CupisHomines]

@shivabel Oh. I heard that the unicorn might've been based on  the rhino. dunno where i heard that.

[CupisHomines]

@shivabel Burning dung, you say? I can just imagine.The silly rubes back then probably loved it. What a perverted idea

Lol.

[lucestelly6]

thaks for the pictures

[adissajota]

Te felicito el video es excepcional, gracias por tomarte la molestia de enseñarnos que tan grande es el arte medieval

[vonspre]

Absolutely amazing...❊❊❊❊❊

[tangerineblu]

awesome, so generous of you--thanks!

[Incognito851]

A very interesting slideshow of rean and fantastic animals. The fact that some real animals were painted in a different color is also interesting.

The musical score is choosen well.

[almacattleya]

Video strepitoso come sempre. grazie infinite.