The contrast with Paris’s careful study of an elephant, centuries earlier, shows the invention of the printing press didn’t instantly lead to modern science but instead proliferated fakes and fictions, like Renaissance social media. Roll up to meet the Monkfish, a fish that looks just like a monk! This is how an illustration from Pierre Belon’s 1551 book The Natural History of Strange Sea Fishes depicts the creature: its human head is tonsured and its scales are shaped into monastic robes. Yet it also revels in the fabulous, impossible dreams we have made of them. From this early attempt at scientific natural history, to a tiny drawing of a bird in flight from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel, to Ludwig Koch’s pioneering 1953 gramophone record of British bird songs, Animals explores how human beings have sought to observe and understand our fellow species. To medieval folk, an elephant was a monstrous legendary beast from their myths of faraway lands – yet Paris pins this fantastic being to reality, tying it down with his objective gaze. This 13th-century portrait of an elephant encapsulates the paradoxical delights of the British Library’s cornucopia of animal art.
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