Over time, and with each successive translation, the mythic tale of the beast naturally changed. In the thirteenth century, the Franciscan Monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus added another element to the story: a mirror. According to his addition, the hunter drops a shiny circular object behind him in order to distract the mother. The tiger stops her pursuit and looks into the mirror; as her reflection looks back, she is tricked into thinking it is her cub. She licks the mirror as if to tend to her infant, and the hunter is able to flee the scene. This is the tale depicted in essentially all subsequent medieval bestiaries.
The Rise of Science
New scientific ideas came to the forefront in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian Europe, introduced through texts from Arabic and ancient classical authors such as Plato, Aristotle, and natural philosophers. Philosophers and scientists stressed the importance of observation and viewing things directly in nature. But during the Middle Ages, knowledge of foreign beasts—such as the tiger—remained scant. The rare sighting of a tiger in Europe usually took the form of a king’s royal procession, in which a ruler showed off exotic animals to illustrate of his power. Viewings of these processions were usually limited to upper-class society, and artists did not always have first-hand accounts of the creatures.
Confusion about the actual appearance of non-European animals such as the tiger thus persisted, giving artists free rein to invent their own interpretations. They depicted not only blue tigers, but also hybrid creatures and fantastic monsters. And color was a primary vehicle through which bestiary artists demonstrated inventiveness and creativity and personalized their creations.
It would not be until much later that artists became more interested in more naturalistic depictions of tigers and other beasts. But as we see in the bestiary, medieval artists were decidedly not aiming for realism.
Learn More
Clark, Willene. “The Latin Bestiaries: A Survey, And Cultural Contexts.” In A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second-Family Bestiary: Commentary, Art, Text and Translation, 7–20. New York: Boydell & Brewer Ltd., 2006.
