I’m actually showing them to make a point about your biases. In the modern era, we expect images to be true to life. We have cameras that give us nearly perfect representations of the world. But realism isn’t what medieval monks were always trying to accomplish. Religion and metaphor were a central part of their lives, to a degree that I think we in the modern world have trouble understanding.
The elephants on the left aren’t really elephants. They’re a way of presenting a moral lesson about your place in the world. The image serves that story. It’s not there to teach you about elephants. It’s there to teach you about God.
So if your first reaction to these elephants was to laugh at those ignorant medieval monks… then perhaps you’ve fallen prey to your biases. The elephant doesn’t look like an elephant because the metaphor was more important than the reality.
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
[beat]
The past informs the present, but the present informs the past. We can’t help but to interpret it through the lens of our own experience, and those biases distort the reality of what it was actually like to live there.
This idea fascinates me, because it’s not only true of the past; it’s true of everything. Our biases and experiences influence so much of how we interpret the world.