Animals were an important part of the everyday lives of ancient and medieval people, whether they were real or imagined, and their literary use in the Middle Ages formed a moral language.
Animals
Posted inArt
Seeing Ourselves in Animals Throughout Art History
The exhibition Stampede prods the viewer to consider how artists use animals to represent human traits and critique the world we humans live within.
Posted inBooks
How the Animal Menagerie of Versailles Changed 17th-Century Art
1668: The Year of the Animal in France by Peter Sahlins delves into the radical influence of Louis XIV’s menagerie at Versailles on the art of animals.
Posted inArt
A VR Documentary on Animal Surveillance Tracks a Grizzly’s Life
Bear 71 VR is an interactive documentary that uses trail camera footage and animal tracking to follow the life of one grizzly in Banff National Park.
Posted inArt
Mourning Extinction with a Museum’s Animal Artifacts
In Next of Kin at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, artist Christina Seely repurposes natural history specimens for an emotional exhibition about animal extinction.
Posted inBooks
The Biodiversity of the World Captured in Five Centuries of Animal Art
Charlotte Sleigh’s book The Paper Zoo explores 500 years of scientific animal illustration as seen in the collections of the British Library.
Posted inArt
Terrible Taxidermy from When Exotic Animals Were Unknown in the West
Exotic animal visitors to Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries were more frequently dead than alive.
Posted inArt
An Artist and Amateur Scientist Who Painted Animal Camouflage and Angels
Before coming across an unusually calligraphic painting of a mountain, Williams College Museum of Art Curator Kevin Murphy considered the turn-of-the-century artist Abbott Handerson Thayer “a one slide guy,” a man known for portraits of placid angels, who in an art history class might get one mention and then be forgotten.
Posted inBooks
A Photographer’s Two-Year Journey to Document Sacred Cows
There’s a beauty in the bovine’s domesticated body that inspired Daniel Naudé to spend two years taking portraits of cows.
Posted inArt
The Curious Fates of Famous Artists’ Pets
There’s a whole history of woe for the pets of famous artists, especially when the creative types decided no ordinary cat or dog would do.
Posted inBooks
The Relics of Victorian Natural History in Eye-Popping Stereoscope
Natural history storerooms are a bit like drowned Noah’s Arks, with specimens from every realm of the animal world posthumously preserved.
Posted inBooks
Illustrated Dolphins and Vampire Squid from the Dawn of Ocean Exploration
In the 16th century, Pierre Belon published one of the earliest scientific depictions of a dolphin: a woodcut with finely hatched skin and pointed teeth.
