when I first started studying the Middle Ages I was so excited to discover that
there was an entire type of book devoted just to animals called the bestiary and
now in Book of Beasts I get to share the world's greatest bestiaries with
everyone else
Book of Beasts
I'm Beth Morrison senior curator of manuscripts here at the Getty Museum.
Hi I'm Larissa Grollemond and I'm assistant
curator of manuscripts here at the J. Paul Getty Museum
What is a manuscript, exactly?
A manuscript is
basically any document that's handwritten it comes from the Latin
"manus" meaning hand and "scribere" meaning written so anything that is
handwritten is actually a manuscript. Technically a manuscript refers to
anything that's handmade but we use it here in the department to refer to books
made between roughly 1000 and 1500
And what is a bestiary
A bestiary is this very specific type of
medieval book more or less a natural history encyclopedia of animals but
instead of encyclopedias today that we think of that discuss dietary habits or
where animals live, the medieval bestiaries talked about animals as allegories
Do you have an example?
The story of
the pelican in the bestiary is that it gets annoyed with its pesky children who
can't stop annoying the mother pelican and so she strikes them dead. She
eventually feels very sorry about this and pierces her own breast in order to
let the blood flow down on the chicks which revives them and this is seen as a
symbol for Christ's resurrection and his sacrifice for humankind.
What are the bestiary's origins?
The bestiary traces its origins all the way back to the second century AD it had its
foundations and a text called the Physiologus which was originally written
in Greek but over the course of the Middle Ages a lot of material was added
from different encyclopedias, different histories of animals, and actually came
to be the bestiary as we know it today
The bestiary is primarily a Latin text in its origination but eventually
gets so popular that it gets translated into a variety of vernacular languages
most notably in French although it does get translated into Catalan and Italian
and a number of other languages.
How were bestiaries used? We think that bestiaries
were originally used as a kind of teaching manual and they were primarily
used in religious context either being read in monasteries or used as
preaching material for priests who would preach to the general population
Bestiaries were so visually stunning and the stories were so engaging and
memorable that it seems obvious that secular people would have wanted copies
of bestiaries too although we don't know who commissioned many of the specific
manuscripts that are on display in the exhibition we think that they would have
been used by a wide swath of the public
Are there examples of the bestiary in modern popular culture? I think when the most popular movies
ever made for families is the Lion King and the entire plot is basically stolen
from the bestiary. The bestiary begins with the lion and
actually the first words of the bestiary are "the lion is the king of beasts" so
this whole idea of a father lion training his son in the art of being the
king of all the creatures of the world is taken and stolen directly from the
bestiary. What is Book of Beasts? The Book of Beasts is a really exciting exhibition that I'm so
thrilled to share with everyone because I've actually been working on it for
almost 10 years. The Getty is fortunate to have three precious bestiaries in its
collection and what's really exciting to me about bestiaries is that there's
something that you can come to even if you don't know anything about them and
find so much in them. When you walk up to a bestiary you can identify the animals
even if you don't know the story off the top of your head or you've never seen
one before bestiaries are so visually exciting that you can't help but get
excited about them
Book of Beasts: May 14–August 18, 2019
Artwork captions
The Getty