
Why Did Medieval Artists Give Elephants Trunks That Look Like Trumpets? - prismatic
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-art-elephants
======
Dove
It amuses me that nearly every comment in this thread advances the same theory
that the article discards as inaccurate: that the artists had never seen an
elephant and were working from description only. It notes that the accuracy
does not seem to improve when there is a real, local elephant they can use as
a model.

The article irritatingly answers its own question mainly by saying, "we don't
know why", but suggests that medieval artists may have been less interested in
realism than in convention and what the art communicated symbolically. That
seems reasonable to me. Compare medieval babies:
[http://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8908825/ugly-medieval-
babies](http://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8908825/ugly-medieval-babies)

This seems like a strange thing for an artist to do, but if you think about
it, we do it, too. Here are some representations in modern entertainment
dominated by convention rather than realism:
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect)

~~~
kbart
_" It notes that the accuracy does not seem to improve when there is a real,
local elephant they can use as a model."_

The single specimen mentioned in the article was kept inside the Tower of
London which was off-limits to the vast majority of population. I doubt many
artists had access to it and had a chance to see a real elephant. Even if it
was on display publicly, mostly London artists could see it anyway, as people
didn't travel much back then.

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pavel_lishin
> _King Louis IX of France gifted King Henry III of England an elephant in
> 1255, and the elephant came to live at the Tower of London, which at the
> time was used as a castle and residence rather than a gloomy prison. It’s
> often said that after that, British artists were able to draw the elephant
> more naturalistically._

My high school teacher would have flayed the skin from my right hand for that
sort of writing.

" _It 's often said..._" By whom? And _were_ British artists actually able to
draw an elephant in a more realistic fashion between 1255 and the elephant's
death? Were any bestiaries created at the time? Or even any crude sketches
that made it into margins?

------
TallGuyShort
To invoke Occam's Razor, I'd point out that the more realistic the trunk is in
the example pictures, the more realistic the rest of the body is (horse-like
legs => trumpet-like trunk). I wonder if many of these pictures were drawn by
people who knew what an elephant looked like only by the description of
others. 4 legs + tusks + big ears + this trumpety thing. Yeah I could see how
they get their pictures.

~~~
sp332
This reminds me of the first penguin to be stuffed and mounted. The
taxidermist only had the skin and a brief description to work with.
[https://imgur.com/a/2XjCk](https://imgur.com/a/2XjCk) It's in the Peabody
Essex Museum in Salem, MA along with a bunch of other cool weird things. I
recommend stopping in if you get a chance.

~~~
14113
Which reminds me of the overstuffed walrus in the horniman museum, London,
where similar events transpired:
[https://www.allinlondon.co.uk/images/musttry/419.jpg](https://www.allinlondon.co.uk/images/musttry/419.jpg)

As far as I understand it, the taxidermist didn't know when to stop, as he'd
never seen a live specimen, so just...kept going.

------
Retric
They can look kind of like Trumpets at the tip:

[http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/1280_640/images/l...](http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/1280_640/images/live/p0/2k/6q/p02k6q25.jpg)

Try drawing that, then have someone copy it, and then have someone copy that
picture. I suspect the game of telephone will end up with an odd creature with
an exaggerated look. Rhinos > Unicorn is not as big a jump as you might think.
Especially as the article points out some people in the middle may have been
exaggerating or simply poor artists.

PS: Also look at the horses in those pictures, some of them look rather 'off'.

------
warpech
This is also encoded in some natural languages.

In Polish an elephant trunk is called "trąba", which also means "trumpet".

~~~
botverse
Same in Spanish: "trompa"

~~~
ggambetta
Kind of - "trumpet" is "trompeta". On the other hand, "trompa" can translate
to "horn", which is not quite the same thing as a trumpet.

~~~
pygy_
In French "trompette" (trumpet) is a diminutive form of "trompe" (trunk, but
it also has other meanings: [0] and _trompe d 'Eustache_, _trompe de Fallope_
(Eustachian and Fallopian tubes)...).

[0]
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe_de_chasse](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe_de_chasse)

------
lobster_johnson
The evolution of the rhinoceros in art is equally fascinating. Here's Dürer's
famous rhino, from 1515:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Rhinoceros_(NGA_1964....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Rhinoceros_\(NGA_1964.8.697\)_enhanced.png)

Dürer had received a rough sketch from an artist in Lisbon, where a real rhino
was being displayed, and he sketched and printed it based on a physical
description by two different people who had seen it. It's beautiful, but also
hilariously inaccurate.

Dürer's rhinoceros was copied — and made further inaccurate — by tons of
artists who also had never seen one in real life.

~~~
olavk
Hilarously inaccuarte? It looks pretty accurate to me, compare this photo of a
live one:
[http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/pictures/o/1195761552/Ind...](http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/pictures/o/1195761552/Indian-
Rhino-Cincinnati.jpg)

~~~
lobster_johnson
Anatomically speaking, it has the right parts, but Dürer imagined all sorts of
things that aren't real:

 _He depicts an animal with hard plates that cover its body like sheets of
armour, with a gorget at the throat, a solid-looking breastplate, and rivets
along the seams. He places a small twisted horn on its back, and gives it
scaly legs and saw-like rear quarters. None of these features are present in a
real rhinoceros,although the Indian rhinoceros does have deep folds in its
skin that can look like armor from a distance._ (Wikipedia)

Also worth mentioning is the very wrong horn, the fuzzy ears, and the entire
anatomy of its rodent-like jaw/facial area. To me, it's the distinctly ratty
appearance that's hilarious.

~~~
olavk
I challenge the "hilarious inaccurate" because I suspect it is due to people
not knowing how a rhino actually look, combined with a prejudice towards pre-
modern artistic depiction of exotic animals. If you actually compare the
drawing to the photo, the drawing is actually amazingly accurate, down to
details like the skin on the legs and the toes.

And if you look at the photo you will notice the rhino actually _has_ hairy
ears.

~~~
lobster_johnson
There are _so_ many details that are wrong. Rhinos have a tiny fringe of hair
at the top of the ear ([http://wandering-photographer.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/11...](http://wandering-photographer.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/11/Rhino-ear.jpg)), but Dürer draws them as being all
hair, like a dog.

The shape is right, everything else is wrong, which makes sense given that he
mainly had a textual description of the animal to work from.

------
falsedan
Saved you a click: to symbolize the sound the trunk made, maybe? We don't
know.

~~~
mrfusion
Thanks. I'd like to see more of these "saved you a click" answers around the
internet. It's one way we can fight back against click bait.

~~~
vacri
What a devious trick this article does, baiting you with a question and then
providing long-form journalism on the answer.

~~~
falsedan
It avoids answering the question until the ultimate paragraph, and even then
it doesn't explain or justify the answer. The whole article is filler.

------
sanderson1
Artists pull inspiration from things they're familiar with, both then and
today. Travel in Medieval times was challenging, causing people to generally
stay where they were, limiting their view of the world.

You can see this throughout art history. Renaissance depictions of Jerusalem
are very "European". For instance, The Sermon of St. Stephen At Jerusalem:
[http://www.louvre.fr/sites/default/files/imagecache/940x768/...](http://www.louvre.fr/sites/default/files/imagecache/940x768/medias/medias_images/images/louvre-
predication-saint-etienne-jerusalem.jpg)

I'm sure these artists had only heard descriptions of elephants from the few
that had travelled and actually seen an elephant. They then referenced things
they knew are were familiar with in northern Europe: wild boar, trumpets, etc.

~~~
digi_owl
> Artists pull inspiration from things they're familiar with, both then and
> today.

I think that you can broaden this to humanity as a whole. And this is why i
find that old Ford quote about faster horses so aggravating.

It is used to claim that the masses are dumb or unimaginative.

But thats not the case.

People would ask for a "faster horse" because that is the means of travel they
were used to.

That is not to say everyone (though perhaps some) would mean an actual horse,
but that they can't begin to describe something they are not familiar with
because they are not familiar with it.

Even the ancient philosophers had to use allegories etc to get an idea across.

~~~
jessriedel
That quote can be used without drawing negatives judgements about consumers.
And in any case, there's no evidence that Henry Ford actually said it.
[https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-
fast](https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast)

------
Qcombinator
We draw elephants with trunks like trumpets (
[https://media.giphy.com/media/Qms9I3pAiN2la/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/Qms9I3pAiN2la/giphy.gif)
)… why shouldn't they?

------
chc
This sounds pretty similar to how we deal with dinosaurs today. We know that
they had feathers, but most people just don't want to stray that far from the
image they grew up with. Maybe to these people, elephants with snake-like
trunks seemed as silly and unappealing as a T. Rex covered in colorful
feathers.

------
anigbrowl
Umberto eco's _The Name of the Rose_ has numerous ruminations from different
perspectives on the symbolism and semantic objectives of medieval illustration
- or as it's more properly called, _illumination._

------
slg
You might say the images were meant to be taken seriously but not literally.

------
dredmorbius
Think of how you know things, and what images you have come up with of places,
creatures, people, processes, or other entities, which you didn't have direct
knowledge of, though you'd heard reports from others. Possibly even seeing
them on television, video, cinema, or photographs.

If you work in technology, think of the types of reports you receive from
users on problems or software or systems when they're having difficulties.
Terminology, descriptions, and behaviour are all over the map.

If you'd like more recent examples of imagined images, look at how atoms and
molecules were popularly visualised in the 1930s - 1960s, or how remote
landscapes of the Moon, or Mars, or Venus, were imagined.

Often people will fill in extensive detail rather than simply present a set of
successively less-blurred images -- the somewhat-less-than-a-century history
of images of Pluto present, or even the succession of images from the New
Horizons spacecraft, illustrates that. But that interpolated high-resolution
detail is often false.

[https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/new-
horizons....](https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/new-horizons.gif)

It's useful to remember that we're all inhabitants of our various Plato's
caves. But we _don 't_ all see the same sets of images. Instead we're trying
to communicate _our_ set of shadows to others, some of which do or don't match
up.

Ideas are interfaces. They give us the general bounds, outputs, and inputs of
a system. And the corrospondence of those interfaces (as well as the mutation
in the retelling) has a great deal to do with what information can or cannot
be effectively communicated.

------
ascotan
I thought that this was interesting.

Apparently the term 'barritus' used to refer to the sound an elephant makes
with it's trunk (trumpeting). It was a term that was also used during Roman
times to describe the Roman war-cry which they had adopted from Germanic
soldiers. [http://worldofdictionary.com/dict/latin-
english/meaning/barr...](http://worldofdictionary.com/dict/latin-
english/meaning/barritus)

It's possible that this association may have colored educated naturalists to
paint an elephant with a 'war-trumpet' on it's trunk. It's also possible that
the author was getting the viewer to visualize the sound that the animal makes
via visual imagery.

------
clickbait
The same reason they painted knights fighting giant snails. Medieval artists
were an odd bunch.

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-were-
medieval-k...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-were-medieval-
knights-always-fighting-snails-1728888/)

------
bryanrasmussen
Why do cartoons make elephants trunks look like trumpets when they trumpet?

------
dogma1138
a better question is why do they look like sad boars?

------
JustSomeNobody
Those are elephants? Look like boars.

"F"

------
coliveira
Because in the middle ages hardly anyone ever saw an elephant.

~~~
dsp1234
The subtitle of article is, "Maybe not just because they didn't know what
elephants looked like."

------
Spooky23
I'd be more interested to see medieval depictions of elephants from the South
of France, Spain or Italy to compare against.

Stuff from England or Northern France is going to be driven by descriptions
given by priests and monks. So not only do you have secondhand accounts or
reproductions of other pictures, but you're filtering it through a religious
filter. Trumpets and ivory have religious significance, and depicting them
incorrectly may have some significance.

Also, didn't mammoth tusks curve upward? There may have been some symbolic
legacy taking place there as well.

~~~
chc
The article notes that some scholars would ascribe religiously inspired
characteristics to real animals, but it also says that readers were generally
canny enough to realize this was going on and points out that there were well-
known works that didn't do this.

