Medieval Artists Clearly Never Met A Cat (And Other Historical Fails)
If you’ve ever tried to draw a horse and accidentally invented a new species, congratulations: you might be a medieval artist. And thanks to that now-viral thread about **medieval painters absolutely butchering animals they’d never seen in real life**, the internet has decided to collectively roast history, one cursed painting at a time.
The actual news bit: people are rediscovering and sharing these glorious disasters—lions that look like overcooked poodles, snails waging holy war, and “dogs” that are 98% human regret. The thread has blown up again across X (Twitter), Reddit, and Instagram, because apparently in 2025 we’ve all decided: yes, we *will* cyberbully a 14th-century monk for drawing a dolphin with knees.
Let’s dive into the chaotic zoo.
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1. The “Lion” That Looks Like Your Mom’s Poodle After Grooming Day
Somewhere in Europe, around the 13th century, a monk was told: “Paint a lion. It is the king of beasts. Very scary. Giant teeth. Big claws.” Problem: this man had never seen anything more exotic than a cow.
So we get lions that look like:
- A golden retriever that just came back from the groomer with a blowout
- A poodle mid-identity crisis
- A shag rug with anxiety
They’ve got human eyes, shampoo-commercial manes, and the facial expression of someone who just realized they hit “reply all” to the entire monastery. Modern Twitter/X users keep quote-tweeting these with captions like “when you tell the barber ‘just a little off the top’” and “ye olde Disney filter.”
And honestly, if these lions had roamed actual medieval forests, humanity wouldn’t have invented armor. We’d have invented brushes.
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2. That Time A Snail Kept Beating Knights In Full Armor
If you’ve seen a tiny snail squaring up against a knight in shining armor in some old manuscript and thought “oh, that’s a meme edit,” nope. That’s an actual medieval illustration. Multiple ones. Repeatedly. For centuries. Why? Nobody is sure. The scholars have theories. We have better ones.
Real explanations floated by historians:
- Symbol of humility
- Weird allegory about slow but steady faith
- Inside joke between monks
Internet explanations (which are superior, obviously):
- The snail is the final boss of anxiety
- Knights represent your to-do list; snail is the one email you’ve ignored for 3 weeks
- Medieval people invented “tiny but deadly” memes before chihuahuas existed
These images are going viral again because they’re absurdly relatable. We *are* the knight in expensive armor losing to a tiny, slimy problem we could’ve solved two weeks ago if we’d just opened the spreadsheet.
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3. Horses That Look Like They Were Drawn From Memory… By Someone Who Has Never Seen A Horse
Modern artists:
“Anatomy is hard, but we have reference photos and 3D models!”
Medieval artists:
“Horses are… long dogs? With hooves? And maybe… human abs?”
Some of the most shared images in the current wave are horses with:
- Necks like noodles
- Faces like mildly concerned potatoes
- Bodies shaped like an overstuffed couch cushion
You can practically hear the monk saying, “Nailed it,” as he proudly paints a horse with zero joints and a spine like a breadstick. TikTok and Instagram reels have started doing side‑by‑side “expectation vs reality” edits: majestic real horses next to what looks like a carnival balloon animal made by someone who only half listened during horse description day.
If your day is going badly, remember: someone got paid—in actual medieval money—to paint a horse that looks like a microwaved dachshund, and it ended up in a fancy book.
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4. The Nightmare Dogs That Prove Nobody Had Ever Seen A Beagle
The medieval “dog” is not bound by anatomy, biology, or basic logic. It is chaos with ears.
Some common dog themes currently being roasted online:
- Dog heads with human eyebrows (absolutely cursed)
- Bodies that are 70% neck
- Limbs with no clear joints, just fleshy noodles with paws on the end
- Expressions like they just read your browser history
Art history nerds will say, “They were symbolic, not realistic.” The internet says, “Okay, but why does this ‘dog’ have the body of a ferret, the paws of a bear, and the emotional energy of a tax audit?”
People are now using these paintings as reaction images:
- “When you open your front camera by accident” = cross‑eyed dog
- “Me pretending to understand crypto” = dog staring into the void
- “First pancake of the batch” = literally any medieval greyhound
If you’ve ever done a bad doodle and thought, “I suck at drawing,” print one of these and tape it above your desk. Congratulations, you’re a Renaissance master now.
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5. Biblical Creatures, Or: “We Heard Of Elephants Once And That Was Enough”
Medieval bestiaries (fancy animal encyclopedias with pictures) are trending again because they contain **elite nonsense**. If someone vaguely described an animal from 4,000 km away, the artist just… guessed.
Popular offenders flying around social feeds right now:
- **Elephants** that look like gray pigs inflated with a bicycle pump
- **Whales** that are basically big fish with human teeth and the vibe of a used car salesman
- **Camels** who appear to be melting from the shoulders down
- **Leopards** that are clearly just cats someone enlarged in MS Paint
There’s a trending challenge where people ask AI to “redraw this medieval animal realistically” and the AI is just like: “I’m sorry, what am I looking at?” Even Midjourney seems to take one look at the source and say “best I can do is demon.”
The best part? These books were considered **educational**. Imagine learning about the world from a book that insists rhinoceroses are just angry cows in armor and thinking, “Yeah, sounds legit.”
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Conclusion
Medieval animal art is blowing up again in 2025 because it scratches a very specific itch: the joy of watching competent adults fail *spectacularly* at something extremely basic… and getting canonized for it.
It’s comforting. These monks were trying their best with:
- Zero Google Images
- Zero National Geographic
- One very tired guy who swore he saw a lion once
So the next time you mess up a drawing, a project, or literally anything, remember: some guy in 1350 drew a lion that looked like a depressed spaniel, and 700 years later, the entire internet is obsessed with it.
Honestly? Iconic.
Now go share this with a friend who:
- Can’t draw to save their life
- Loves cursed memes
- Or just needs to know elephants once looked like fat horses with sinus problems
History isn’t just written by the winners. Sometimes, it’s drawn by people who had absolutely no idea what a cat looked like. And we’re so, so lucky they tried anyway.