Medieval Elephants

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Uli Westphal’s Elephas Anthropogenus project – a collection of images depicting how Europeans imagined elephants from the Fall of Rome to the end of the Rennaissance. to wit:

After the fall of the Roman Empire, elephants virtually disappeared from Western Europe. Since there was no real knowledge of how this animal actually looked, illustrators had to rely on oral and written transmissions to morphologically reconstruct the elephant, thus reinventing an actual existing creature.

MORE: Elephas Anthropogenus

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