This week’s marginal curiosity comes to us courtesy of Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century Benedictine monk, historian, and illuminator of no small talent. The following is from the Chronica Majora:
It depicts an elephant owned by Emperor Frederick II, a gift of the Sultan of Egypt, Al-Kamil, in 1229. Emperor Fred used the fearsome beastie as a show piece during parades, and it is often called “the Cremona elephant” because its existence is attested both in Paris’s account of the visit of Fred’s brother-in-law Richard of Cornwall to Cremona and in Cremona’s local city annals. It’s unlikely that Fred’s elephant could seat thirteen, as he’s depicted here, however. Imagine how much you could save on gas if twelve of your coworkers made your daily commute atop this sturdy mount.
Aside from its remarkable fuel efficiency, the most interesting thing for me about Matthew Paris’s Cremona elephant is that Paris knew full well that this was not what elephants looked like and chose to draw it that way anyway. Paris had earlier in his life been afforded the rare opportunity (for an artist in medieval England, anyway) of drawing an elephant from life at the court of Henry III of England, when the latter received the elephant as a gift from Loius IX of France.* Henry’s elephant, poor thing, survived four years of drafty accomodations at the Tower of London, reportedly fed a diet of red meat and red wine.
Paris’s sketch of the actual elephant looks like this:
Note the distinct lack of thirteen guys riding its back, and the realistic shape of its ears and trunk. So, why did Paris, when sketching Frederick’s elephant, depict it so apart from reality? The answer, I think, is the one-two punch of representational tradition and audience expectation. In the margins of the Chronica Majora, the elephant’s job is, as it was in Frederick’s parades, to demonstrate the majesty and grandeur of the monarch able to command such a behemoth. If there was one thing that medieval men and women who had never actually seen an elephant knew about elephants, it was that they were big enough to fit a castle on their backs, like so:
A realistic elephant, one that defied the established visual vocabulary, would hardly demonstrate Emperor Frederick’s imperial might for the readers of the Chronica Majora as well as an exotic, mobile battle fortress, so the castle elephant is the one that makes the cut for the margins.
BONUS: Because it wouldn’t be properly medieval if I didn’t mention signification, let me add that according to medieval bestiaries, elephants represent Adam and Eve, for just like Adam and Eve before the fall, they feel no sexual desire. When elephants want to mate, they go to the east, near Eden, and eat the mandrake plant in order to inspire lust, just as Adam and Eve were inspired to hanky and panky by the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle (against Satan for your immortal soul)!
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*What do you get the king who has everything? Nothing. But if you know a king who has everything but an elephant…