The stone bestiary: animals and monsters in the cathedrals
Capitals, portals, mosaics and choir stalls: how the creatures of the bestiaries entered medieval churches, from Otranto to Verona and on to Paris.
Anyone who enters a Romanesque or Gothic church with an attentive eye soon discovers that they are surrounded by animals. Lions support the columns of portals, birds and serpents intertwine on capitals, dragons and sirens peer out from friezes, and under the choir seats curious creatures appear. Many of these figures come straight from the repertory of the bestiaries, others from popular imagination or from purely decorative ornament. Telling one from the other is one of the most fascinating exercises for anyone who studies medieval art.
A famous protest
The multiplication of beasts and monsters in sacred buildings did not please everyone. Around 1125 Bernard of Clairvaux, in the Apologia addressed to Abbot William of Saint-Thierry, sharply criticised the decoration of Cluniac cloisters. He asked what that ‘ridicula monstruositas’, that ridiculous monstrosity, was doing there, made of apes, lions, centaurs and hybrid monsters that distracted the monks from reading and meditation.
Bernard’s criticism is, paradoxically, one of the most precious witnesses to the spread of these images. It tells us that capitals inhabited by animals and fantastic creatures were very common in the twelfth century, and that even then some people wondered what they meant. Cistercian churches, consistently, adopted a more sober style almost free of figures.
The Otranto floor and the portals of the Po valley
One of the most extraordinary examples of a stone bestiary is found in Otranto Cathedral. Its mosaic floor, made between 1163 and 1165 by the priest Pantaleone, unfolds around a great tree of life and shows biblical scenes, the months of the year, the flight of Alexander the Great, King Arthur and a great number of real and fabulous animals, including elephants, griffins, sirens and a unicorn.
In northern Italy Romanesque sculpture filled portals with animals of strong symbolic value. The column-bearing lions of the basilica of San Zeno in Verona and of the cathedrals of Modena and Parma recall the watchful lion of the bestiaries, which sleeps with its eyes open. Griffins, eagles and dragons also appear on portals and capitals, sometimes fighting one another, as images of the battle between good and evil.
Stalls, gargoyles and chimeras
In the Gothic period the creatures of the bestiaries also found room in less visible places. Misericords, the small ledges under the tip-up seats of the choir, are often carved with animals and curious scenes. Exeter Cathedral in England preserves one of the oldest series in the country, which includes an elephant, an animal that few artists had seen in the flesh.
An important distinction must be made, however. The famous chimeras of Notre-Dame in Paris, the brooding monsters that look out from the gallery between the towers, are not medieval: they were made in the nineteenth century during the restoration directed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Medieval gargoyles, by contrast, were above all spouts for draining rainwater, and their symbolic meaning is still debated by scholars.
The stone bestiary reveals how the images of books spread far beyond the cloister. Those who could not read could recognise the lion, the pelican or the siren and understand at least part of their message. Not every carved animal hides a moral lesson, but many of them were words in a shared language, which the cathedrals offered to the eyes of all.