Why Did Medieval Artists Give Elephants Trunks That Look Like Trumpets?

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

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

> 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?

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.

They can look kind of like Trumpets at the tip:

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/1280_640/images/l...

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'.

This is also encoded in some natural languages.

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

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....

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.

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

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/...

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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....

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.

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...

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.

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...

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

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

Those are elephants? Look like boars.

"F"

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

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.