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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

> A second-century Roman mosaic of a war elephant in Tunisia

It is quite interesting to see that the depicted elephant has wrong proportions. This makes one wonder whether the artist who created that mosaic, ever saw an elephant himself.

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Pure speculation, of course, but I would say so. The hump in the back; the small, high, tail; dominant forehead — those are all things missed by people who mis-draw elephants. I think this artist got them right, which is hard to do from description alone.

I’m very tempted to agree with you: people who draw from description draw unicorns after being told about rhinoceroses. We have a lot of medieval monks’ drawings of elephants by description and theirs look like tapir with a trumpet stuck in their nose. This is not a photo, of course but it mainly highlights the head, like any one would if they didn’t measured proportions carefully.

> tapir with a trumpet stuck in their nose

Oh, that’s hysterical. I’ve seen drawings exactly like that, in illuminated manuscripts, and your description is perfect :D

There has also been debate about which species of elephant Hannibal's forces used. Elsewhere, Hellenistic Greek forces used Asian elephants, but many believe Hannibal used North African elephants, a sub-species that was extirpated by the Romans. Their proportions might have been a little different than living elephants. It will be interesting to see if the bone can help settle this debate.

This page showed up on HN years ago, someone gathered a bunch of art depicting elephants over time: https://uliwestphal.de/elephas-anthropogenus/

It's interesting because they don't monotonically get better over time. Some of the oldest depictions are pretty good, and there's some zaniness in the middle of the timeline

Might be a limitation of the medium. Mosaics are complicated.

This famous "skeleton" mosaic has the proportions wrong as well, even though the artist almost certainly saw some actual human skeletons, and definitely some living humans with their longer arms and smaller heads than depicted :)

https://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ha...

The main thing I see wrong is that the back legs bend the wrong way. But I only know that because of the trivia question, "what is the only animal with four knees?"

Those elephants are supposedly "Loxodonta africana pharaohensis", an exinct and not yet verified subspecies of the African bush elephant which is smaller than the savanna types. The pharaohensis was supposedly even smaller, and smaller than an Indian elephant, but with ears like an African elephant.

Even experienced artists look at reference. Unless they had an elephant or sketch of one right in front of them, minor issues are understandable.

Even then we're assuming it's not stylized. They clearly wanted a nice tile pattern, and might have made deliberate tweaks to get that.

Wrong to elephants today

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