French religious art, as part of the general evolution of Christian art, had adopted pagan motives from both Rome and Byzantium, adapting and developing them in accordance with its own spirit. It is especially through the animal imagery, both symbolic and grotesque, which was the outcome of this process, that we must seek to understand the religious as well as the social and satirical spirit of the age, and how closely these elements were interwoven. At no time, and in no country, perhaps, did symbolic animals play a more important part, both in literature and in art, than they did in the Middle Ages in France. The beast confronts us everywhere, greeting us at the church portal, on cornice and capital, in painted window and illuminated manuscript, in sermon and song, in fable and romance, and in its own special province, the Bestiary, or Book of Beasts, aptly called 'the Christian symbolic menagerie ofthe Middle Ages.' In many of these instances the beast was chosen to represent virtue as well as vice. It was not till the later Middle Ages that the beast-carving in the sanctuary, like the beast-fable in literature, was made use of as a form of satire, behind which the exponent of social wrong, whether artist or minstrel, could, so to speak, hide himeelf, and give unbridled expression to the growing want of respect for those in high places. - [Kemp-Welch]

Language: English