(Credits: Far Out / Weird Medieval)
Medieval paintings are often disparaged for their quality, but they’ve served an essential purpose in art history. Their associated works highlight the survival of classical, early Christian art, as well as reflecting changing tastes towards more Western European styles – but they’re incredibly hard to classify accurately. They all have a distinct style, but it’s also the sum of many varied parts – Byzantine art, gothic and pre-Romanesque art all influence the work of the time. But there’s always one thing that seems to single it out a mile off: the ugly cats.
Why exactly medieval painters struggled with cats so much remains largely unknown. It clearly wasn’t a skill issue because, often, these hideous cats were just minor details in otherwise fairly normal paintings. But consistently, and to the point it has become its own meme phenomenon online, the cats were laughably ugly. The artists of the period nail the proportions of the bodies, but when it gets to their heads, things go badly awry.
The anthropomorphising of the cats is either so aggressive they stop resembling animals or so non-committal you end up with a cat right out of the uncanny valley. In many paintings, the cats have shell-shocked eyes and sagging faces of what you’d imagine an aged war veteran would have.
Naturally, this has become a hot-button topic in the art history community. Two schools of thought have emerged, each wheeling out blog posts poking holes in the other’s theory. The cats have caused chaos in several corners of the internet at this point.
The first group’s theory is that medieval cats are painted so badly because people didn’t trust their nature. One very popular story amongst this crowd is about a monk whose manuscript was ruined by a cat after weeks of writing. It is on record that in 1420, a monk had done some very bad PR for cats, warning the public: “Beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night.”
It’s a plausible theory, and when you consider the odds have always been against cats because they’re often deemed as unlucky, it goes some way to explain their weird depictions. However, the second group insists cats were actually well-loved, and once again, manuscripts crop up as evidence.
Some serving texts from the medieval period are littered with small paw prints, so logically, cats can’t have been that disliked. As for their forlorn faces, some believe this was the artists of the time showing how domesticated cats were in that they looked something close to human. Whatever the reason was, cats had a very unflattering time of it in medieval artwork.
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