You may have already met amazing medieval miniatures depicting killer snails, human-headed hares and other completely amazing and absolutely paradoxical creatures.
But what prompted medieval masters to create such strange images?
It is noteworthy that at present such an unusual work of medieval masters is even singled out as a separate art form called drollerie (humor, joke) and is especially characteristic of the works of the mid-12th - early 15th centuries, although there are also earlier artistic masterpieces.
The most common type of droller imagery is chimera-like creatures: hybrids between different animals, animals and humans, or even between animals, plants and inorganics.
For example, roosters with human heads, dogs with bird heads, archers belching fish from their mouths, and monks - frogs, birds like dragons, elephants with their heads on their backs …
Sometimes they have a thematic connection with the text of the page or are part of a large-scale decoration of the fields, but as a rule they have absolutely nothing to do with the work itself, being nothing more than a very strange initiative of scribes, which may well cause some surprise.
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Before the invention of printing, the creation of one book could take up to several years of painstaking work of a master, as a rule, a more or less educated monk who puts his whole soul into a work.
The reasons why the “X moment” suddenly came, in which he was interrupted from “the work of his whole life” and proceeded to depict killer snails, hares with human heads and other dubious creatures in the fields, remains a mystery.
In a number of cases, such masterpieces can be fully explained by the theme of the works themselves, for example, the legendary "Revelation of John the Theologian" (better known as the Apocalypse), when, after months of working on an apocalyptic work at a God-fearing scribe who was in almost absolute isolation from the outside world, to appear apocalyptic visions not inferior to that seen by John on the island of Patmos.
However, despite the fact that most medieval manuscripts are clearly religious in nature, the amazing miniatures themselves often depict not godly deeds at all, but a parody of religious texts, being frankly blasphemous, ridiculing priests and monks (hybrids of priests and frogs, the struggle of monks with hares and monsters, as well as other much less disagreeable things).
Despite the fact that most of the droller images can only be explained by the insanity of their creators themselves, it remains only to be surprised at the rich imagination of individual masters.
