Medieval Sculptors Who Never Saw a Lion

The weather's been heating up, so we've temporarily abandoned the British Museum for the Victoria & Albert, which has a lovely wading pool in the middle to cool your feet in. There's a Grace Kelly exhibition on right now, which seems to have attracted an alarming number of perfectly groomed women in designer clothes, but we didn't let that stop us. They rarely paddle in the pool.

While the British Museum maintains a dignified pretense of Documenting Highah Culchah, the V&A makes no bones about what its collection really is: loot. Pages cut out of sacred books, ornamental corners knocked off palace staircases, tomb memorials packed up and shipped oceans away from the bones they were meant to honour – it's the accumulated booty of a global empire.

The beauty of getting all this stuff in one place, however, is that one has the opportunity to make quick comparisons. My eighteenth-century predecessors had to make the Grand Tour to get a look at Western medieval church sculpture. I polished it off in a forty-minute stroll.

I was interested to note that one can pretty well mark the date that European sculptors first got a real lion to look at. Prior to about 1500, anything with four legs and a beard is probably a lion, no matter what it actually resembles. I collected a good many photos of this menagerie, but I wasn't quite sure what to do with all of them when I got home. So I downloaded them to my favorite lol-cat site (icanhascheezburger.com) and made them all into lol-lions. Here they are.









As Mike points out, I'm always at least two years behind the latest meme. Luckily, he seems to find that charming.