Artist Uli Westphal observes "how humans perceive, depict and transform the natural world. I am especially interested in how misconceptions and ideologies shape our view of nature." He created this amazing poster showing the many ways illustrators depicted elephants during the Middle Ages.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, elephants virtually disappeared from Western Europe.
Since there was no real knowledge of how this animal actually looked, illustrators had to rely on oral and written transmissions to morphologically reconstruct the elephant, thus reinventing an actual existing creature. This tree diagram traces the evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages up to the age of enlightenment.
