It is often assumed that the art that best communicates the spirit of its era is also the art that transcends it. We value the virtuosic, the original and the profound. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes, the art that actually reveals the most about an era is precisely the opposite: the clumsy, the transient, the profane and the plain baffling.
By matching funny, irreverent captions with painstakingly sourced details from medieval manuscripts, the X (formerly Twitter) account Weird Medieval Guys has amassed more than half a million followers since mid-2019. The woman behind this carefully curated assortment of cute bats, armless frogs, musical skeletons, queens enjoying intimacy with dragons and amusingly dispassionate scenes of brutal violence is Olivia M Swarthout, an American data scientist in London whose interest in art history has turned this online labour of love into a book of the same name. What started life as a series of witty recontextualisations of illustrations by anonymous artists has become a gently fascinating insight into the marginalia of a lost era.
