“A political imagination that resonates in the present.”

Here, the monk vomits frogs, while warrior rabbits ride snails. There, the fruits of the apple tree are replaced by dozens of human arms, and the beetroot smiles with a toothless smile. Here again the demons stand in a circle to spend a satanic sabbath, and Satan pushes the mouths of hell away with his hairy arms. Here, finally, is a monk who appears to be wearing sunglasses playing dice with a dog.

Scary animals, demonic representations, everyday scenes that oscillate between the familiar and the absurd: representations from ancient paintings or manuscripts from the Middle Ages are flourishing on the Internet. These image fragments have gained amazing popularity thanks to niche accounts such as @weirdmedievalguysor @medievalbestiary or @medieval.psychedelia or @medieval.marginalia or @smilingbeetroot.

When viewed with our modern eyes, these images sometimes seem strange, sometimes ridiculous, and even grotesque. “I adore! I look at them like a Monty Python sketch.” »laughs Othman Talbi, 39 years old, a project manager on immigration issues in Rabat, Morocco. Each of them has tens of thousands of likes on social networks such as Instagram and X. Thibaut Goringer, a 36-year-old Parisian web developer, appreciates that “Diversity in the representation of the monstrous, the grotesque and the surreal: mutilated and demonic animals, raw violence and representations of death intertwined with everyday scenes that seem familiar to us, such as companionship with dogs.”.

“The childhood of our present world”

This window into the distant and familiar past also inspires artists. A tattoo artist born in eastern France and based in Montreal, Bartobello draws on the aesthetics of medieval carvings for the tattoo designs he creates. He notices it “These images are almost childlike, easy to decipher for Europeans who grew up in a cultural environment made up of knights, powerful castles, heraldry and armor, but also demons and dragons. These are the signs of our childhood.”.

Maria Bandiello, Doctor of Art History, specializes in fifteenth-century political propaganda^H Century and curator of the Instagram account visions_of_manuscripts, also uses the analogy of going back to childhood to explain the success of medieval photo manipulation accounts. “The Middle Ages, for us Europeans, are in some ways the childhood of our present world, another distant and familiar world to which we always return to understand ourselves better. It is a bit like psychotherapy.”

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