Why Is That Rabbit Bigger Than the Man It's Carrying?
Look at the size of that rabbit.
Now look at what it's carrying.
This is from The Romance of Alexander, a lavishly illustrated French-language manuscript now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It was illuminated by Jehan de Grise and his workshop, and completed in 1344, according to its own colophon.
And somewhere in the margins, while the main text is busy telling the story of Alexander the Great, the artist decided to draw this instead.
A rabbit. Armed with a crossbow. Bigger than the man it's hunting.
There's more than one of them.
Further along the same border, another rabbit β also armed, also enormous β is walking off with someone slung over its shoulder. A third rabbit just watches. Nearby, a man has been strung up a tree like laundry.
The humans, meanwhile, are small. Outnumbered. Not doing terribly well for themselves.
So WTF is going on?
Here's what we actually know.
This isn't a one-off doodle. The same manuscript contains several scenes elsewhere in its margins where animals behave like people.
Medieval artists had a long tradition of turning the normal order of things upside down: the hunter becomes the hunted, the servant becomes the master, the small becomes large and the powerful become prey.
Art historians often describe this kind of imagery as βthe world upside downβ β mundus inversus.
But was the artist making a specific joke about someone? Commenting on the main story? Satirising something? Or just enjoying the idea of a rabbit with a crossbow?
We don't actually know.
Nobody wrote down the punchline.
What we do know is that someone, in 1344, sat in a workshop illuminating one of the great romances of the medieval world β and paused to draw a giant rabbit casually making off with a person.
And nearly seven hundred years later, we're still looking at it, still asking the same question.
What the hell is going on?
What do you think?
Sources
The Romance of Alexander, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodl. 264, f.81v. Illuminated by Jehan de Grise and workshop, completed 1344.