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I love these "Why yes, I know what [animal] looks like!" paintings ;)

Medieval lions were the best.

I am not going to condemn some guy in mediaeval Flanders for not knowing what a leopard looked like, but the appearance of babies in every painting before about 1800 is unforgivable. There are babies all over the place! Just go and look at one for a bit and sketch it!

It's not even like you are painting Mount Etna or the Piazza San Marco or something where there is a bit of travel involved. There is a baby near you, I guarantee it.

When I was in Italy looking at the paintings in churches, that was what bothered me the most, how old man-ish all the babies looked. They never looked like babies. I also searched for Jesus smiling, there were very few paintings of him smiling, when he was he was surrounded by poorly drawn kids.

Not just the faces - sometimes they'd even give them abs! You know, like babies are famous for having.

I love that, thanks to the Roman Empire, whole swaths of Europe got introduced to exotic animals that were painstakingly described in writing from England to the Balkans, and then produced in art through centuries of the telephone game.

For sure.. that giraffe is definitely "like a goat but with a long neck.."

Someone at a Renn Faire once hypothesized to me that the reason why animals in medieval art look That Way is because enough people were nearsighted that they just assumed everything had a human face because those were the only faces they could see clearly.