In the Middle Ages, the lens of Christianity permeated the world view to a degree unimaginable today. We can see this with the descriptions and illustrations of animals like the lion, whom many authors considered king of the beasts. And, since they thought that God/Christ ruled over the universe, lions were compared symbolically to the Christian deity.
One quaint expression of this can be seen in this painting, which is an image from a Medieval Bestiary, a genre that discussed beliefs about different animals, often including moralistic stories. You can see a lion licking its cubs — it was thought that baby lions were not completely formed upon birth, and their mothers had to lick them in order for them to be animated. Writers compared this leonine habit with the Biblical story of Adam and Eve being moulded by God.
Source(s): _The Iris: Behind the Scenes at the Getty_, “The Laudable Lion of the Medieval Mind,” by Sarah El Massry, May 10, 2018. British Library Royal MS 12 C XIX, folio 6r. See bl.uk/manuscripts from the British Library Digitized Manuscripts site.
