Created by the man's insatiable curiosity feeling fascination, respect or fear for all the creatures that, next to him, they populated the Earth. The scientists and naturalistic, the browsers and adventurous of the time, they took note of their discoveries conforming a work, forbidden half and worshipped half that alone it was consulted by the sages that tried to discover the new monsters that still inhabited the world.

Antecedents

Coming from the Greco-Roman, Byzantine and Persian world, Popularized in the medieval (XII century) time; the magic, fantastic or mythological bestiarios, as well as they were known, they were a collection of relating fables to animals and real or chimerical monsters with descriptions, and images that were generated by combination of parts of different animals, creating prints, in occasions, atrocious... speaking and classifying the beasts of the most diverse sort, taking possession quickly not of the world Christian romantic without resistances and critical for thinkers of the time.

This pagan hairdresser converting the animals - so much real as imaginary - in payees of virtues or perversions, for that that their appearance in capitals, canecillos, metopas, eardrums, etc., it is reinvented and used with teaching sense and warning.

For that that, these animals could be represented alone or in fight to each other or with defenseless men, with the objective of to move and to motivate the believer in their effort to avoid the temptations and to renounce of the sin.

Although any symbol has duality of meanings, even totally opposed, the románico used certain animals with predilection to manifest the well and others as forms of the wrong and of the devil.

This way we meet with Dragons, basilisks, fauna escatológica, demoníaca, outlandish, hallucinating, grotesque and amusing...

This reflected the belief that the own world was literally the Word of God, and that, therefore, all alive being made a special sense. For example, the pelican, of which was believed that the chest opened up to light its breedings with its own blood, era Jesus Christ alive representation. This symbolism was very well-known in that time: the animals drawn in the religious squares were not only animal, but rather they symbolized something in the square. The animals of the bestiarios are also in the sculptures of the churches, where the family images reminded the observer the history and the allegorical meaning.

The bestiarios enjoyed special popularity in England and France during the XII century, and they were mainly compilations of previous texts, especially Physiologus and Etymologiae of Isidoro of Seville.

An important part of most of the bestiarios is the illustrations, since they added a lot to the descriptions, and they served like an educational tool for the illiterates.

Inside the bestiarios we find real bestiarios of positive sign, as the birds (doves, storks, eagles) and lions, bestiarios of negative sign as snakes, monkeys, hares, pigs, goats, etc and fantastic bestiarios as: faucets, dragons, harpies, mermaids, basilisks, centaurs, etc.