Qasr mosaic leopard and VMS Leo/August image
Koen,

JKP is correct in thinking that the subject is Herakles.

Since depictions of Herakles with his skin go back to well before the Christian era, then if you aim is just 'name the subject' - there you are, its Herakles (Hercules in the Latin).

However, the specifics of that image which you've shown tell us that it belongs to a rather horrid period in European history, and I very much doubt that you will find another such image outside the environment in which that particular manuscript was made.

I suppose for the sake of scholarship I should explain, with apologies to any whose feelings may be affected.

There is a three-way reference in that image: one being to Herakles and his lion skin; a second to the associations made between Jews and the 'lion of Judah'; and a third which represented murder of the Jews in Europe by a bizarre fantasy that it was done in retaliation - this last notion referenced by the Isaac story.  I have difficulty speaking of this sort of thing; enough to say that there's a vast body of documentary evidence about such a patterns of thought at the time, and also a great deal of comparable imagery - from certain regions, and less often in manuscripts than in other media.

For any well acquainted with medieval imagery (not just that in formally produced manuscripts) your image is a distressing one.
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Messages In This Thread
this is not a tail - by MarcoP - 19-08-2016, 08:16 AM
RE: Qasr mosaic leopard and VMS Leo/August image - by Diane - 13-09-2016, 02:41 AM

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