How would you draw an elephant if you’d never seen one?

        For illustrators in medieval Europe, depicting animals like elephants that they’d never set eyes on was a key part of their task to shape the morality of humankind.

        What mattered most was what such creatures represented in Christian spiritual terms—and so a lion might represent the virtues of strength and courage.

        Such depictions appeared alongside biblical stories and in extraordinary illuminated manuscripts—including illustrated bestiaries—created by hand before printing became dominant in the 16th century.

        And among the earliest medieval European representations of fantastic ________ were elephants. Their bond with their solitary children represented devotion, while stories of elephants taking care to be _________ around smaller animals symbolized kindness to others. Elephants were also said to represent the spiritual redemption of Jesus Christ, possibly because they had the strength to easily lift a person out of sin.

        The problem was, however, that few artists in medieval Europe had ever seen a real elephant—instead they created an astonishing variety of fabulous pachyderms that still fascinates today.

        Elephants first appeared in Europe with invading armies as far back as 280 B.C., when the Hellenistic king Pyrrhus __________ 20 along for his failed invasion of Italy.

(Source: National Geographic — adaptation.)