File talk:Marco Polo sheep manuscript.jpg

Identification

Puzzled by this picture:

• These are not sheep! They have upturned horns (not spiral ones), their tails have tassles, and they are much bigger than the "shepherds". These are all characteristics of cattle, not sheep. In the context of a castle, they might possibly be intended to be White Park cattle, whose black ears are often forgotten by artists, and which are believed to have been kept in parks in Britain and Ireland at this time.
• Marco Polo sheep are not domesticated, so are not shepherded.
• Marco Polo sheep have very short tails, unlike most domestic sheep, and unlike these animals.
• The animals do have rather small heads and upright necks for cattle, but this would not be surprising in a mediaeval painting. Sheep don't have upright necks either...
• The style of the castle in the background looks like Europe, not China. Were there any Marco Polo sheep in captivity, in Europe, at this date?

The source of this picture does say that they are Marco Polo sheep, but gives no explanation of why they think so. Either they are simply mistaken about what the picture was intended to show, or the mediaeval artist was just guessing, and drew something very different from a sheep. Either way the picture is not accurately representative of Marco Polo sheep. Richard New Forest (talk) 09:05, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

No, it certainly isn't representative of them. This would be drawn by someone who had no idea what Marco Polo sheep looked like, and would almost certainly be based on Marco Polo's own description- he described them as very large (not to mention the fact that perspective was a rather alien concept to medieval painters), and he did describe them as domesticated. I admit they look more like cattle, but we should probably stick with what the source says. J Milburn (talk) 12:47, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree that it's likely that a picture such as this might be drawn entirely from a description, but if so, we've ended up with things that look as like cattle as makes no difference. It doesn't really ring true anyway:

• Surely if he was describing huge sheep they would have drawn huge sheep, not cattle?
• Where are the "60-inch horns" in his description?
• If travellers had to put bells on their animals for protection from the sheep, they don't sound all that domesticated.

In any case is the source really a reliable one? This is a secondary source which gives no details of the primary one, so we know nothing about that all, and cannot check what it actually says. Other illustrations in the source do not inspire confidence: for example, we have a painting (p 64) made 500 years before, of something of doubtful relevance, from a place Marco Polo may have gone to; then we have a painting of what Kublai Khan's palace "may" have looked like (p 67), and on p 62 we have a modern photo of a camel train "in western China" – which shows the wrong kind of camel! This is not a scholarly work, but a popular book with a lot of illustrations thrown it to make it attractive. Though it's an interesting book, I don't think we can rely too much on its statement about what the animals are supposed to be – we need to see the original, or a scholarly assessment of it.

I can't see how this picture is any use at all as an illustration of Marco Polo sheep. It might possibly do as an illustration of how wrong paintings can be when done from verbal descriptions – but only if we could confirm that it was intended to be these sheep. Richard New Forest (talk) 22:54, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Gosh, you make an impressive case. However, I would not that they were domesticated- see the note I added to the article about the use of their horns, under "agriculture". That said, as I think about it now, that doesn't necessarily mean they were domesticated... I have no objection to this image being removed from the article. It may be worth adding a note pointing here to the image description page, too. J Milburn (talk) 23:01, 22 July 2009 (UTC)