Cats in Medieval Manuscripts: Prancing, Prowling, and Pounding the Ivories

In an enchanting new show, Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum looks at cat capers, from comforting the Baby Jesus to routing rats.

I was in Baltimore recently for the second of two memorial services for my dear old friend Julia Alexander, the longtime director of the Walters Art Museum, who died suddenly and shockingly on May 4. Today, cats are on the agenda, in part because Julia loved hers as much as I love mine.

From Baltimore I went to Washington for a swing through four Smithsonian museums and a tour of the White House’s ceremonial rooms. For my Labor Day pleasure, I’m reading a catalogue of the White House’s historic furniture and watching Mrs. Kennedy’s 1962 televised tour and Harry Truman’s TV tour from 1952. Better these than reflect on my slog through the Smithsonian, with so much great art but a curatorial vision that, more often than not, is arid, exhausting, and heavy on doom and gloom.

Julia’s first memorial service, in late May, was for family and close friends. The second was for her museum colleagues nationwide and her Baltimore Museum friends. Sitting at service, and looking at the crowd, I realized I’d insulted half the people there over the past eight years of writing for NR. No matter. We were there for Julia, her family, and especially for her twins, my godchildren. “You can’t please all of the people all of the time,” I thought, adding, “maybe they should do better shows.”

After the service and reception, I walked through the very nice Walters. It’s a miniature version of the Met with great strengths from antiquity — the 3,000-pound sculptures of the Egyptian lion-headed, fire-breathing goddess Sekhmet are, unlike a mere art critic, truly take-no-prisoners — and later eras, including Islamic manuscripts and weapons, medieval ivories, Raphael’s spooky Madonna of the Candelabra, and Ingres’s Odalisque with Slave. There’s an odalisque as slinky and sinuous and uninhibited as a cat. Then there’s Paws on Parchment, a new and, like Julia, immensely enjoyable and smart Walters exhibition about images of cats in medieval manuscripts. I’ve always liked Walters shows. They often draw heavily from its deep, rich, idiosyncratic collection. Its brand is the surprise that enlightens. Paws on Parchment will make people smile, even the ones who, God forbid, don’t like cats.

I know there are countless cat memes and cat videos to be relished. They’re internet royalty. Memes and amateur videos, which, broadly thinking, can be art, are one thing. They’re low-end art. A deluxe illuminated manuscript from the late 1400s is something different, especially when it shows Jesus entering Jerusalem, a prelude to the Crucifixion. It’s among the openers in Paws on Parchment. In the margin, the artist depicts a cat playing a portable organ he evidently swiped from an angel illustrated on the previous page. He’s banging away like Jerry Lee Lewis. Nearby, a horn-playing dog makes a duet. Irreverent? Correct. Zany? Check. God’s world makes room for tragedy and comedy, with cats serving far more laughs than tears, unless you’re a rodent.

There’s plenty of reality — cats are night prowlers — merged with humor. La fleur des histoires, or The Flower of History, is a Flemish book from around 1470 by Jean Mansel, working for the rulers of the Duchy of Burgundy, and decorated by the best Bruges illustrators in ink, paint, gold, and the errant paw prints of a cat. The pages were left out for the night so the ink and paint could dry, and a cat, disrespectful of the ducal heights, either strolled across them or scampered after a mouse, rat, vole, spider, or shadow. His tracks, now more than 500 years old, are crisp and clear.

The book is not about flowers. Rather, it’s a history of the world from the Book of Genesis to the reign of France’s King Charles VI. Called Charles the Beloved by some, Charles the Mad by others, he alternated randomly between states of benevolence and lucidity on the one hand and insanity on the other. How feline, though I think there’s method to a cat’s madness. They’re always on the hunt or looking for fun. Charles had bouts of amnesia, sometimes thought he was Saint George, and believed he was made of glass.

And the presence of cat paws on three pages isn’t the reason The Flower of History is at the Walters. Henry Walters, founder of the museum, was a passionate collector and connoisseur of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The Flower of History was, in its day, a well-known, landmark encyclopedia, but only a few copies were so lavishly illustrated. Philip the Good, the duke who commissioned the volume, raised Burgundy to its zenith in political power and in art patronage. Gorgeous book and renowned patron make the Mansel manuscript a gotta-have work of art. The Walters has very good taste.

Cats were, and still are, seriously useful for eliminating rodents. Vermont cats tend to be busy mousers in the winter since critters try to move indoors then and our houses are old and, in odd places, porous. Today, mice are nuisances. In ye olden days, cats played a part in a life-or-death struggle. Rodents ate or contaminated stored food. They gnawed on furniture, textiles, and parchment. They carried deadly diseases. Cats were key solutions — stealthy, insatiable killers and on the clock at night when rodents went rogue. Purr as much as they do, cats have their Freddy Kruger side.

Scenes of cats pouncing on a varmint appear over and over. A Ghent Book of Hours from around 1300 shows a cat catching a rat, awkwardly but proudly. It’s safe to ask a timeless question when paging through a French missal from around 1350. “Is it a bird, is it a plane, etc.” But it’s Super Kitty, as we see a cat, evidently wearing a cape, swooping down on a mouse. A label called “Frenemies” describes an illustrated fable in a Persian book from 1847. A cat trapped in a net enlists a rat to free him by promising to protect the rat from a menacing crow. The adage about “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” goes only so far. Once the cat dispatches the crow, the rat drops him from his dance card.

Seeing Paws on Parchment leads me, circuitously, back to Julia. It’s likely ego on my part as well as my curiosity about voices from the grave. Paws on Parchment did open only two weeks ago. I know, I know, it’s a coincidence. These shows are planned far in advance, but Julia did indeed encourage me to get a cat about 30 years ago, my first pet since childhood. Between relationships, I’d begun to think of myself as a childless spinster cat-man in the making, though not shrill, insistent, political, and psychotic. Baby Girl, an animal-shelter find, then came into my life. I treasured her for 15 years until she went to Heaven. Julia was the ultimate networker, between people and between man and beast.

I’ve written four or five stories over the years about dogs in art and one profile of the Museum of the Dog on Park Avenue. Our two cats, Precious and Sweetheart, look at me beseechingly as if to ask “Quando, quando, quando,” wondering when I’ll write something about that most superior of species — theirs. Every cat knows he or she is perfect. Cats were, after all, once worshipped as gods. That they are no longer is, to them, an injustice for the ages, ranking with having to live with our dog, who comes and goes and, they’re convinced, must be a spy. I’m glad to join the Walters in giving the art of cats its place in the sun, and cats do love a place in the sun.

In case there’s a question, I’m not a cat person. I love our dog and our cats, in part, for their different qualities, but all equally.

Paws on Parchment is a medieval-art exhibition in the Walters’s medieval galleries. It’s about 20 objects in a handsome gallery of cases designed for close looking. It’s an intimate space made more so by dim lights since most of the works are manuscripts. Was a bigger show possible? Of course! The ancient Egyptians worshipped cat gods and goddesses, appreciating their powers to combat rodents and snakes. The Walters has some ancient Egyptian cat sculptures.

Barocci, Rembrandt, and Greuze are among the Old Masters who did cats. So did Hieronymus Bosch, who painted nearly everything weird and wonderful. Leonardo da Vinci planned a painting based on the legend of the Virgin and the Cat in which a tabby cat warmed the newborn Jesus in the manger and soothed the baby with his purring. Mary rubbed the letter “M” on the cat’s forehead. So tabbies are marked to this day. Leonardo did half a dozen preparatory drawings but ditched the project, probably because he knew he couldn’t get a cat to pose long enough for a painting.

Paws on Parchment does indeed leave the realm of manuscripts for other media and to cavort among divinities. Madonna and Child with a Cat, from around 1490 and by Milan’s Master of the Pala Sforzesca, a Leonardo contemporary, draws from the old legend. The kitten seems to compare his paw pads with Jesus’s plump toes. Cats could be drawn into the world of vice as well as virtue. A drawing from the late 1490s shows a scene of adultery from Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, a satire of governance, whether of a nation, a business, a church, or a home. A man in a fool’s costume communes with a woman who is not his wife. Under the table at which they sit, a cat chases mice. He’s got one in his mouth. “Cheat, and you’ll be caught” is the takeaway.

From the 1500s on, with the spread of printing presses and image-making, cats appear in art in every era. Cornelis Visscher’s Large Cat, an etching from 1657, is the essential cat in repose, fat and soft, so off-duty that he doesn’t know there’s a mouse, eminently pulverizable, behind him. Rococo cats, usually pampered and cuddled, often pedigreed, suited new bourgeois tastes and a new age of pets for the sake of love, not the business of pest extermination. Renoir and Eakins were among many outré artists starting in the 1870s who used cats as surrogates for a young woman’s private parts. In Manet’s Olympia, a black cat recoils at so brazen a nude subject. “Get a fur coat, girl,” he seems to say between hisses. Closer to our time, Picasso loved his cats, who appear off and on, and then there’s Dr. Seuss, the fantasist who imagined the one cat who’d cheerfully wear a hat.

The Walters went narrow, which is fine. It’s also doing two more exhibitions with animal themes. Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt opens later this month. Millions of mummified animals have been excavated in Egypt. About a hundred — dogs, cats, birds, snakes, and more — will be on view, drawn from the collections at the Walters and the Brooklyn Museum. The Walters, having a superb art-conservation department, will go high-tech in exposing the mummies’ secrets. Then there’s another exhibition, coming in November of 2026, on Walters art made from tortoise shell, kingfisher feathers, rhinoceros horn, and elephant ivory. All are controversial materials that, we have to say, make luxurious, seductive art.

Paws on Parchment’s curator found party cats, cuddle cats, a cat who steals yarn, and, who knew, a cat that doesn’t like to be picked up. The show is too small for elaborated sections, but the labels have titles, most designed for smiles. There’s “CATastrophe” and that refers to the case of the inky paws in The Flower of History. “Super Kitty,” “Whimsical Whiskers,” and “Battle Cat” remind visitors totally in the dark that art historians, at least the good ones, know how to use a light touch.

There’s no mention of cats on Noah’s Ark, but a copper, gilded-wood, and enamel box from Limoges, made in the late 1500s, shows a cat in a Creation scene, at God’s feet, next to the box owner’s coat of arms. And a Book of Hours from around 1460, made in Paris, depicts a cat riding a keg pulled by monkeys, a pinwheel in his paw. The scene is next to a prayer to Saint Germanus reminding us that “he despised earthly things,” which might mean foie gras and Beluga caviar but surely not the pleasure a purring cat gives to the soul.

On Saturday I’ll write about someone who’s not dead and something that’s not medieval. I’ll salute another dear friend, David Lubin, on his retirement as an esteemed art history professor at Wake Forest University. Mostly, I’ll look at his brand of American art history, what American Studies involves, and his scholarship, which goes from Eakins and Sargent to Henry James, the Zapruder film, the visual culture of World War I, and his new book on Sunset Boulevard. David, get ready for your close-up.