Taxidermy by its nature will always be creepy. But at least in the past, before all this Etsy bullshit happened, it was somewhat dignified, right?

The Historical Awfulness

Nope. The glorious past presents us with this 18th-century taxidermy of a lion, now on display at Mariefred in Sweden:

Via The Mary Sue

King Frederick I of Sweden had been given the lion as a gift some time around 1731. He loved it so much, he wanted to stuffed after it died, so he hired a taxidermist, who had only the creature's pelt and bones to work with. People have tried to excuse the guy's leonine failure by pointing out that back then you couldn't just drive to a zoo to check what a living lion looks like. But come on -- lions have been appearing on flags and coats of arms since long before the 18th century: just try to imitate one of those, dude. Hell, he could have just found himself a nice fluffy cat and scaled up. Either would have produced something better than a stoned pedophile dog.

And the anonymous, lion-ruining taxidermist wasn't the only awful animal-stuffer in history. The 19th century had Walter Potter, who created weird tableaus of dead animals reenacting human scenes. Potter wasn't any good at stuff like "realism" or "getting the size of the animal right before trying to put a skin over it," but he sure could create creepy scenes of dead kittens getting married, and this made him so popular with Victorians that he was able to open his own museum.

Via The Telegraph
And you thought the LOLCats thing was bad.

It wasn't like this back in the day. After all, in Europe and elsewhere you can find buildings still standing after hundreds or thousands of years. In the past, people built shit that lasted. I'm trademarking that last sentence to use in an ad campaign for my nostalgic country-diner chain, so please don't steal it.

The Historical Awfulness

Except there was that one guy back in the 1st century who constructed an amphitheater so bad it makes those crumbling, weed-strewn McMansion tracts look like the Taj Mahal.

In the year 27, a guy named Atilius decided to construct a large amphitheater in the town of Fidenae, not far from Rome, in order to exhibit some good old-fashioned gladiatoring. Access to gladiator shows had been restricted during a recent emperor's reign, so locals flocked to the amphitheater like teenage girls to an all-nude One Direction concert. Which was unfortunate, because the amphitheater then collapsed, killing up to 20,000 people.

grafalex/iStock/Getty Images
"I ALMOST SAW HIS PENIIIISSS!"

The disaster wasn't just bad luck: according to the historian Tacitus, the structure collapsed because Atilius failed to "lay a solid foundation and to frame the wooden superstructure with beams of sufficient strength." He'd deliberately rushed the amphitheater-construction job and built it dangerously big so he could make more money on entrance fees, and possibly so he could point suggestively to the building and drop hints about his crotch size. Atilius ended up banished, which doesn't really seem like that much of a punishment, because living in that town and having to avoid eye contact with all those piles of rotting corpses would be pretty awkward anyway.

OK, but you'd expect gladiator-related stuff to be pretty sketchy already, what with all the killing of innocents and weird Australian accents and such. What about the stuff that was taken really seriously, like religious buildings? Well, about that ...

The Historical Awfulness

Well, sometimes. Other times that deep devotion and skill looked more like this:

Via Stained Glass Attitudes
Via Stained Glass Attitudes

If these guys got their church-measurements wrong and couldn't fit in an arch where they thought they could, they just awkwardly squished it in there anyway and hoped no one noticed. See, the people designing these churches usually didn't work off scales or drawings, like the heathen architects of today: they mostly just dove in and built, and if that meant that an arch ended up looking like it had melted and fallen over, well, just be happy you're not in a Roman amphitheater.

The Historical Awfulness

The margins of medieval manuscripts are scrawled with notes that anonymous scribes have left us, and these notes tell us that young people have stayed the same throughout history. In the notes, scribes complain about bad ink and poor tools, whine that "writing is excessive drudgery," and write about how much they wished they were drinking instead. At least young people today usually keep their complaints about college work to anonymous Tumblrs or whatever; these guys didn't even care that all of history would be able to see it.

Photos.com/Photos.com/Getty Images
I hope they at least checked the parchment's privacy settings.

Bitching about their companions was also big. One monk left us with an angry message about a shitty Bible translation he had to copy, while another scribe's writing starts with the words: "Cithruadh Magfindgaill wrote the above without chalk, without pumice, and with bad implements." Fucking Cithruadh, man, always messing shit up. I mean, have you ever met a nice person called Cithruadh? Me neither.

And speaking of religious vigor ...

The same story is often repeated about all kinds of Islamic artwork, as well as about traditional Amish art: artists were said to leave "humility squares," or deliberately mismatched patches on their quilts, to remind themselves that perfection belongs only to the divine. Presumably the only perfect quilt was the quilt Adam had on his bed in the Garden of Eden, and it would just be wrong to try to imitate that quilt. That quilt was probably sewed with unicorn hair and it turned you invisible when you wanted it to.

The Historical Awfulness

Deliberate imperfections are a charming story, but those mistakes you see on Persian rugs and old quilts? They're probably just mistakes. One woman who actually researched the story about Amish humility squares found that Amish people reacted in horror when she brought it up: to them, adding deliberate mistakes seemed like an act of extreme egotism, implying that the only reason you weren't like God was because you chose not to be. The idea of deliberate imperfections in Islamic art is disputed as well, especially since it's easy to find oodles of Islamic art without any evidence of deliberate imperfections at all.

sparkplugpictures/iStock/Getty Images
"It looks nice and all, but have you considered getting a cat to throw up on it?"

Nope, a far more likely explanation is that the artists who made these quilts and rugs and tiles were like us: they made mistakes, not because they were feeling super religious but because they were tired or distracted by a squirrel or just really sick of making quilts that day.

So why did these rumors about folk-art mistakes start? Think about it: you're a craftsman showing off his tile work to the rich guy who commissioned it, and he points out that you put in a tile upside down in one spot, and the gorgeous calligraphy near the ceiling now reads GROD IS GREAT. What better way to deal with it than to insist that you were just being really, really pious? The rich guy doesn't want to seem like he's out of touch with your down-to-Earth spirituality, so he accepts that explanation. Soon, he's boasting to his friends that the mistake on that wall is all due to one man's mighty devotion to Grod.

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For more from C. Coville, check out 4 Ways to Spot an Internet Bullshit Artist. And then check out Recruitment Posters for the Worst Jobs Ever.

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