Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Lions (and a Pterodactylus) in the temple

This image was briefly shown in a Michelle Stone podcast, in a context that made it clear it was the interior of a Mormon temple:


Since I had just posted on two lions in a library, and Leo had followed up with a post of his own on the same topic, this got my attention.

What temple is that, though? I figured it would have to be one of the older Utah temples, since it appears to be a Creation Room. I served my mission in Utah and have been to several of those temples, but I didn't recognize the lion mural, and no amount of Googling Mormon temple murals enabled me to track it down.

I did find a couple of interesting things in the course of my searching, though. One was this picture of St. Jerome with his lion, reading a big red Bible, by Scott Gustafson:


I had mentioned Dürer's picture of Jerome and his lion in my last post, and Leo's post on lions in a library had mentioned the Red Book. I found the picture by searching for lds temple lions, so a picture of Jerome -- not recognized as a saint by Mormons, who consider the Church to have been in apostasy in his day -- was a pretty unlikely result.

The other interesting thing I found was an article called "The Surprising True Story Behind the Dinosaur Mural in the Manti Utah Temple." It shows this picture from that temple:


It said the picture was directly influenced by this illustration by Édouard Riou:


If that looks familiar, it may be because you've seen essentially the same picture before, in "A Pterodactylus and a globe of light," where I had a not-quite-vision of this thing:

No comments:

Lions (and a Pterodactylus) in the temple

This image was briefly shown in a Michelle Stone podcast , in a context that made it clear it was the interior of a Mormon temple: Since I h...