A person who compiles, writes, or illustrates a bestiary; an author or artist of animals with symbolic or moral meanings.
From bestiary + -ist (suffix indicating a person who practices or specializes in something). A variant of bestiarian, used interchangeably in scholarly contexts.
A bestiarist was part scholar, part artist, part theologian—they had to research animals (or invent them), draw them beautifully, and then explain what they meant spiritually, making them Renaissance men (or women, though fewer are recorded) centuries before that term existed!
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