King Arthur's prowess: Visualising Arthur's fight with the terrible cat

King Arthur’s reputation as a great warrior is based mainly on his military victories as an army commander on the battlefield, but there are also individual victories where Arthur triumphs in one-on-one combat, either on horseback or on foot, as a heroic fighter for a good cause. In the French romance tradition, the story of King Arthur killing the cat of Lausanne is part of the campaign against Roman Emperor Lucius, who demands that Arthur pay him tribute. As a visual motif in medieval art, Arthur’s fight with the monstrous cat did not enjoy a widespread popularity, which might explain why its visual tradition has not yet been studied in a comprehensive way. However, it is an important motif that visually demonstrates King Arthur’s virtue and power. Apart from text illustration in Arthurian prose romance, the motif functioned – at a higher level – as an example of the fight of good against evil. Rulers identified with Arthur, and the fight with the monstrous cat was used in the context of personal propaganda.

This article studies the visual motif of King Arthur fighting the terrible cat across art forms, regions and centuries. It starts with its well-known but problematic first appearance on a floor mosaic in Southern Italy in the twelfth century, moving towards the West, where it occurs in other art forms and cultural contexts, up to modern comic books. This iconographic study on the motif leads to new interpretations, presents formerly undiscussed and unpublished manuscript illumination, reflects on a lost Romanesque mural painting, dismisses a sculpture from the Arthurian art canon, and suggests a new medieval representation of King Arthur’s heroic fight against the monstrous cat.