Ever tried to paint a cat? It turns out that it’s not as easy as you might expect. It indeed wasn’t for these Medieval artists anyway! While they excelled at painting religious scenes, portraits of Royalty, and naked ladies, this particular type of pussy offered an altogether different challenge.

There are a couple of reasons why these funny cats look as they do in the Medieval art depictions. One of them is that the primary purpose of these paintings was to translate the religious scripts to the illiterate (bear in mind that there were relatively few people who could read - monks, priests, and the nobility), and the other, unnecessary details weren't so scrupulously painted.

On the other hand, linear perspective, giving a painting depth, was not systemized until the Italian Renaissance. That's why the given ugly cats look so flat and slightly misshapen.

While most of them have got the basic shape of a feline down to a reasonable tee in these cat illustrations, it is the face that seems to provide the biggest problem. Instead of the cute kitten features we all know and love, the artists instead appear to favor a grim, almost human-like look that makes these cat paintings look a bit, well, scary. I guess the drawings do prove, though, that we have been obsessed with sharing cat memes since way before the internet!

Scroll down to check out the list of Medieval funny cat memes compiled by Bored Panda below, and don’t forget to vote for your favorites!