JohannesUniversityJohnsUniversitychapmanofDelawarecharlesdempseyHopkinsUniversityestellelingoofWashington,Seattleelisabethoy-marraGutenbergUniversitätMainzlorenzopericoloUniversityofWarwickphilipsohmUniversityofTorontokatlijnevanderstighelenKatholiekeUniversiteitLeuvenvictorstoichitaUniversitédeFribourg
harvey miller studies in baroque art Editorial Board giovanni careri École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris perry
sarah r. cohen PICTU RING ANIMALS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE ART AND SOUL
113
Chapter Nine: Animals at Versailles 184
Introduction
Introduction
18
Chapter Five: Exemplary Animal Lives
116
CONTENTS Acknowledgments 6
Chapter Six: The Debate Over Animal Soul 138 Chapter Seven: Life and Death 150 part three The Courtly Animal 168 Introduction
Chapter Ten: Interspecies Transformations of Illustrations
286 Index 291
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204 Conclusion 224 Notes Bibliography228 271 List
Chapter Eight: Animals in the Salon 172
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Chapter Three: Titian’s Characters
Chapter Four: Montaigne and the Earthly Paradise 94 part two Animal Drama in the Netherlands
Chapter One: The Sensitive Soul 22 Chapter Two: Matter into Life 48
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Introduction 8 part one Nature’s Protagonists
1.1 Albrecht Dürer, Hare, watercolor and gouache, 1502, Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina
Art historians have long noted the attention Dürer paid to the landscape and animals in this engraving in constructing a real-life base for the miraculous woodland event. Since the fourteenth century, hunt scenes had inspired artists to develop a realistic approach to representing animal and vegetative life, in northern and central Italy as well as in Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The “Room of the Stag” in the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, for example, still features walls covered with frescoes attributed to Matteo Giovanetti depicting scenes of hunting and fishing.38 Sight hounds and scent hounds, much like the two types of dogs depicted in Dürer’s print, aid their elegant masters in pursuing a variety of wild game the stag prominent among them within teeming landscape environments. The story of Saint Eustace itself had appeared in a 1.3 Hans Hoffmann, Hare Surrounded by Vegetation, watercolor, 1580s, Rome, Palazzo Barberini
chapter26 one quite literally, has its own new life and its own new outlook on the world. In his quest to re-create graphically that which he could perceive in the great “theater” of nature,33 Dürer fashioned a number of other living animals, virtually all of which found later incarnations in the works of subsequent copyists and emulators. Each is individualized as a self-contained protagonist, whether the animal is represented as a sketch made directly from life or as a finished watercolor “portrait” in the manner of the Hare. Dürer tended to emphasize in all of these works the particular attributes of the creature through which it perceived and acted in the world the huge, reflective eyes of a small owl; the fierce forward crawl of a lobster, pincers opening and closing; a recumbent male lion subtly shifting his weight on his mighty legs and paws.34 Important in themselves for an artist voraciously eager to grasp the essence of life, Dürer’s sensitive creaturely portrayals also served a larger purpose when he turned to visual narratives set in the natural realm. His monumental engraving of the Vision of Saint Eustace from about 1501 features five hounds, a horse, and a stag bearing the miraculous Crucifix in his antlers, as well as a 1.4 tiny swarm of birds just visible by the turret that surmounts the background hill at the very top of the image. With the exception of the miraculous stag, the many animals featured in this engraving have been valued since the time of the artist himself as a demonstration of his skill in portraying animal anatomy, and they likely also would have been seen as embodying the miracle of God’s creation in the natural world.35 But Dürer’s subtle treatment of these animals takes us beyond such generalities of artistic and divine mastery, for both the horse and the dogs in fact show us the essence of earthly knowledge in sensory perception. Without their alert eyes, noses, and ears, the inward enlightenment of the saint would lose its quiet force. In scanning this richly inhabited landscape, one at first risks missing altogether the saint himself, for he has dismounted to kneel humbly in the middle ground as he reveres the Crucifix borne by the stag on the hill at right. The story of Saint Eustace was well known in Dürer’s era, for it had long been valued by hunters and had already appeared in medieval manuscript illumination and early Renaissance panel painting. The pagan hunter Placidus, while approaching a stag in the woods one day, was startled to see between the creature’s antlers a Crucifix whose dying Christ called out to him, “I am Jesus Christ. Why do you hunt me?”36 Placidus, who converted to Christianity on the spot, received baptism under the name of Eustace, and after his sainthood gained the stag as his identifying attribute in art. The story of Saint Eustace, as well as a cognate story about another hunter-saint, Hubertus, contributed substantially to the prominence of the stag in European hunt culture, which held this animal to be the most noble of all prey.37
1.6 Agostino Veneziano, Landscape with Animals, engraving, first quarter of the sixteenth century, Vienna SammlungGraphischeAlbertina
29 the sensitive soul and sit a cogent display of man’s intermediary position between the earthly world of animals and the celestial realm of God. Perhaps the swirl of birds in the open sky at the very top of the sheet alludes to this divine spirituality, barely perceivable even by man. A scene in which God Himself appears between the branching antlers of a stag might very well invoke the infinite through the aerial flight of birds. It is Eustace’s attentive horse that in fact occupies the central position in the scene: although unaware of the miraculous vision, the horse echoes in his stance the body of the miraculous stag and gazes at the viewer with a keen eye placed just to the left of center. This eye, which pointedly turns toward us, is moreover aligned almost exactly with the much smaller eye of Eustace, as if the animal is calling us visually to observe the saint in his inward enlightenment. Sixteenth-century viewers, much more familiar with the nuances of equine-human interaction than is the average viewer today, could have readily accepted the ability of this species to respond to our physical presence and send us a signal through eye contact sensitive soul to sensitive soul.46The whole composition is anchored by the dogs, whose casual, prosaic attitudes show that they know nothing of Crucifixes, nor even of the emergence of the majestic stag. What they do know, however, is the sensory realm that Aristotle claimed to be the special province of animals. Dürer probably used life studies of just two animals, a sight hound and a scent hound, to fashion his five, self-contained, canine individuals.47 Alert, but finding themselves momentarily with nothing particular to do, the four dogs at the base of the hill gaze in four different directions; the scent hound in the lower right shifts his eye to look directly at the
1.5 Albrecht Dürer, Study of Running Hound, brush and ink with stylus, c. 1500–1501, London, Royal Collection Trust
animalisticoneidentities.
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chapter46 The cape-like folds of the flying fox’s membranous “wings” are probably the result of improvisation on the part of the artist, for Fröschel noted in his inventory that the original specimen in Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer had been badly damaged by moths.154 Hardly following the attention to accuracy demanded by naturalists of our own era, the bat’s author nevertheless gave the screeching creature a vivid spark of the wild. Similarly imaginative in its effort to re-enliven organic remains as an independently assertive pictorial creature is the Museum’s black-footed penguin. Fröschel himself appears to have had some understanding of the penguin’s avian idiosyncrasies, for he wrote in the inventory of Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer, “The Magellan goose walks on two legs, like a man [. . .].”155 But the artist who brought 1.21 the remains to life misinterpreted the thick, leathery wings as enabling the creature to fly. And indeed, in the Museum we confront the penguin soaring above a large body of water, a great distance above the small tower on the promontory in the distance. Centered on the horizon as well as in the artist’s scenic view, the penguin assumes a convincingly wild authority, perhaps even for those of us who know that these social animals are strictly swimmers rather than fliers. The most imposing species presented in the Museum is the hippopotamus, and the three full plates devoted to this animal give specific insight into how the Museum artists “rewilded” their subjects pictorially. In the first plate the amphibious animal greets us on his own turf, poised between land and water. His suspiciously bearlike shape suggests that the artist did not fully grasp what this African mammal 1.22 1.20 1.241.211.20 Anon., Indian Flying Fox (Rodriguez Flying Fox), oil on vellum, c. 1600, Vienna, Drucken,vonNationalbibliothek,ÖsterreichischeSammlungHandschriftenundaltencod.min.130 1.21 Anon., Black-Footed Penguin, oil on vellum, c. 1600, Vienna, Drucken,vonNationalbibliothek,ÖsterreichischeSammlungHandschriftenundaltencod.min.130 1.22 Anon., Hippopotamus, oil on vellum, c. 1600, Vienna, Drucken,vonNationalbibliothek,ÖsterreichischeSammlungHandschriftenundaltencod.min.129 Anon., Hippopotamus, woodcut illustration from Konrad Gesner, Icones Animalium Quadrupedum Viviparorum et Oviparorum quae in Historiae Animalium Conradi Gesneri Libro I et II (Zürich: C. Froschauer, 1560), p. 82 Anon., Hippopotamus Skin, oil on vellum, c. 1600, Vienna, Drucken,vonNationalbibliothek,ÖsterreichischeSammlungHandschriftenundaltencod.min.129 1.25 Anon., Hippopotamus Head, oil on vellum, c. 1600, Vienna, altenlungNationalbibliothek,ÖsterreichischeSammvonHandschriftenundDrucken,cod.min.129
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47 the sensitive soul intensity. The artist’s allotted sheet of vellum could not even contain the fearsome central incisors. Male hippopotami roar when they fight one another, and whether he was aware of this fact or not, Rudolf II, who like most Hapsburgs was an avid hunter, probably appreciated the belligerent depiction of the animal as a worthy opponent. But, as I have been arguing, taking the side of the Museum’s main viewer is not the only way an art historian can interpret an expressive visual language. Like the Mexican ranchers whose perspective on jaguars shifted from damaging pest to valuable subject when they were given the opportunity to sell their remote photographs of the living predators, an interpreter of animals depicted in art can move beyond studies of the patron to consider how the resurrection of wildness in an animal can converge with the making of art. looked like, and the body was in fact based upon the depiction of the animal in Gesner’s Icones. The head of Gesner’s hippopotamus, however, with its neat rows of identical, small teeth, bears none of the fearsome realism nor the pointed eye contact with the viewer found in the Museum’s version. In the next plate we learn that the more important source for the Museum image was an actual, preserved hide and head kept in the Kunstkammer collection. The open maws of the specimen and its resurrected counterpart reflect the talismanic importance of hippopotamus teeth to European collectors of naturalia, including Rudolf II.156 But whatever secret powers hippopotamus teeth might have had for people who possessed them, the next plate reveals that the animal’s personal fierceness was clearly an artistic goal as well, as we confront a close-up of the head that is almost cinematic in its 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.231.221.25
Federico II Gonzaga himself appears to have catalyzed 3.6
Giulio Romano, Frescoes in the Salone dei Cavalli (detail), 1526, Mantua, Palazzo del Te 3.6
Titian, Portrait of Clarice Strozzi, oil on canvas, 1542, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
chapter84 three by sixteenth-century Europeans strictly as pets, and were regularly associated with women.21 Closely related to the white Maltese was the brown, or brown and white dwarf spaniel, a dog that Titian featured in other portrayals of “Venus” types as well as in his portrait of Clarice Strozzi of 1542.22 Despite its diminutive pair of subjects, the portrait of Clarice and her spaniel is in fact among Titian’s subtlest in the way he fashions the respective psychologies of dog and girl. Patiently nibbling a treat offered by the two-yearold child, the spaniel mirrors her curly brown-gold hair, small stature, and round, bright eyes, glinting with white. But while little Clarice conveys dawning human thought in her quickly shifting eyes and puckering mouth, the spaniel appears more grounded in its senses, gazing steadily at an object different from that which attracts the girl’s notice. In so carefully picturing the ways dogs and humans differ as perceptive subjects, Titian departed from many of his peers, who tended to use dwarf spaniels more simply as mirroring doubles for their female sitters.23 In the first half of the sixteenth century, Titian was joined by certain other empirically oriented artists who would advance the double portrait of human and canine to subtly elaborate on what it might mean to “become with” a member of another species.24
the use of portraiture techniques to represent those animals most favored at court and in the hunt, in his case both horses and dogs. He commissioned from Giulio Romano, his court artist in Mantua, a marble tomb for one of his numerous dogs as well as the astonishing Salone dei Cavalli in the Palazzo del Te of 1526, in which full-scale likenesses of six particular court horses appear to stand like loyal warriors atop moldings within the actual space of the room. As the horses in the Hunts of Maximilian would do, Giulio’s horses turn their heads and slightly shift their eyes to meet those of a visitor, suggesting the personal attachment that Federico held to these 3.7 3.7
chapter212 ten 10.8 Pieter Boel, Five Studies of a Dromedary, oil on canvas, before 1668 (?), Paris, Louvre 10.9 Charles Le Brun, Dromedary Heads and Eye after Pieter Boel, black chalk, c. 1668–1671, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques (inv 28094, Recto)
Charles Le Brun, Two Views of a Dromedary Head, black chalk and pen and ink on squared paper, c. 1668–1671, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques (inv 28091, Recto)
interspecies transformations
Charles Le Brun, Two Views of Dromedary Head, Diagrammed, pen and ink, c. 1668–1671, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques (inv 28089, Recto)
Charles Le Brun, Three Head Studies of a Dromedary-Man, black chalk and pen and ink on squared paper, c. 1668–1671, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques (inv 28088, Recto)
Charles Le Brun, Two Views of Head of a Dromedary-Man, Diagrammed, pen and ink, c. 1668–1671, Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques (inv 28090, Recto)
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