Aquatic animals were prized collectables in seventeenth-century Antwerp. At least, that is the impression you get when you look at the set of paintings labelled as ‘gallery pictures’ or ‘constcamer paintings’ by the Antwerp artist Frans Francken the Younger (1581–1642). In Francken’s gallery pictures, you find seahorses, blowfish, sawfish, horseshoe crabs, and dolphin skulls, to name just a few (e.g. figs. 11.1 & 11.2). This chapter discusses the interest in aquatic fauna in seventeenth-century Antwerp in relation to mimetic practices: how were these natural objects preserved and displayed, and how were they related to the man-made images of the same animals? As with images of nature, we can ask how far modes of representation of natural objects themselves constituted artistic interventions. These fish out of water are part of the early modern turn towards nature in the circles of painters and collectors, but also reveal how radically different their notions of what is natural are from ours today.
Frans Francken II, Collector’s cabinet with Abraham Ortelius and Justus Lipsius, 1617. Oil on canvas transferred from panel, 52.5 cm × 73.5 cm
Location unknown (formerly Haboldt & Co., auctioned 2011)
Frans Francken II, Interior of an art cabinet with ‘ânes iconoclastes’, 1620 or 1626. Oil on panel, 101 cm × 143 cm
Quadreria della Societ à Economica di Chiavari
Francken was a key player in the rise of the genre of the gallery picture, which was developed in Antwerp in the first decades of the seventeenth century.1 As a glimpse into the early modern culture of collecting, these paintings offer beautiful arrangements of paintings, drawings, statuettes, coins, books, as well as shells, corals, and (parts of) other aquatic animals. Francken’s gallery pictures depict a combination of the natural and the man-made, of naturalia and artificialia. They let the viewer reflect upon the making of nature and the making of mankind. But upon closer inspection, we may also wonder whether we can draw such an easy distinction between art and nature. For instance, a dried sea horse is obviously a preserved naturalium, but without human intervention the object would never have existed: it had to be selected, captured, dried, transported, sold and bought, and put on display. Even such preserved specimens are representations, although one might argue that they come as close to the living ‘actual’ thing as one could imagine. Early modern collectors were aware of this, and there were debates about the value of different types of representations (in particular specimens versus pictures) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Margócsy 2014). Furthermore, the dried aquatic animals in Francken’s gallery paintings are, of course, images in oil paint of the specimens – adding a second layer of representation.
Preservation was a way of stabilising the value of a natural specimen and creating a lasting representation of a once living animal. Images too provided stable representations of animals, whether dead or alive. In early modern collections, preserved specimens and animal images were often kept together. Collectors at this time were mostly interested in naturalia that were particularly curious, rare or exotic. The goal was not so much to collect (or investigate) large samples of “common” nature, as to gain admiration for the atypical.2 The preserved aquatic animals in Antwerp collections seem to comply with these standards of curiosity, rarity or exoticism, even though very practical reasons deriving from the ease or difficulty of preservation also played a role.
This chapter argues that fascination with the material, outward appearance or surface texture – the scales, skins, and carapaces – of aquatic animals was an important factor in their appeal to collectors. It could determine whether an object was indeed considered worthy of display and how to position it within a collection. Mimesis, in the sense of a proper imitation or representation (which was one of the meanings of this ubiquitous concept) was an important issue: the materials defining surface textures needed to be preserved by means of different techniques. The mimesis of surface texture was also a central issue for painters – in particular, one might argue, in the Netherlandish tradition.3 One thinks here of depictions of the sheen of fish scales, the toughness of the carapace of a crustacean, or the spiky excrescences of seahorses and blowfish. This interest in textures was shared by Antwerp collectors and artists, and extended from the collecting of natural specimens to the production of works of art and other artificialia. The objects discussed in this chapter brokered the connection between the scholarly world, the culture of collecting, and the world of artisanal and artistic making. Crucial in this context was the generous overlap between the preservation of natural specimens and more thorough artistic interventions, from the creation of monsters from real fish, to the depiction of real fish or the pictorial invention of fictitious fish. This led to the existence of a broad spectrum of different levels of mimetic practices.
1 Representation and Texture
Seventeenth-century Antwerp knew a lively collecting culture. The city’s numerous successful artists and artisans were able to put their stamp on the culture of collecting, both through their networks and the products made in their workshops (which were in high demand), but also because many of them were themselves collectors.4 Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was the most famous artist-collector, but many followed his example, from painters or engravers to apothecaries and gold- or silversmiths.5 Some of these guild masters were extremely wealthy, belonging to the city’s economic elite, while others belonged to middling groups. Often, there was an overlap between their places of making and collecting, the workshop and the cabinet. Their collecting practices could impact the products they made, most notably in the invention of the genre of the gallery picture. Collections also enhanced artists’ social status and placed them in contact with other Antwerp collectors. This in turn helped to promote their products further, and to enhance the status of their workmanship. The close relationship between Antwerp’s most successful artists and artisans and the city’s collectorly élite is one factor that explains the increasing appreciation for artistic and artisanal products and processes. Elsewhere, I have named this new sensibility ‘process appreciation’, to denote an appreciation not just for the end product, but for the making process in general.6
The crafting of precious or exotic materials held an exemplary status within this collecting culture, for example in ornamented nautilus shells or the many objects made with tortoiseshell. Many materials served to decorate the wooden cabinets that held collections – paintings, mirrors, ivory, and tortoiseshell come to mind; silver cutlery was adorned with mother-of-pearl, ivory saltcellars decorated with shells, pearls, and coral.7 Antwerp painters experimented with different kinds of support, such as marble or metallic surfaces (silver, copper, tin, and other metals). Their paintings and other made objects could thus become part of a display in which different materials were to be compared, such as marble statuettes, paintings on marble, and the depiction of marble in oil paint. Such displays were not just typical of collectors’ cabinets, but could also figure in other settings, such as the Baroque interior of the Jesuit Church of Antwerp (St. Carolus Borromeuskerk).8
The comparison of materials and surface textures was part of the appeal of such displays. This was related to the issue of the maker of the material: nature or mankind. Such works of art or displays juxtaposed, as it were, the skills of nature with the skills of mankind. For this reason, objects falling between art and nature were particularly appealing to collectors, and a similar interest underpinned attention to imitation materials such as counterfeited coral, pearl, marble, or gemstones. From inventories we know that these imitations were both made and collected in Antwerp. Collectors knew about the non-authenticity of these materials, which demonstrate that imitations had a value in their own right. Sometimes imitations were displayed next to the real materials, so the two could be compared (Rijks 2018). Successful imitations captured the colour, shine, or lustre of gems, the same qualities of surface texture that artists tried to capture in their paintings. Both commercial interest and intellectual interest played a part. Imitations could be a cheaper alternative to the real thing, but it would be a mistake to imagine that counterfeiting processes were always cheap. Intellectual pursuits were also important: many contemporaries argued for analogies between the making processes of art and the natural origins of gemstones, for instance.9
Natural history appealed to collectors and artists partly for the same reasons: nature as a maker of a magnificent number of stones, plants, and animals, with a rich variety of forms, colours, and textures. The allegorical paintings typical of Antwerp output (invented by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), but emulated by many Antwerp painters), with their abundance of objects, plants, and animals, can be placed in this tradition. The spatial division of such paintings was often based upon the division of the natural world into the elements of earth, water, air and fire, for instance in Landscape with allegories of the four elements by Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601–1678) and Francken, now in the Getty Museum (fig. 11.4). Animals were commonly grouped in four kingdoms, quadrupeds, birds, fish, and insects (often these animal kingdoms were, in turn, linked to the elements: quadrupeds to earth, birds to air, and fish to water).10 Such ordering also took place in collectors’ cabinets. The category of fish included sea mammals, crustaceans, and amphibians, and basically referred to the entirety of aquatic fauna.
Frans Francken II, The world honours Apollo, 1629. Oil on panel, 64.5 cm × 104 cm
Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Oldenburg. Photo: Sven Adelaide, LMO 15.612
Jan Brueghel II and Frans Francken II, Landscape with allegories of the four elements, c.1635. Oil on panel, 53 cm × 81 cm
Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program
Another way of ordering was on the basis of similarities in surface texture or material. This sometimes produced results that might seem odd to the modern naturalist, as Florike Egmond (2017) has demonstrated. Emperor Rudolf II, one of Europe’s most important collectors, owned albums groups, for example, that combined animals together with stones on the basis of shared characteristics – a hard skin and spiky excrescences. This classificatory move entailed the bringing together of reptiles, lizards, an American armadillo, a tortoise, corals, stones, the skin and teeth of a hippo, shellfish, blowfish, swordfish and sturgeons. A similar interest in scales, skins, and carapaces is visible in Francken’s Collector’s cabinet with Abraham Ortelius and Justus Lipsius (1617, fig. 11.1), where the painter likewise combines coral with a horseshoe crab, a fish with a sort of horn similar to the horseshoe crab (probably a species of triggerfish), a blowfish, a crab, a pair of tusks and a swordfish.11 All fit into the category of the aquatic, as well as the category of spiky excrescences. Unless the historian approaches ordering criteria from the vantage point of the early modern collector, the logic of the collection cannot be grasped.
Although all sorts of naturalia were widely collected in Antwerp, there were no truly specialised collections of naturalia, let alone of aquatic fauna. Aquatic animals in Antwerp were part of collections in which man-made objects, particularly paintings, predominated. The lack of specialisation supports the argument that Antwerp collectors were not so much interested in natural history per se, but rather saw their naturalia as part of a broader connoisseurship in which art and nature were understood in relation to one other. The dried aquatic animals depicted on Francken’s gallery pictures, for instance, seem to question the extent to which such specimens were also artistic interventions. These paintings thus effectively showcase several different levels of artistic interventions upon natural bodies: showing preserved naturalia, decorated naturalia, and drawings and paintings of plants and animals. In fact, these paintings have been called ‘self-aware’, in that they reflect upon the medium of painting.12 I would add that this self-awareness extended from the domain of painting into the broader domain of artistic intervention or making.
This question of artistic intervention was even more compelling in the case of monsters and mythical creatures kept as specimens in early modern Antwerp cabinets. Monsters long remained an integral part of natural history and of the visual vocabulary of artists. As we will see, they were depicted in natural history books and print series alongside other, common species, a practice that continued well into the seventeenth century. Furthermore, the practice of fabricating monsters out of (parts of) real animals was widespread, as Pugliano argues in this volume. Such activities, again, may seem odd to the modern eye, but was entirely appropriate in early modern cabinets, where different levels of artistic interventions or mimetic practices readily overlapped.
2 Scales, Skins, and Carapaces
One of the most curious aquatic animals depicted by Frans Francken the Younger, which may have looked like a monster to those who saw it for the very first time, was the horseshoe crab. This animal, to be found in East Asia and on the Atlantic coast of the United States, only became known in Europe during the sixteenth century. The first images reached Europe in the form of drawings made by travellers to the New World, while Clusius had an engraving made based upon a dried specimen from the East Indies, which was published in his Exoticorum libri decem (1605). The horseshoe crab appears in at least four of Francken’s paintings: three times in gallery pictures painted in 1617 (e.g. fig. 11. 1) and once in an allegory of 1629 (fig. 11.3).13 Around 1620, two horseshoe crabs were also depicted by another Antwerp artist, Frans Snyders (1579–1657), on a fish stall.14 These Antwerp paintings were among the first European depictions of the horseshoe crab and, to the best of my knowledge, the first in the medium of oil. It is very probable that the crab depicted by Francken was from the collection of his acquaintance, the notary Gilles de Kimpe (d. 1625), one of the city’s most avid collectors (Rijks 2019).
De Kimpe had a truly impressive collection of books (of which he owned over 1,000, among the largest libraries in Antwerp at the time), and also owned no less than 144 paintings, drawings and prints running into the hundreds, over 2,000 medals and a variety of naturalia.15 Among the aquatic animals represented in De Kimpe’s collection were a zeeduyff (blowfish); two mysterious objects described as zeepeerden tanden (literally seahorse teeth, perhaps walrus tusks); eenen schilt van een schiltpadde (the shell of a turtle); another schiltpaddeken (turtle); and a so-called zeespinnecop (sea spider), the early modern Dutch name for the horseshoe crab.16 All the aquatic animals or their parts in De Kimpe’s collection would have been considered to be ‘fish’. In the early modern period, this category contained virtually all aquatic fauna, including sea mammals, crocodiles, turtles, shrimps and crustaceans. In Latin, a distinction was sometimes made between pisces, which included creatures with scales that lived in water, and aquatilia, a broader term which included all aquatic animals, also those without scales (Egmond 2017, 60). It is impossible to establish whether someone like De Kimpe was aware of such a distinction, but in general collectors in this period used broad and inclusive categories, rather than narrow ones.
From Antwerp inventories we know that Gillis de Kimpe was not the only Antwerp collector to own dried fish or other aquatic animals. The wealthy merchant Peter Licea (d. 1645), for instance, owned a zeehaenken (a lyra).17 A sales book from 1653, listing objects from the superb collection of Petrus Deams (c.1590–1653), former prior of the Carthusian monastery, included three seahorses and a ‘dragon’, which sold for 3 gulden and 5 stuivers. In the same sales book we find a zeespinnecop (another horseshoe crab), a fish, and an ostrich egg, all of which were sold together to a certain F. de Bie for the total sum of 7 gulden.18 As in other cities, Antwerp surgeons and apothecaries sometimes amassed collections of naturalia.19 Among them were the surgeons Abraham Rombauts (d. 1675), who owned vier drooge vissen (four dried fish), and Benedictus van den Walle (d. 1652), who owned a gedroocht visken (a small dried fish) as well as a schelpe van een groote schiltpadde (the shell of a large turtle) and een geheel gedroocht lantschildpaddeken (a whole dried land turtle).20 In the Antwerp apothecary shop owned by Abraham van Horne (d. 1625), customers could admire a ‘dried crocodile hanging on a beam’, a ‘large dried snake, a large dried turtle’ as well as ‘a large dried tongue of a fish’.21 The objects called ‘tongue stones’ or ‘glossopetrae’ were, in fact, fossilised sharks’ teeth, but this was only suggested later in the seventeenth century. They were on display in many cabinets and sometimes mounted in gold and silver or used in fantastic artefacts. As early as 1565, Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) had discussed tongue stones and their different names, colours, materials, and where to find them.22 Gesner also noted that the specimens were believed to work against poison. Furthermore, he summed up the points of debate: some believed these objects to be of purely stony nature, while others thought them to be tongues of fish, tongues of snakes, or even the beaks of births. Then there were specimens that looked very much like shark teeth, for instance one sent to Gessner by the Antwerp apothecary Pieter van Coudenberghe (1517–c.1599).23 As in the case of Gillis de Kimpe, the aquatic animals in Antwerp were often part of impressive art collections. In his 30-room townhouse at the Gildekammerstraat, Van Horne, for instance, also had a number of tapestries and 32 paintings on display, while Van de Walle owned not only 119 paintings (including four by Rubens), but also numerous objects made with tortoiseshell, a human skeleton and a ‘flame-shaped dagger’, which was probably a much-desired exotic kris from Indonesia (Göttler 2016). Van Coudenberghe, moreover, was known for his fantastic botanical garden (Guicciardini 1612).
Almost without exception, these collectors had boxes and drawers filled with large and small shells. Shells were among the collected naturalia that were most widely owned and fashionable: every self-respecting collector owned some. In some cases, rare exotic shells were decorated with gold and silver. One very popular example was a decorated nautilus shell, an object accorded pride of place in many collectors’ cabinets. Corals too were widely collected, both in their natural state and made into artefacts. In seventeenth-century Antwerp inventories, moreover, we find an abundance of objects decorated with tortoiseshell. Then there are several specimens of whalebone or baleen, in some cases turned into picture frames or other artful objects.24 They are described as een walvischgraet (a whalebone); elff rondekens lantschap met gedraeyde lystkens van walvischgraet (eleven round landscapes with turned whalebone frames); een swert ebbenhollten cruijs met eenen voet van schiltpadde ende walvisgraet (a black ebony cross with a stand made of tortoiseshell and whalebone); een schribantien van walvischgraet met schilpat ingeleyt (a desk of whalebone inlaid with tortoiseshell); een leijste van walvisgraet (a frame of whalebone); twee halffmaentkens van walvisgraet met perelkens daerinne (two half-moons of whalebone with pearls). Whalebone or baleen could be pressed into all sorts of shapes and was highly decorative. In the course of the seventeenth century, the States General of the Dutch Republic granted several patents for the crafting of whalebone.25 Apparently, even ordinary fish skins could be made into new objects: in the shop stock of an Antwerp leather-worker we find – among the skins of dogs, cats, otters, beavers, foxes, and rabbits – tweehondert ende vier gewerckte vissen (two hundred and four worked fish) and (the skins of?) vierendertigh schollen (thirty-four plaice).26 It is possible that fish skin was used to decorate objects such as boxes or sword pommels, or converted into gloves or other fabrics.27 In fact, in an inventory from 1644 in Haarlem, we read of a ‘jacket of fish skin’ worth 20 gulden.28
3 Preservation and Commercialisation
These preserved crocodiles, sea horses, turtles, sawfish, blowfish and horseshoe crabs ended up in Antwerp cabinets thanks to extensive trading networks. Even after the Blockade of the Scheldt by the Dutch in 1585, the import of exotic goods into Antwerp never really stopped (Egmond & Dupré 2015, 211). Via land routes and other ports, such as Amsterdam or Seville, objects from all over the world ended up in Antwerp. Sailors coming back from the New World and East Asia brought home naturalia in their chests, hoping to make some extra money. Sometimes naturalists gave shopping lists and instructions to surgeons working in the service of the trading companies. But during long sea voyages, a lot could go wrong with frail specimens. Even before setting out on their journeys, the animals first needed to be preserved properly. It was not only rarity or exoticism that determined which naturalia ended up in European cabinets; difficulty of preservation and commercial considerations were equally important.
At the turn of the century, the renowned naturalist Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) wrote down instructions ‘for the apothecaries and surgeons who will sail with the fleet to the East Indies in the year 1602’, with the newly established Dutch East India Company. In this short memorandum, Clusius (n.d.) requests branches and seeds of plants and trees, but also ‘diversche soorten vremde visch, wan sij niet groot waeren’ (‘diverse kinds of exotic fish, as long as they are not large’). Indeed, size did matter: since transportation was expensive, it was small animals that were most frequently brought back. Clusius does not give instructions on how to bring these exotic fish back to Europe, and as we all know, hardly anything is more perishable than fish. So which preservation techniques were used for fish and other aquatic animals?
The most common method of preserving fish was by drying. Where it was relatively easy to do so, fish could be dried and kept as whole specimens, for instance in the case of trunkfish and blowfish. As we have seen above, the fish in Antwerp inventories were commonly listed as being dried. From a catalogue of the collection at Leiden University, drawn up in the years 1620–1628, we learn that larger dried aquatic animals could be filled with hay.29 Another practice was to cut a fish in half, skin it, let it dry, and apply the skin to parchment or paper, the result being very similar to the way plants were preserved in a herbarium (Davis 2018, 151). One such method was developed and described by Johan Frederic Gronovius (1690–1762), a physician and botanist based in Leiden.30 The practice of preserving fish in pots and jars filled with alcohol also seems to have been gradually increasing during the seventeenth century. In fact, these two techniques for the preservation of fish, drying and pickling them in alcohol, would remain almost unchanged for 300 years (Davis 2018, 151–152).
We do not have a lot of textual evidence for preservation techniques dating from the first half of the seventeenth century or before. One exception is a note by the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), who observed how birds and fish were kept ‘sotto spirito’ (in alcohol) in Jacopo Ligozzi’s painting studio in Florence (Egmond 2017, 94; Tongiorgi Tomasi 2014). Ligozzi preserved animals in order to study them in detail, in preparation for his beautiful depictions. Aldrovandi notes that Ligozzi’s patron, Grand Duke Francesco I de’ Medici, had been the inventor of the special preservative liquid used, which apparently kept the shine and colour of the animals intact. This is a remarkable observation, since alcohol inevitably makes colours fade. Whatever sort of liquid it may have been that was used in this case, it is obvious that colour was a big issue in the preservation of fish in particular. Coloured pictures had an obvious advantage over preserved specimens, in that the former were stable representations of fish in their original colour.
In contradistinction to the difficulties involved in preserving fish, crustaceans were relatively easy to preserve. With their tough carapaces, they were easy to dry and much less prone to decay, although there were warnings to avoid boiling crabs and lobsters, which could change their original brownish colour to a vibrant red. But even in the case of crustaceans, it was not always easy to preserve and transport specimens without damage being done. For instance, when Clusius (1605, 128–129) saw a horseshoe crab for the first time in his life, he complained that he was unable to make accurate observations, since the dried animal he investigated was in such bad condition. Particularly troubling was the fact that he was unable to tell with certainty how many legs the horseshoe crab had, while he also confused the telson (the posterior element of the body) with a horn on the head.
Practical reasons of preservation and trade often determined which objects became part of collectors’ cabinets in Antwerp and beyond. As Dániel Margócsy (2014, 29–73) has recently argued, commercialisation was a crucial factor in the collecting of naturalia, and could even impact scientific practices. Illustrated natural histories, which came to be used to ease communication and as ‘mail-order catalogues’ for collectors, are exemplary in Margócsy’s view. The production of such works allowed the conversion of the comprehensive and philologically oriented Renaissance natural histories written by humanist scholars into concise works of classification. It was no coincidence that this transformation began in places where commercialisation played the biggest role: in the first instance botany, and somewhat later conchology and entomology. The trade in plants, shells, and insects was a flourishing one precisely because these specimens were relatively cheap to transport and easy to preserve. In zoology, transportation and preservation were much more complicated, especially in the case of large quadrupeds, while these animals were also easier to distinguish, which reduced the need for classification.
The case of aquatic animals seems to fall somewhere in between. Crustaceans were relatively easy to preserve, but fish much more problematic. As we have seen, the fish that were easiest to preserve, such as blowfish or sea horses, often ended up in cabinets. The same holds true for parts of aquatic animals, such as the shell of turtles, or the saw of sawfish. Also, it is not insignificant that many aquatic animals were relatively small, which made transportation comparatively cheap. In line with Margócsy’s argument, this may be one factor in the rapid rise of ichthyology during the sixteenth century. Before the early modern period, by contrast, interest in and knowledge of aquatic animals had been rather limited. In other areas of zoology, earlier publications (especially from antiquity) to a large extent determined the type of writings that were possible, but in ichthyology there was less of a debt to the ancients to be acknowledged. Free of the ballast of earlier publications, the field of ichthyology quickly achieved lift-off. In the 1550s, within a single decade, fish books were published by Pierre Belon (1551), Guillaume Rondelet (1554), Ippolito Salviani (1554–1558), and Conrad Gessner (1558 and 1560). These heavily-illustrated works offered the first overviews of the endless variety of life in the underwater world. These works fit Margócsy’s definition of the comprehensive and philologically oriented Renaissance natural histories on the one hand; on the other hand, they were the avant-garde in zoology, in that they were less dependent upon the ancients, and outdid contemporary publications on other animals in both numbers and volume.
Works of natural history such as Gessner’s fish books (Historia piscium IV, 1558; Nomenclator aquatilium animantium, 1560), also included descriptions of monsters. Most early modern naturalists did not exclude the possibility that monsters existed, and aquatic environments in particular had long been considered as particularly suitable for the formation of monstrosities. Aquatic environments, such as swamps, wells, and stagnant pools, were also thought to be places where spontaneous generation could occur.31 Moreover, it was fairly common practice to fabricate the most fantastic beasts and monsters from (parts of) animals, as Pugliano argues in this volume. Gessner, for one, included such man-made monsters in his book of 1560, describing how basilisks or winged snakes were made from rays (fig. 11.5). Likewise, Aldrovandi described and depicted several monsters made out of dried rays (fig. 11.6). The aforementioned ‘dragon’ in the collection of Petrus Daems was probably such a monster made out of ray. Some of these fabrications survive in museums: a dragon made out of ray in Leiden’s Naturalis Biodiversity Center looks remarkably close to Aldrovandi’s image (fig. 11.7).32 Monsters were defined as deviations from ‘normal’ nature, but many exotic animals that first reached Europe in the early modern period were also deemed to be monsters.33 Sometimes, New World species were considered to be Old World species altered by different (extreme) climates. At stake was the question of naturalness: when naturalia entered the European market, it was very difficult to determine whether they were real naturalia, as-yet-unknown naturalia, or outright fakes. Just as collectors were interested in the boundaries between natural and the man-made, they were also fascinated by the boundaries between the natural and deviations from the natural.
Winged snake. Woodcut from Conrad Gessner, Nomenclator aquitilium animantium (Zürich, 1560), 138–139
Photo: Leiden University Library, 665 A 9
Draco ex raia effictus. Image from Ulisse Aldrovandi, Opera omnia. X: Serpentum et draconum historiae libri duo (Bologna 1640), 315
Photo: Leiden University Library, 665 A 12
Dragon made of dried ray, eighteenth century
Naturalis Biodiversity Center , Leiden
Joachim Beuckelaer, Fish market, 1568. Oil on panel, 128 cm × 174 cm, 1568
Metropolitan Museum, New York
As in the case of imitation gemstones, these fantastic fabricated animals were not necessarily considered to be fraud. The “realness” or “naturalness” of dragons made out of ray lay partly in the fact that they were made out of the body of a real animal: the dragon’s skin, its surface texture, were natural. Also, it became a sign of connoisseurship to be able to differentiate not only between the hands of different artists, but also between the ‘hand’ of nature and man, between the real and the imitation. So although Gessner complains that such dragons were on display in cabinets to impress gullible people, he still included them in his works. Dragons and other monsters may also have been described and depicted for reasons of completeness, and because of the long literary, cultural, and scholarly tradition that discussed their existence (Hendrikx 2018c). In light of this, it is telling that the polyglot, geographer, and founder of the Dutch West India Company Johannes de Laet (1581–1649) describes the scales of a certain ‘strange’ American fish as being ‘as similar as can be to a painting of St George’s dragon’.34 In fact, St George’s dragon was so well known, thanks to an age-old corpus of authoritative textual and visual sources, that it was to a certain extent more “real” than a still unknown American fish. In the early modern period, the value of different forms of “proof” (whether in the form of natural specimens, texts or images) was heavily debated.
4 Fish Pictures
To avoid problems of preservation, pictures were a good alternative to dried or wet specimens. Naturalists and artists who aimed to observe fish when still fresh accompanied fishermen on fishing trips or visited fishmarkets. In his autobiography, Aldrovandi writes that it was in the years 1549–1550 that ‘I began to be interested in the sensory knowledge of plants, and also of dried animals, particularly the fish that I saw often in the fishmarkets’.35 Sometimes, the exchange went in the opposite direction. In the case of Adriaen Coenen (1514–1587), a fisherman’s son who became a fish merchant and fish auctioneer at Scheveningen and The Hague, the experience gleaned from his trade formed the starting point for his natural investigations, which he recorded in richly illustrated manuscript albums in the 1570s and 1580s (Egmond 2018).
Sometimes pictures were substitutes for specimens that were missing in a collection (Felfe 2018, 200). Albums with watercolours conveyed information, and were arranged and rearranged according to the owner’s idea of order. The practice (and flexibility) of ordering seems to have been more important than the observation of any one strict order (Egmond 2017, 58). Painters also made detailed and vivid depictions of fish: think of market scenes, still lifes, allegories, and gallery pictures. However, unlike watercolours and drawings, fish paintings were not substitutes for actual specimen, but rather functioned as conversation pieces, on which the connoisseur could recognise different species and showcase his knowledge of these species, which could include literary and symbolic meanings. The accumulation of objects, plants, or animals – including aquatic animals – is something these paintings have in common with collections, and both functioned in similar ways.
Around the same time as Coenen, Netherlandish painters started to depict fish in more detail and greater numbers than ever before. Whereas depictions of the Biblical stories of the miraculous catch of fish had long been popular, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the market scenes of Pieter Aertsen (c.1508–1575) and Joachim Beuckelaer (c.1533–1573) marked the beginning of a new type of imagery, in which fish were elevated from bijwerk (secondary motifs) to main theme.36 In some cases, the Biblical story was moved to the background, while in other cases it was omitted altogether (e.g. fig. 11.8).37 The oldest dated fish still life is a painting of 1611 now in the Prado, made by the Antwerp artist Clara Peeters (c.1587–after 1636).38 In another fish still life, now in the Rijksmuseum, Peeters has depicted some fashionable and exotic shells, including the conus marmoreus (fig. 11.10). During the seventeenth century, fish still lifes became very popular in both the Southern and Northern Netherlands.39 Of course, in still life painting in particular, the mimesis of surface texture was crucial. Moreover, Frans Snyders’ (1579–1657) large fish market scenes were collected by Antwerp’s elites (Wyssenbach 2016, 336). In the aforementioned example, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Snyders even included two seemingly living horseshoe crabs on his fish stall, where that exotic animal, not really suited for consumption, would probably not have been found in reality.40 Indeed, his addition of a range of exotic and expensive shells (including a nautilus shell and a conus marmoreus) to the scene points to the fact that such paintings were a kind of collection in their own right, rather than realist documentation of a fish stall.41
Nicolaes de Bruyn, Aquatic animals (including fictitious animals). Engraving from Libelivs varia Genera piscium complectens, plate 10, c.1594
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Clara Peeters, Still life with fish, oysters and shrimps, c.1612–1615. Oil on panel, 25 cm × 35 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
While collectors appreciated the display and comparison of different materials in their cabinets (or ordered their objects based upon materials or textures), Netherlandish painters were renowned for their imitation of materials, especially precious materials, and of the play of light upon different textures. In fishmarket scenes by Antwerp painters like Snyders, the lustre and shine of the fish scales depicted was an important part of the paintings’ attraction for connoisseurs, along with the abundance of species to be recognised. The different material textures were also pronounced in close-up versions of Francken’s gallery pictures, part of a subgenre of the so-called Preziosenwand (walls of precious things). This subgenre of the gallery picture is characterised by the predominance of still-life components. One example is Francken’s Interior of an art cabinet with ‘ânes iconoclastes’ (fig. 11.2). In this painting, we see lustrous shells and mother-of-pearl, glossy Asian lacquer work, a reflective metal ball, a rough and spiky seahorse, and lucent fine coral. Also depicted are the skull and head of a dolphin and a dried fish.
Changing conceptions of the natural world went hand in hand with the emergence of new pictorial genres, such as market scenes and, around the turn of the century, still life paintings. In market scenes and still lifes, local fish were depicted (even if exotic specimens were sometimes added), while, in the gallery pictures by Francken, the emphasis was on the specimens found in cabinets, which were usually rare and exotic. In Antwerp allegories celebrating the abundance and variety of nature, we often find a combination of local and exotic species. In Francken’s The world honours Apollo (fig. 11.3) for instance, we see common species, but also a horseshoe crab and flying fish (as well as American maize and an armadillo). As mentioned above, what such paintings had in common with collecting trends was an interest in the remarkable variety of nature: its forms, colours and textures. Another aspect these paintings shared with cabinets was that the viewers of allegories were prompted to recognise and compare species. Lastly, allegories could also include mythical creatures: in Francken’s The world honours Apollo, the god Neptune with his mythical horses and the Nereids are juxtaposed with real species of naturalia.
The engraver Nicolaes de Bruyn (1571–1656) depicted a similar combination of real and fictitious creatures in his Libellius varia genera piscium complectens. This was probably the first print series specifically devoted to fish, and came off the press in Antwerp in around 1594, some years before Adriaen Collaert’s well-known series Piscium vivae icones. The fish are depicted clearly and recognisably, which fitted the turn towards nature, and both Dutch and Latin names are given. Next to common fish such as cod, sturgeon, carp, ray, and herring, there were also other aquatic animals such as shrimp, crabs, snakes, frogs, and shells, as well as fictitij pisces (fictitious fish) and the fabulosus equus Neptuni – the (mythical) horse of Neptune (fig. 11.9). De Bruyn’s horse of Neptune was largely copied from the ones depicted in works by Gessner and Belon (Rikken 2016). Similar images of Neptune’s horses were depicted in maps as well as in paintings, including several of Francken’s allegories (e.g. fig. 11.3). As in allegories, cabinets and natural history books, the combination of real and mythical creatures fitted early modern conceptions of the natural as a realm where different levels of artistic intervention were permissible and even desirable.
5 Conclusion
The aquatic naturalia depicted by Francken in his gallery pictures were indeed collected in Antwerp, as we know from inventories. Many were collected because they were rare, curious or exotic. But very practical reasons also played a part: the ease or difficulty of preservation determined, to some extent, which kinds of objects ended up in cabinets. Blowfish, for example, were relatively easy to preserve compared to other fish, while shells, corals and turtle shells did not need preservation techniques at all. In seventeenth-century Antwerp, these naturalia were part of collections that were usually dominated by paintings, and there were no specialised collections devoted specifically to naturalia. This is an indication that Antwerp collectors were not necessarily interested in natural history per se, but rather viewed natural objects in the same light as man-made artworks. Here was a connoisseurship in which the making of art and nature were tightly linked.
In part, this connoisseurship alluded to mimetic practices – to a spectrum of representations of nature, including preserved aquatic animals, dried or wet; objects made from precious or exotic materials; decorated naturalia; monsters made from real fish; and pictures of aquatic animals, both real and fictitious. All of these objects demanded different levels and types of artistic intervention. Real displays and gallery pictures seem to question and compare these different levels of representation. One aspect that determined the ‘naturalness’ of these representations was surface texture. In the case of aquatic animals, collectors and artists were fascinated by the textures of their scales, skins, and carapaces. The culture of collecting fostered a context in which these materials were used and displayed in a variety of ways. They brokered a connection between making practices and natural knowledge.
Acknowledgements
A generous grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for the collaborative project New history of fishes. A long-term approach to fishes in science and culture, 1550–1800 enabled me to carry out the research that this paper is based upon. Furthermore, I am grateful to the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) for funding my latest research project, Printing images in the early modern Low Countries. Patents, copyrights, and the separation of art and technology. I would also like to thank Florike Egmond, Paul J. Smith, and the editors of this volume for their constructive comments.
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Endnotes
Filipczak 1987; Marr 2010; Rijks 2015.
This situation only slowly changed in the late 17th century and the 18th century. See MacGregor 2018.
Netherlandish painters were renowned for their imitation of materials and the play of light upon different textures, while Netherlandish art theorists from Karel van Mander (reflexy-const) to Samuel van Hoogstraten paid attention to optical phenomenon and theories (Weststeijn 2008, 329–347).
Rijks 2022.
Several authors have argued that the apothecary’s shop was an urban hub where natural history was pursued; see for instance De Vivo 2008; Pugliano 2018.
The economic concepts of product and process innovation were famously applied to the Dutch art market by John Michael Montias (1990).
Such as the saltcellar designed by Rubens for his own collection: Jan Herck and Georg Petel, Saltcellar with the triumph of Venus, 1627–1628, 43.8 cm × 12.5 cm, Royal Palace Stockholm.
Baadj 2018.
Newman 2004; Smith 2016; Bol 2014.
Joris Hoefnagel linked insects to fire, but this seems to have been exceptional.
Thanks to Floris Bennema for this identification.
Stoichita (1997) has argued that, in the context of the image debates during the 16th century, some paintings became self-aware meta-paintings: by taking painting as their theme, these works acquired a new status as ‘theoretical objects’.
Frans Francken the Younger: 1. The cabinet of a collector, 1617 (signed and dated), oil on panel, 77 cm × 119 cm. Royal Collection, RCIN 405781; 2. Collector’s cabinet with Abraham Ortelius and Justus Lipsius, 1617 (inscribed and dated), oil on canvas transferred from panel, 52.5 cm × 73.5 cm, private collection (formerly Haboldt & Co., auctioned 2011); 3. A curiosity cabinet, 1617, oil on panel, 89 cm × 120.5, Collection of the Duke of Northumberland, Alnwick Castle; 4. The world honours Apollo, 1629, oil on panel, 64.5 cm × 104 cm, Oldenburg, Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kunstgeschichte (signed right: 1629; left, below: do. ffranck. IN. f.A.). I would like to thank Stephanie Dickey for pointing me to the horseshoe crab in Francken’s gallery picture, now in Alnwick Castle.
Frans Snyders and possibly Anthony van Dyck, Fish market, c.1620, oil on canvas, 253 cm × 375 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. nr. 383. See: www.khm.at/de/object/90599c8fdd/.
We know about De Kimpe’s collection from a household inventory drawn up after he died in July 1625. Duverger 1984–2009, vol. II, 399–415; City Archive Antwerp (SAA), Notary J. Plaquet 2867, fols 1r–12r; Rijks 2019.
SAA, Notary J. Plaquet 2867, fol. 8v.
Duverger 1984–2009, vol. 5, 225–228. Peter Licea (d. 1645) was chapelmaster of Our Lady Chapel at St. Jacob’s church, Antwerp. From a series of watercolours of fish now held in Amsterdam University Library, we know that the term ‘zeehaenken’ was used for the lyra.
Duverger 1984–2009, vol. 7, 117–119, 148, 325–342. Petrus II Daems was the son of the rich Antwerp merchant Petrus I Daems (1560–1640) and his wife Isabella de Witte (d. 1635). For biographical details for Petrus I and Petrus II, see Timmermans 2008, 47, 60, 145; Sacré 1991, 171–179.
Rijks 2022.
On the collections of the surgeons Benedictus van den Walle and Abraham Rombauts, see Duverger 1984–2009, vol. 6, 387–393, vol. 10, 87.
SAA, Notary B. Van den Berghe, 3495 (1624–1627).
Gessner 1565, 162–163 (chapter ‘de lapidus qui aquatilium animantium effigiem referunt’). In Nomenclator aquatilium animantium (1560), Gesner had already discussed glossopetrae in the chapter on sharks (Canis Carcharis), 151–153.
Gesner 1565, 163: ‘In formula C ad numerum primum expressus lapis, similis est caeteris, substantia, duritie & splendore: sed auis alicuius, Mercule ferè, rostri superiorem partem prae se fert, minor caeteris, & vero Lamiae aut Carchaie denti (qualem Petrus Coldenbergus pharmacopoeus Antuerpia ad me misit) simillimum’.
In the inventories of Sebastiaan Daems, Elizabeth Sophie, the pastor Arnoldus van den Hove, Jan Lindemans, Johannes van Beverts, and Jeremias van Pelleken (Duverger 1984–2009, vols. 1–12).
Doorman 1940, 138, 144–145, 163, 208, 291.
Inventory of Clara Adriaenssens: Duverger 1984–2009, vol. 11, 203–205.
It is known that the skins of cusk, cod, eels and flatfish were used to produce objects such as gloves. Also, interest in shagreen, leather made from shark or rayskin, remained steady over the period from 1600 to 1800. Stevenson 1902, 382; Gluth 2016.
In the inventory of Marijcken van Steenkiste (6 January 1644). See Biesboer 2001, 90.
There was a ‘manati ofte See Kalf. Es met hoi ghevolt’ (a manatee or sea cow. It is filled with hay) and ‘een klein Bruynvisken, met hoi ghevolt’ (a small porpoise, filled with hay) in the inventory drawn up by Otto Heurnius in the years 1620–1628. See Barge 1934, 39.
Gronovius described his method in a letter to Peter Collinson, who published it in the Philosophical transactions (Barlow Robles 2017; Striekwold & Van Trijp 2017; Gronovius 1742).
Shell 2010, 61–62; Hendrikx 2018b, 2018c.
Such a dragon also exists in the in the Utrecht University Museum (https://www.universiteitsmuseum.nl/Collectie/Detail/UZ-4914). Sophia Hendrikx (2018a) and Robbert Striekwold achieved a similar result in a historical reconstruction in 2018, based upon Gessner’s description of how to make a ray into a dragon.
Lawrence 2018, 95. See also the chapters by Tarp, Smith & Lores-Chavez, and Ajmar in this volume.
De Laet 1630, 118: ‘Maer de vreemste visch, is een kleyn vischken, zo ghelijck, als kan wesen, de schilderije van S. Joris Draeck’. On De Laet, see also Jorink 2006, 307.
Findlen 1994, 75–177, with quote at 175.
Meijer 2004, 18–19. As Meijer notes, Aertsen’s Market scene (c.1560, now in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne) with a number of detailed fish is unique for this painter, while Beuckelaer produced many paintings with fish.
Compare Beuckelaer’s Miraculous draught of fishes (1563) now in the Getty (110.5 cm × 210.8 cm) with The element of water (1569) now in the National Gallery (158.5 cm × 215 cm). The latter painting is a new type of market scene, in which fish take up the at least half of the canvas, while in the background (in a vista through a gate) Beuckelaer has depicted the scene of the miraculous draught of fish very small.
Clara Peeters, Still life with fish, a candle, artichokes, crab and prawns, 1611, oil on panel, 50 cm × 72 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. On Clara Peeters, see Vergara 2016.
Duverger 1984–2009; Montias n.d.; Meijer 2004.
Frans Snyders and possibly Anthony van Dyck, Fish market, c.1620, oil on canvas, 253 cm × 375 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. nr. 383. See www.khm.at/de/object/90599c8fdd/. See also Rijks 2019.
Göttler 2013, 93–94; Koslow 2006, 140–141.