Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark (review)

In the seventeenth century, Jan Brueghel the Elder developed a new subgenre of landscape painting known as the "paradise landscape" of which his Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark is one of the finest examples. One of the most outstanding features of The Entry is the array of species depicted and their naturalistic representation. In her book, Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark, Arianne Faber Kolb sheds new light on the painting by examining it in its historical context. More specifically, she demonstrates not only how Brueghel's presentation of the subject was well suited to his own artistic predilections, but also how the painting reflects the growing interest in animal species and their classification in the seventeenth century.

In chapter 2, "The Descriptive Process: Brueghel's Representation of Animals," through a scholarly investigation of Brueghel's sources Kolb convincingly demonstrates that Brueghel studied the actual animals portrayed in the painting. Evidence for his life study of the animals includes the two surviving drawings for the painting. One drawing is of an ostrich, accompanied by specifications for its height and color notations. Brueghel would have had access to such exotic animals in the menagerie of his patrons, the Infanta Isabella of Spain and her husband, the Archduke Albert of Austria. That Brueghel was admitted into their Brussels collection of animals is documented in a letter in which he mentioned that he had studied the animals in it for another painting. Moreover, many of the animals depicted in The Entry are the same species recorded in descriptions of the menagerie. It is likely that Brueghel also studied animals in his native city of Antwerp, whose port was flooded with goods from the New World, including exotic animals.

The classifying culture of the time, boosted by the exotic species discovered in new lands, manifested itself not only in the collection of animals in the menagerie of the archdukes, but also in the appearance of the first scientific collections and the publication of the earliest natural history catalogues. Kolb documents the significance of the natural history catalogues for Brueghel's presentation of the animals in The Entry in chapter 3, "A Pictorial Catalogue of Species: The Artist as Naturalist," particularly those by Conrad Gesner and Ulisse Aldrovandi. While Brueghel, whom Kolb describes as "the first artist to classify certain species in a painting," did not rely on the schematic drawings of animals in these catalogues, he did adopt some of their methods of classification (26). As a result, Brueghel's Entry functions as a "type of microencyclopedia" (27). Among the ordering devices that he shared with the catalogues was the arrangement of the animals by basic biological characteristics and physical similarities. Brueghel went beyond the catalogues by placing the animals in their natural habitats while documenting their characteristic behaviors.

Complementing the contextual approach of the first part of the book, in the following two chapters Kolb examines the place of The Entry in the artistic tradition of northern animal studies and landscape painting as well as the artist's development of the paradise landscape. Kolb also addresses the religious context of The Entry in her consideration of Brueghel's important relationship with Cardinal Borromeo, whose patronage and views toward nature contributed to the development of Brueghel's descriptive approach to animals and his paradise landscapes.

In chapter 6, "The Courtly Context," Kolb suggests that Brueghel's Entry was made for the archdukes. In a general sense, this painting, along with other encyclopedic representations, "established visually the religious and political authority of the Archdukes" (63). More-specific clues that link the work to the archdukes reside in the painting itself. The prominence of the horse and the lions — royal symbols — represent the artist's attempt to adjust his classification system to appeal to his courtly patrons. A...