Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark
Arianne Faber Kolb
2005 / 104 pages / PDF / 12.2 MB

At the dawn of the modern era in Europe, there was a keen interest in the precise rendering of the natural world, as evidenced by the landscapes and still lifes of the great Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder. Born in Brussels and trained by his grandmother, he was called “Velvet Brueghel” for his skill at painting rich and delicate textures.
This monograph takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Brueghel’s fascinating paradise landscape, exploring Renaissance zoology, religious views on nature, and the culture of collecting and cataloguing animals and natural specimens. It is brilliantly illustrated with paintings of landscapes and animals by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens, and Lucas Cranach the Elder as well as by Brueghel himself. It presents an overview of the tradition of this type of painting and discusses both the cultural context and the artist’s background, crucial to understanding Brueghel’s approach to nature.