SARAH ROBERTS

Symbol to Specimen: A Transition of Perception in Early Modern Animal Painting

As a genre, animal painting is often associated with a tradition of specialized artists in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The foundations of this tradition, however, are in Northern Europe, among the Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century. The Early Modern period was marked by a shift in the way animals were conceptualized, treated, and understood by natural historians, philosophers, laypeople and artists alike. In the first half of the seventeenth century, an emblematic system of symbolic and allegorical associations characterized the human understanding and perception of animals. As the study of natural history moved from a firmly humanist tradition in the Renaissance to a practice based increasingly on empirical observations, the position of the animal in the macrocosm was questioned, and the drive to classify and categorize nature occupied natural historians.

Abraham Hondius’s The Amsterdam Dog Market (c. 1677) illustrates a key transitional moment in the mid-seventeenth century during which surviving understandings of animals and the natural world from the Renaissance mingled with new theories of the animal (and human) body and mind, generating an ambiguous category of artwork which is both anthropomorphic and scientific. Through the organization and imagery used in sixteenth and seventeenth century natural history encyclopedias as well as the works of preceding and contemporary animal painters, I will demonstrate the ambiguity and continuing development in the fields of natural science and philosophy which prompted artists like Hondius to engage with themes outside of the traditional hunting pictures and game pieces, in some cases inventing the premise of their images in order to compromise between competing ideas. In the case of The Amsterdam Dog Market, the liminal position of the dog between the human and animal spheres further complicates their classification and portrayal as characters or objects. As immigrant artists to England, Hondius and his Dutch peers likely influenced the subsequent development and popularity of animal painting there, and his artistic choices reveal the complicated network of associations present in the mind of the contemporary viewer, which structured their understanding of both animal and image.