A god draws butterflies and Mercury says “Psst”. Please don’t disturb us. What happens when people paint animals? Or when the baroque artist Dosso Dossi paints Jupiter, the god of the gods, painting the delicate wings of a butterfly on his easel?
A wondrous, startling ark is this book of animal paintings from the 15th century, from Tintoretto to Warhol, from Hieronymus Bosch to Joseph Beuys. The animals look at us, they look back. From the very beginning, since people depicted their animal companions, their prey, their enemies in cave drawings.
And even in the more recent centuries, her gaze, like her sight, is a source of fascination. Pieter Breughel’s sad captive monkeys as well as Lucian Freud’s beloved gray gelding or the Flemish painter Roelant Savery’s cow, which turns its head so far back that it can stare at the viewer intently. It is amazing – and terrifying.
What have we done to them, we human beings who have lost “animal common sense”, as Nietzsche once asked?
The art historian Kirsten Claudia Voigt quotes the philosopher in her fabulous foreword and puts us on the trail of the exalted, hunted or maltreated creature. From Dürer’s melancholic field hare, melancholically dashed, to the quiet, chained goldfinch by Carel Fabritius – maybe he’ll chirp again soon and delight his owners? – to Clara, the legendary rhino who was beset by curiosity, who toured Europe for 17 years and had to be gaped at.
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Humans, Voigt also quotes Max Horkheimer, are “the only race that must hold specimens of other races captive or otherwise torment them in some way just to make themselves feel big doing it.” The stoicism of the animals, their being with themselves and the magic that unfold their images, they act as an antidote.
They arouse humility, whether the artists paint their models with an empathetic gaze, with pride in ownership or with curiosity about researchers. The colonialist gesture of submission can be found in the 61 panels, as well as the longing for a paradise in which all living beings frolic peacefully.
[Lothar Schirmer (Hg): Gemalte Tiere. 61 Meisterwerke aus sieben Jahrhunderten. Schirmer/Mosel, München 2021. 160 Seiten, 49,50 €]
Here the fear of the beast banished in the image, as in Frans Snyder’s “Lioness” from Antwerp, there the pity for Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Agnus Dei”: one would love to touch the lamb, scratch its curly fur, carry it away, untie it.
A personal text is attached to each plaque. Cees Nooteboom writes about the “angry mass of white feathers” in Jan Asselijn’s “The Beleaguered Swan”, Cornelia Funke hears the flapping of the birds’ wings in Tintoretto’s “The Creation of the Animals”. And in front of Karin Knefel’s pet portraits, Isabella Rossellini reflects on an evolution that rewards the survival not of the fittest but of the kindest. This illustrated book for “Children, Adults and Adult Children” (editor Lothar Schirmer) promotes more kindness towards all those we have domesticated.
