Seventeenth Century Follower of Roelant Savery

A Wildcat and Wild Man
(offered as a set with A Horse and Ostrich)

oil on canvas laid down on board

5 1/16 × 4 ¾ inches (12.9 × 12.1 cm.)

PROVENANCE:

This delightful pair of paintings’ origins can be traced back to medieval bestiaries (a type of natural history catalogue), fable illustrations and emblem books. The first artist to depict animals in an independent format was Albrecht Dürer in the early sixteenth century. Mainly executed in watercolor and gouache, his subjects fell into two distinct categories. One group featured animals from everyday life as well as zoological specimens brought back from newly discovered lands and oceans to the east and west. The other group was based on legend, rumor and the artist’s imagination. For naturalists as well as artists Dürer’s work carried a profound impact. ¹

Rudolph II Hapsburg (1552-1612) King of Hungary and Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor from 1576, had a passion for Dürer’s work as well as for nature. In Prague he had a fish pond, pheasant garden, an aviary with rare birds including one of the first dodoes brought to Europe, and a lion’s den and menagerie where camels, elephants and leopards were reportedly kept. His passions led to the development of new categories of paintings within the imperial court which included those featuring animals, now deemed worthy of independent easel painting.² Notable Rudolfine artists who executed such works were Roelant Savery and Hans Hoffmann. This new genre continued to gain in popularity throughout the seventeenth century. ³

Aristotle wrote three main treatises on natural history in which he classified living things by their nature (essentially how the being functioned as opposed to its physical form), and this methodology would dominate zoological classification until the nineteenth century.⁴ The artist of our paintings has followed suit in his pairing of subjects combined with the tradition of depicting real and imaginary creatures that Dürer fostered. The horse by the seventeenth century had long been a symbol for power, nobility and class. It was further regarded as the most utilitarian of beasts. Natural historians Conrad Gesner (1516-1565) and Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) in their encyclopedias devoted the most attention to the horse emphasizing its elevated status in the hierarchy of animals. Similarly the ostrich was renowned for its speed, height and beautiful plumage. Originally imported from Africa it represented the beauty and exoticism of the new world. Unable to fly, Aldrovandi classified it on its own in Ornithologie (1600) regarding it as sharing features with quadrupeds.⁵

European wild cats typically have thick coats that are yellowish-grey ringed with black stripes. They are distinguishable from domestic cats by their size and dwell in dense forests, although they are now very rare in Europe. They are predatory beasts that traditionally were linked with the devil and darkness. The wild man was a purely fictional creation that originated in the medieval imagination. His universal attributes are a large club or as in this case the uprooted tree he holds as well as his thick coat of hair. He was believed to live in remote, mountainous and heavily wooded forests particularly in German speaking countries although stories about him thrived throughout western and central Europe. He was said to make his lair in caves, rocky crags, dark burrows and hollows of tree trunks. He was by nature violent and aggressive and thought to indulge in cannibalism. He was irrational and unrepressed sexually. He was emblematic for lust, aggression, chaos, insanity and ungodliness. ⁶

In this pair the artist has laid before the viewer the classic struggle of good versus evil. The horse and ostrich symbolize man’s nobility and accomplishments while the wild cat and wild man embody all the dark and evil forces of the world that must be guarded against and kept forever in abeyance.

¹ Colin Eisler, Dürer’s Animals, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London, 1991, pp. xi-xii.

² Thomas DaCosta Kauffman, The School of Prague, Painting at the Court of Rudolf II, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1988, pp. 74, 76.

³ Arianne Faber Kolb, The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2006, p. 39.

⁴ Ibid., p. 24.

⁵ Ibid., pp. 29, 31, 64-65.

⁶ Timothy Husband, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, c. 1980, pp. 1-5, 7.

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