Tag Archives: Renaissance

April 21, 2011

Renaissance Rabbits

By daseger

Yesterday I found myself thinking and teaching about the intersection of science and art in the Renaissance quite a bit. At one point I was lecturing on this topic with the visual aid of an older powerpoint presentation in which I had inserted a slide of Albrecht Durer’s Young Hare as a perfect illustration of observational art. And suddenly it seemed as if I was seeing this image for the first time, so struck was I by its perfect depiction of an everyday animal.

I keep forgetting; it always stops me in my tracks. I hope this particular image isn’t becoming too commonplace; Ballard Designs produced a cheap canvas wallhanging last year that both horrified and attracted me. Rabbits are interesting because they so very familiar and unthreatening, but at the same time useful for social commentary. In the medieval period, for example, you occasionally see a reversal “hunting hares” vignette in manuscript marginalia, where rabbits are the hunters (of hounds and men) rather than the hunted: a classic world-turned-upside-down scenario. In the Renaissance, the rabbit adds a touch of realism and familiarity to paintings and serves as a useful subject for illustrators striving to prove their technical skills.

Below are four fifteenth-century images of rabbits demonstrating the transition from anthropomorphic actors to observed objects, all from the British Library Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts: baking and jousting (with a snail! on a monkey’s back! And the snail’s monkey is on stilts) rabbits from marginalia, a rabbit illustrating a celestial chart, and a page from an Italian herbal.

British Library MS Lansdowne 451

British Library MS Harley 4379, Froissarts Chroniques

British Library MS Arundel 66, 1490

British Library MS Sloane 4010

After the sixteenth century turned, a succession of Renaissance bestiaries were issued with updated, “scientific” information about the beasts of the world (both ordinary and exotic) and detailed accompanying illustrations. The most popular Renaissance bestiary by far was the Swiss naturalist (and alchemist) Conrad Gesner’s five-volume Historiae Animalium (1551-1558) which features a charming illustration of a rabbit, shown below, along with an English “cony” from Edward Topsell’s translation and abridgment of Gesner, The Historie of foure-footed beastes (1607).

All rabbits represented sexuality and fertility (then as now), but apparently white rabbits symbolized a special virginal type of fertility, hence its prominent placement in Titian’s Madonna of the Rabbit (1530; the Louvre), shown below.

An even rarer breed of rabbit, perhaps the victim of some genetic disorder or the predecessor of the legendary jackalope, is the horned rabbit, or “Raurackl”, pictured in a print from the Flemish artist and illustrator Joris Hoefnagel’s Animalia Qvadrvpedia et Reptilia (1575-80).

Even with his more familiar companions, this rabbit presents a rather unsettling image; best to return to where I began, with realistic and reliable representation of the common hare. This last image (Crouching Hare) is from my favorite seventeenth-century observational etcher, Wenceslaus Hollar, whose works are accessible at the University of Toronto’s Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection.

2 Comments | tags: Art, Flora and Fauna, Renaissance | posted in History

February 7, 2011

Agincourt and After

By daseger

With each course I teach, I introduce students to my conceptualizations of “boys’ history” and “girls’ history”; the former referring to battles and anything you might find on the History Channel, the latter to everything else that happened. Of course these are flippant and ridiculous characterizations, but at least it gets them thinking about interpretive issues as apposed to just the facts. While working on my Renaissance course this past weekend, I encountered a scenario which can represent history for both boys and girls, one with a big battle, a prisoner in the Tower, and an earlyValentine’s Day poem.

The big battle is Agincourt in 1415, which resumed the long series of battles which later became known as the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. This battle, like all those before it in the War, was a momentous victory for England against overwhelming odds, inspiring Shakespeare’s St Crispin’s Day/”band of brothers” speech in Henry V almost two centuries later.

One reason that English had been so dominant throughout the war was their creative way of financing it: ransom. Noble French prisoners would be taken prisoner on the field and given amnesties to collect large ransom demands to ensure their ultimate release. After Agincourt, however, one notable prisoner of war was not given amnesty or release: Charles d’Orléans. The Duke of Orleans, as he is known in the English sources and in Shakespeare’s play, was simply too high up in the French line of royal succession and too connected (by blood and marriage) to be released. And so he remained an English captive for 25 years, several of them in the Tower of London.

The Duke in Wallingford Castle, National Library of the Netherlands

To relieve the boredom of his long imprisonment (which as you see from the images above, was quite a splendid captivity), the Duke started writing poetry in the romantic style of his near-contemporaries Chaucer and Petrarch. The ballads addressed to his wife back in France reference Cupid, Courts and Castles of Love (illustrated below in miniatures from a late fifteenth-century Flemish manuscript in the British Library) and St. Valentine’s Day.

The Duke had very little time with his Duchess, Bonne d’Armagnac, before his capture and imprisonment. Their betrothal is illustrated in one of the most magnificent illuminated manuscripts of the late Middle Ages: Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry as that Duke was Bonne’s grandfather. This was in 1410; in 1415 he was captured at Agincourt, and when he returned in 1440 the Duchess was dead (but he quickly found another).

Given the circumstances and the fashion of the times, the Duke’s”valentines” are a bit plaintive: I am already sick of love/my very gentle Valentine; Strengthen, my love, this castle of my heart. More cheerful examples—the products of printing, liberation, and an ever-expanding market, are displayed in the windows of Roost on Front Street in Salem.