A splendid exhibition looks at small animals, raising big questions

Washington Post

24-05-2025

A curious figure from Greek mythology ornaments the top of an elaborate cabinet, made to store shells, small stones and other natural curiosities. He is muscular and wields a large club and is almost certainly Hercules.
The creature he is battling is more mysterious. The lower body looks to be the Nemean lion, slain by Hercules as part of his atonement for having murdered his wife and children, but it is topped by what appears to be the several heads of the Hydra, another beast slaughtered by the hero.
'Blurring boundaries was absolutely fascinating to them,' says Stacey Sell, who along with Alexandra Libby and Brooks Rich curated the National Gallery of Art exhibition 'Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World' in which the cabinet is displayed. By 'them' she means the Dutch and Flemish artists of the late 17th and early 18th century, who were processing a sudden surge of knowledge about the natural world into images that blur the boundaries between art and science, curiosity and fear, literal truth and fanciful imagination.
It is a splendid show and while it is not huge — it features some 75 prints, drawings and paintings, most of them quite small — it feels like just the right show at just the right moment. The National Gallery has even installed a pop-up gift shop outside the exhibition entrance, a sign that its leaders anticipate popularity.
The National Gallery was once a leader in exhibitions of Dutch art from the golden age, but that ended with the retirement in 2018 of Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., the long-serving and greatly esteemed curator of northern baroque paintings. Now it's back with a show that is focused and smart, bringing together virtuoso miniature paintings with samples including preserved insects and taxidermy borrowed from the Smithsonian.
The side-by-side comparison of painted and real life is part of the pleasure of the show, but even more engaging are the dualities and contradictions raised by the cabinet that features that strange image of Hercules. Near the mythical hero on the top of the decorative wooden box of drawers are astonishingly lifelike metal casts of beetles and a lizard, molded from the actual bodies of the creatures. Also featured in the exhibition are examples of lepidochromy, the process of using actual butterfly wings to 'print' an image of a butterfly.
Using real insect wings to leave an impress of color, or the actual bodies of animals to cast their three-dimensional likeness, may feel like cheating, shortcuts to absolute verisimilitude that distinguishes these works from actual art. But the artists on view, including Joris Hoefnagel, Jan van Kessel the Elder, Albrecht Dürer and Wenceslaus Hollar, had no need to 'cheat.' They could build up verisimilitude freehand just as easily as someone else could 'print' a butterfly (the process involved pressing the wings onto a sticky page until the colors transferred).
Viewers of these printed works would certainly have prized their accuracy, but perhaps something else was going on, too. Creating an image was a way of understanding the natural world, the horizons of which were expanding as European powers colonized the Americas, Africa and Asia. But it was also about taming it and owning it, and the direct impress of the actual creature on the page or the metal suggests a literal sense of ownership. Animals could be made up in the mind — like the Nemean-Hydra figure — but they could also be physically owned, in the menageries of wealthy collectors, and in the small drawers of cabinets like this one.
Throughout the exhibition, fear goes hand in hand with wonder. Creatures, dead or alive, brought back from the colonies were expanding knowledge of the world, breaking down old categories and systems of thought. The first room is devoted to Hoefnagel's four-volume survey of the animal kingdom called 'The Four Elements,' which included some 300 meticulous and breathtaking watercolors made late in the 16th century. Hoefnagel was borrowing the classical elements — air, water, earth and fire — for his basic taxonomy, and insects for some reason fell into the 'fire' category.
This was part of an inheritance, both classical and Christian, that was at times useful and often a distraction from actually looking at the world. Stories like that of Noah's ark provided a convenient template for making images of animals cohere into a meaningful visual narrative. But these painted creatures carried the legacy of Aristotle along with mounds of medieval misinformation, often with an incrustation of religious moralizing. An inscription on Hoefnagel's painting of a hedgehog (a European animal that appears along with a guinea pig from the New World) references the old parable of the fox (which has multiple tricks to survive) and the hedgehog (which has only one, rolling itself into a ball). Long before Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous 1953 essay allegorizing this duality, painters like Hoefnagel were interpreting it with Latin inscriptions that suggest that the hedgehog's limited and purely passive form of defense is a greater strength than the manifold wiles of the fox.
'I wrap myself in virtue,' says the hedgehog, which suggests that passivity in the face of power is a good thing, which undoubtedly it is if you are the one with the power.
These kinds of inscription were reflexive thinking, a bit like rolling the mind up in a ball when faced with the immense task of making sense of new worlds. Looking back at this period from the far side of the dwindling Enlightenment, it is too easy to think of the classical and Christian traditions as a nuisance to be waved away by scientists and philosophers creating a new world of rationalism.
But these tiny works, in many cases marvels of observation and analysis, remind us that the Renaissance was never just about suppressing old forms of magical thinking, but rather, accommodating them into new forms of rational discovery. Perhaps the presence of Hercules next to realistically rendered insects and reptiles isn't an accidental mash-up of the mythological and the scientific, but an honest affirmation of the brutal struggle to tame these systems of thought into something compatible and sustainable. (Spoiler alert: We have largely failed in this endeavor.)
The story of this art cannot be told without engaging with colonialism, and the curators deserve heroic commendation for doing so at a moment when the Trump administration is policing language and attempting to scrub history of any chapters embarrassing to those who have benefited from the legacies of oppression. Colonialism didn't just provide the raw material for these works; it offered the basic mental paradigm for making sense of it. Exploring the world and Christianizing it were conjoined into one worldwide labor. The boundary between knowing and owning was blurred. In many cases, the shells, fossils and animal samples that made it into European cabinets of curiosity were first gathered by people working under colonial duress and perhaps enslaved.
'For many Indigenous communities, animals and plants are sacred relatives,' reads the wall text in one room of the show. So, collecting specimens had at least a dual nature: gathering knowledge for one people while dispossessing meaning from another.
The last room of the show features a new film by Dario Robleto, 'Until We Are Forged: Hymns for the Elements.' The title refers to Hoefnagel's rare and invaluable book of animal miniatures. The film is an ecstatic, 43-minute paean to the work done by institutions like the National Gallery to preserve and pass on the legacy of art and knowledge, which takes on cosmic and spiritual significance. Museums, where the treasure of colonialism is stored, are transformed into places of empathy and connection.
'Every fragment of the past raises questions: What right do we have to forget?' asks the narrator of the film in a long string of existential queries. 'Can we repair our legacies of destruction and harm? What new sensitivities must we invent to bridge the gap of loneliness that keeps life apart?'
It's a smart film and its message is very necessary at the moment, but it will also divide audiences. Some may find the rhetoric too superheated and ostentatiously poetic (think Ken Burns on steroids). Others, more cynical to be sure, will disagree with the very premise of a moral dimension to the museum world. But they are not likely to see the film unless actively searching for something to find objectionable.
One object not to missed is a collaboration with curators from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History made to imitate a painting by Van Kessel, the grandson of Jan Brueghel the Elder, and a masterful painter of miniatures. The collage of real things helps make sense of the image, in which there is more conceit and artifice that one might think, including a curiously abstract space in which there are shadows, but no background or sense of up or down, just a white emptiness that makes each sample seem separated by 'the gap of loneliness.'
I confess the collage unnerved me. The samples are held in place with pins, a standard procedure for displaying insects. To 'pin it down' is now colloquial for demanding a clear, unequivocal statement, definition or answer from someone. Clarity, offered freely, is a kindness to others, but to pin down an idea is often a form of aggression. The thing pinned down must be inanimate or dead, and then becomes a possession. The only thing missing is life itself, which was of course the reason we tried to pin it down in the first place.
Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World. Through Nov. 2 at the National Gallery of Art. nga.gov. 202-737-4215.