page_title: Jan Brueghel the Elder
section_title: Ideological context
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Brueghel the Elder / Work / Ideological context
context_page_description: Jan Brueghel the Elder was a Flemish painter and draughtsman. He was the son of the eminent Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder. A close friend and frequent collaborator with Peter Paul Rubens, the two artists were the leading Flemish painters in the first three decades of the 17th century.
  Brueghel worked in many genres including history paintings, flower still lifes, allegorical and mythological scenes, landscapes and seascapes, hunting pieces, village scenes, battle scenes and scenes of hellfire and the underworld. He was an important innovator who invented new types of paintings such as flower garland paintings, paradise landscapes, and gallery paintings in the first quarter of the 17th century. He further created genre paintings that were imitations, pastiches and reworkings of his father's works, in particular his father's genre scenes and landscapes with peasants. Brueghel represented the type of the pictor doctus, the erudite painter whose works are informed by the religious motifs and aspirations of the Catholic Counter-Reformation as well as the scientific revolution with its interest in accurate description and classification.
context_section_description: Jan Brueghel's work reflects the various ideological currents at work in the Catholic Spanish Netherlands during his lifetime.  The Catholic Counter-Reformation's worldview played an important role in the artist's practice.  Central in this worldview was the belief that the earth and its inhabitants were revelations of God.  Artistic representation of, and scientific investigation into, that divine revelation was encouraged and valued. Breughel's friend and patron, the Counter-Reformation Cardinal Federico Borromeo, particularly emphasized the beauty and diversity of the animal world.  In his I tre libri delle laudi divine (published only posthumously in 1632) Borromeo wrote:  'Looking then with attentive study at animals' construction and formation, and at their parts, members, and characters, can it not be said how excellently divine wisdom has demonstrated the value of its great works?' Jan Brueghel's realistic depictions of nature in all its various forms, in flowers, landscapes, animals, etc., was clearly in line with the view that study of god's creation was an important source for knowing god.
  Brueghel's era also saw a growing interest in the study of nature through empirical evidence as opposed to relying on inherited tradition. The increased access to new animals and exotic plants from the newly discovered territories played an important role in this intellectual exploration. This resulted in the appearance of the first scholarly catalogues and encyclopedias, including the illustrated natural history catalogues of 16th-century naturalists Conrad Gesner and Ulisse Aldrovandi.  Their major contribution to natural history was the creation of an extensive system of description of each animal. Gesner placed all the species within four general categories: quadrupeds, birds, fish and serpents.  He described animals in alphabetical order and in terms of nomenclature, geographic origins, mode of living and behavior. Aldrovandi took another approach and did not order animals alphabetically. He relied on visual resemblance as the classifying factor. For example, he grouped the horse together with analogous animals, such as the donkey and mule, and separated species into categories, such as birds with webbed feet and nocturnal birds.
  Brueghel's works reflect this contemporary encyclopedic interest in the classification and ordering of all of the natural world.  This is evidenced in his flower pieces, landscapes, allegorical works and gallery paintings.  In his paradise landscapes, for instance, Brueghel grouped most of the species according to their basic categories of biological classification, in other words, according to the main groups of related species that resemble one another, such as birds or quadrupeds. He further classified most of them into subdivisions consisting of similar morphological and behavioral characteristics. His paradise landscapes thus constituted a visual catalogue of animals and birds which fulfilled the role of micro-encyclopedia.
  Brueghel's endeavor to represent the world through ordering and classifying its many elements based on empirical observation did not stop with the natural world.  In Prague he had acquired knowledge of the large collections of Emperor Rudolf II, which were divided in natural, artificial and scientific objects.  Brueghel's allegorical paintings of the four elements and of the five senses reveal the same classifying obsession, using each element or sense to organize natural, man-made instruments and scientific objects. In this skillful union of the areas of art, science, and nature Brueghel demonstrates his mastery of these various disciplines. His paintings serve the same purpose to that of encyclopedic collections by linking between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intelligibilis. His approach to describing and cataloguing nature in art resembles the distinction natural historians were starting to make between perceptual experience and theoretical knowledge.
  Brueghel's obsession with classifying the world was completely in line with the encyclopedic tastes of the co
caption: Studies of animals
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