Part 3, plate 10: Riddle, Jacob Hoefnagel; Joris Hoefnagel

Exhibition Label: "Cabinets of Curiosity: Musing About Collections," Jun-2006, Joseph Keehn and Madeline Rislow These engravings come from a book of forty-eight engravings of flowers, insects, snails and other small creatures. Many of the groupings derive from manuscript illuminations by the artist's father, Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1601). The texts in these engravings are moralizing commentaries by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) and earlier writers and philosophers. For example, the Title page to Part 2 includes a passage from Erasmus's Adagia that suggests how we all follow our own paths, “Parrot and quail Squak with different voices, “below is a Latin proverb, “Today is passing away, and we know not whether the morrow will bring work or rest. Thus passes away the glory of this world. “Combined, these texts suggest that we will all meet our end, regardless of our station in life. Jacob and Joris Hoefnagel each spent significant portions of their careers in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II (1552-1612), who was known for his opulent court in Prague. There he assembled a kunstkammer that was especially rich in paintings and marvelous scientific instruments, probably due in part to the presence in the Imperial court of the astronomers Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). Joris Hoefnagel's manuscript illuminations and miniature paintings and Jacob's engravings catered to the Emperor's taste for examples of precise invention associated with the investigation of the natural world.