Part 3, plate 10: Riddle

Jacob Hoefnagel, artist

1575–circa 1630

Joris Hoefnagel, artist

1542–1601

Part 3, plate 10: Riddle, 1592

Portfolio/Series title: Arcetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelli

Where object was made: Southern Netherlands (present-day Belgium)

Material/technique: engraving; laid paper

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 158 x 208 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 186 x 273 mm
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 14 x 19 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: Helen Foresman Spencer Art Acquisition Fund

Accession number: 2006.0020.04

Not on display

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Images

Label texts

Collection Cards: STEM

The animals and plants in this image were drawn so that scientists could examine them more closely. Recording images of living things became very important during the 14th and 15th centuries and continues today. Before the invention of the camera, people drew the objects they studied. Drawings were copied by the printing press and were given to scientists around the world.

What would you want to examine carefully and how would an image be helpful? How would you record its appearance?

Find a real plant or animal and draw it.
Now make a drawing of a plant or animal in a photograph. How was the experience different than drawing from life?

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.