2.1 The Printed Works before the 1550s

Even if we limit ourselves for the moment to the domain of print, the older historiography is in need of some nuances. While the canonical publications on aquatilia belong to the 1550s, specialized books on this subject began to appear much earlier. Intriguingly, the first of these was published far away from the core areas of European printing at the time. In 1517–20 the jurist-humanist and printer Nicolaus Marschalk in Rostock published a 115-page book in Latin in which he first describes fish thematically and then discusses them alphabetically per species. Although he refers to his own experience in crossing the seas, most of his descriptions actually go back to combinations of classical (and thus Mediterranean) sources. The rather rough woodcut illustrations that conclude his work are hardly connected with the text: they belong to the late medieval tradition of bestiaries and books of health (going back in particular to the Hortus Sanitatis of the early 1490s), and include ‘monsters’, such as sea swine, mermaids, and dragons. Visually and in terms of approach this publication stands on the edge between classical tradition and new observational science, between late medieval imaginary and erudite humanism. Its influence was probably only regional, and the work was soon forgotten. Yet, together with a contemporaneous 100-page unillustrated publication on serpents and medicine by Niccolò Leoniceno (1518) it is the first printed work in Europe that attempts to bring together knowledge about a whole category of animals. Marschalk also speaks explicitly of ichtyographia.⁶

From that moment on publications about aquatilia never stop. The publication order of the following works indicates that the cultural interest in aquatilia grew steadily and did not suddenly explode in the 1550s. In 1524 the Vatican church official and Papal advisor Paolo Giovio published a circa 125-page un- illustrated work on fish in Latin in which he critically discussed fish names in sources from antiquity (among the most important were Oppian’s Halieutica, Aelian’s work on animals, and Pliny’s Naturalis Historia). Giovio also attempted to match fish names and descriptions with what he knew about aquatic life from practice and contemporary sources. The work was written on the suggestion of Cardinal Francesco Ludovico di Borbone, and to a large extent the result of the many feasts and banquets at the Papal court and Giovio’s visits to the Roman fish market. In contrast with Marschalk’s publication, Giovio’s work proved so popular that it was reprinted (in Latin) until the 1730s in various European countries; an Italian edition appeared already in 1560.⁷ Importantly, Giovio had intended to illustrate his work, but did not receive the necessary funding from his noble patron.⁸

Fish studies almost immediately also involved travel and personal observation. In the course of the 1520s, the Venetian Francesco Massari travelled to Greece and Constantinople, partly for his fish research. He left important, but unillustrated comments on the 9th book of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia with abundant information especially about vernacular Venetian and Greek fish terminology. Written during the 1520s, his work was only published in 1537.⁹

One of the most interesting early publications on (Mediterranean) fish appeared a decade after Giovio’s first edition: a Latin edition of Aelian by the French naturalist Pierre Gilles (1535). A process familiar from the herbals is also clearly visible in Gilles’s works: newly gathered information clustered around and soon began to take over from the core of classical knowledge. Gilles’s 1535 edition presents much information about Mediterranean fish and their local names, based on his own observations from Marseille to Liguria. And his successive editions contain additional information on aquatilia from Rome, Naples, the Adriatic, Greece, and Constantinople.¹⁰ Gilles not only integrated practice-based knowledge; he also explicitly acknowledges it in his references to fishermen-informants.

Gilles’s widely read work triggered further investigations into aquatic life. One of these is a short, unillustrated Latin treatise by the Sicilian monk, mathematician and astronomer Francesco Maurolico, written (1543) in the form of a letter to Gilles. Maurolico aimed to provide the latter with more information about marine and fresh water aquatilia, fishing techniques, and marine monsters from Sicily. Maurolico’s treatise remained unpublished until 1807, but it throws some light on why there was such a great interest in the world of water creatures in his time. Maurolico states that neither classical authors nor modern naturalists provided sufficient detail about aquatilia to facilitate their identification and further discussion. The domain of water, he continues, appears filled with a riches of life at least as varied and fascinating as that on land, and potentially more so, since it is inscrutable and largely invisible. Maurolico also points to the need for clear descriptions, since fish names differ per region or even location. He thus directly links the lack of uniformity in naming with the need for detailed description.¹¹

Strikingly, none of the works printed before 1550 has any illustrations, apart from Marschalk with its bestiary-based images. This group is larger than we might think. Besides the ones discussed above, it also includes Figulus (1540) on Ausonius’s fourth-century poem concerning the river Moselle and its fish; Estienne (1544) on the names of all kinds of naturalia; and Dubravius (1547) on freshwater fish and fish ponds.¹² The situation changed dramatically in the 1550s. Not the interest in aquatilia suddenly exploded, therefore, but their visual representation.

2.2 The Visual Revolution in Print

In the 1550s one printed publication on aquatilia swiftly followed another: all are illustrated, and the number of illustrations and of species discussed increased rapidly. All of the publications now regarded as canonical works that mark the birth of ichthyology as a scientific discipline were published in this decade. The first of this series, the French edition of Belon (1551) has only 20 illustrated pages, but his much-expanded La nature et diversité des poissons of 1555 already contains 185 pages with illustrations. Rondelet’s well over 600-page work on marine fish of 1554 counts almost 220 pages with woodcuts, often with more than one image per page. Its second part (1555) has some 130 illustrated pages which include shells as well as amphibians and fish. Salviani (1554–1558) has 81 pages with copper engravings; several show more than one fish.¹³ Gessner’s massive, almost 1300-page Historia Animalium IV (1558), finally, has 507 pages with woodcuts of aquatic creatures. Still within the same decade, water creatures gained an important place in two further publications. Olaus Magnus’ famous work on life in Scandinavia (Rome, 1555) is illustrated throughout and has a considerable section on fish and fishing. More surprisingly, in 1554 the Italian naturalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1578) first introduced illustrations of animals, especially marine ones, in his famous and mainly botanical Commentarii on Dioscorides.¹⁴

How crucially important illustrations became in this decade is also clear from much smaller illustrated works with a regional focus. A significant example is the modest work about fish and fishing in Lake Constance by Gregor Mangolt (1498–c.1584), a German Protestant preacher and bookseller who worked for some time as a corrector for the Froschauer publishing house in Zurich. As Hakelberg has shown, Mangolt probably wrote the text of his fish book before c.1548. He focused on fish names and local fish expertise, and had no illustrations. Only in the mid 1550s, the Swiss publisher Andreas Gessner decided to print Mangolt’s work on the instigation of Conrad Gessner (Andreas’s relative). Without ever consulting the author, the publisher inserted some 24 fish images (grouped in twelve woodcuts) which he took from old calendar illustrations. He also reorganized the text according to the months and inserted some short calendar poems as well as a whole section on fishing techniques, which goes back to a late 15th-century text.¹⁵ With a definite eye for the market this publisher thus created a bricolage, spicing up an unillustrated but recent treatise with texts and images that were old at the time. There was no intrinsic connection between image and original text. In fact, they even belonged to distinct genres.

The adoption of a presentational format in which illustrations – whatever their quality – became an absolutely essential ingredient was a real visual turn. Only three relevant works of the 1550s are unillustrated. In two cases that absence is significant.¹⁶ The English physician-naturalist Edward Wotton’s strongly Aristotelian work of 1552 excerpts and discusses the classical sources on various categories of animals. The Italian polymath Girolamo Cardano too wrote about aquatilia (1557) in a far wider context, and his discussion moves from general characteristics of aquatic creatures to more specific ones.¹⁷ These were general analytic works on nature and natural philosophy, therefore, in which illustrations of specific species were far less functional than in surveys of fish. The enormous emphasis on illustrations is not the only characteristic that distinguishes the aquatilia publications of the 1550s from those of the preceding four decades, however. The 1550s publication wave also shows increasing attention to region-specific information and local knowledge; a partial shift to vernacular languages; and a more wide-ranging (encyclopaedic) effort to include as many species as possible. After botanical works, aquatilia publications were indeed forerunners in this respect.

All these changes together and especially the rapidly increasing number of illustrations in the 1550s indicate that a genre of natural history encyclopaedia was finding its form. In that genre, illustrations and textual description together served the essential purposes of identification in a situation of confused naming and huge and partly invisible natural variety.¹⁸ The visual turn of 16th-century natural history publications with their unprecedented numbers of illustrations is more, therefore, than mere evidence of acute commercial awareness on the part of the publishers – though there is no doubt that the latter pushed for images and realized that illustrated works sold better than non-illustrated ones. The turn to visual information was intrinsically connected with the function and identity of the genre as a whole, and with the functions of illustrations within these publications.

The influence of aquatilia publications of this type was lasting, but the actual 16th-century publication wave was relatively short-lived. Further editions of Gessner’s major fish work of 1558 with newly added illustrations appeared in 1560 and 1563.¹⁹ In the 1562 Latin edition and especially in the Valgrisi-editions of 1565 and 1568 Mattioli published expanded and revised sections on animals with more, newly executed and larger woodcut illustrations in his work on Dioscorides: his animal section starts with water animals and he pays special attention to the sea creatures of the Adriatic [Fig. 6.1].²⁰ And an influential new German translation by Johannes Heyden of the popular books VII–XI of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia appeared in 1565 in Frankfurt am Main, on the initiative of the publisher Sigmund Feyerabend. It had some 200 newly cut illustrations by the famous Jost Amman and Virgil Solis, including a large number of fish and sea monsters. Feyerabend had obviously been inspired by the success of the 1550s wave of naturalia publications, and his commercial instincts proved correct. This German edition was reprinted at least eight times until 1651.²¹

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Crab and crayfish. Woodcut, probably based on a drawing by Giorgio Liberale da Udine, in Mattioli Pietro Andrea, Commentarii in sex libros Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei De medica materia (Venice, Vincenzo Valgrisi: 1565) 308

Public domain: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/125718#page/484/mode/1up

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No major new works on fish were published in Europe during the rest of the 16th century.²² Obviously, this does not imply that research had ended or that interest petered out. Some of the works discussed earlier continued to be reprinted. And one important work was still in preparation: Ulisse Aldrovandi’s huge volume on aquatilia with five large sections on fish and one on whales (ceti) only came out posthumously, in 1613, edited by Aldrovandi’s former student and successor, the Dutchman Johan Cornelis Uterweer (Uterverius). Of its well over 700 pages, some 340 pages are illustrated, often with more than one woodcut or with full page images. It was based on almost half a century of Aldrovandi’s collecting information, dried fish, and fish drawings, and its origins went back as far as the years 1549–51, as will be discussed below. In terms of its conception, character and formative decades Aldrovandi’s work on aquatilia is thus a very late manifestation of the big wave of the 1550s rather than an example of seventeenth-century natural science.²³

In the domain of print, copper engravings of aquatilia began to play a more important role in the final years of 16th century, in particular in the Low Countries.²⁴ More or less contemporaneously with the emergence of plant and animal still lifes and market scenes in oil, smallish groups of copper engravings began to appear. They hover on the edge between artistic models or scenes and visual natural science.²⁵ Nicolaes de Bruyn’s (undated) group of 13 copper engravings of aquatilia, for instance, was explicitly intended as a model book for painters and sculptors.²⁶ Adriaen Collaert created (from c.1590) a series of engravings that depict various fish species in a setting of beach and coastal landscapes.²⁷ The Dutch printer-engraver Crispijn de Passe produced (1620s?) a small group of copper engravings in which each page shows a handful of aquatilia draped artistically against a watery background. Engravings of aquatic creatures also embellish a small section on fish in Colonna’s publication on plants of 1592 (with images based on Salviani), the published description of the Calzolari museum in Verona (1622); and seven fold-out copperplates conclude Schonefeld’s 100-page work (1624) on the aquatilia of the North-German coastal zones [Fig. 6.2].²⁸

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Spirinchus and silurus. Woodcut in Schonefeld Stephan von, Ichthyologia et nomenclaturae animalium marinorum, fluviatilium, lacustrium (Hamburg, Bibliopolis Heringianus: 1624), Table VII

Public domain: https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb11220552?page=5

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All of the illustrations in the 1550s-wave of publications aimed to represent aquatilia accurately, true to life. Most authors valued empirical observation. Ideally this would be direct, personal observation of the live or dead fish by the naturalist and painter. In practice it often meant that at least someone had seen the fish and had it portrayed, after which a copy, or a copy of a copy, of the image had been sent to the naturalist. Interestingly, only very few of the printed images of the 1550s were copied after older woodcuts, such as the relatively well-known section on fish in the German Hortus Sanitatus (1491).²⁹ The vast majority of the illustrations of the long decade 1550–1563 was newly made. Something quite amazing happened, therefore. Although the genre of natural history publications in general and the interest in fish in particular developed fairly gradually from about 1500, a large, almost full-blown visual corpus of printed aquatilia-images emerged out of nothing in less than a decade in the mid-16th century. The influence of that corpus can be traced until far into the eighteenth century.

There is a further curious aspect to this corpus. Illustrations that appeared within the same decade are totally dissimilar in technical quality and artistic level, and it is impossible to discern any kind of artistic development. Right in the middle of the 1550s-wave, Salviani’s Roman work on fish appeared as the first and virtually only publication in the whole of 16th-century natural history to be illustrated with copper engravings – a more refined and vastly more expensive type of illustration than woodcuts. Artistically, these engravings belong to the top; they are equalled only in the eighteenth century, if ever. That top was reached, therefore, within the first five years of the publishing pattern described here, and Salviani’s engravings are contemporaneous with both excellent and extremely clumsy woodcuts.

This situation sounds unreal, which suggests that we are looking in the wrong way. First, I propose that there is no point in comparing the incomparable and trying to place this heterogeneous material in a line of qualitative visual development: Salviani’s engravings aimed for excellence and were sponsored both financially and in terms of information by a Roman cardinal. They cannot be put on a level with works produced (often for different purposes and a different public) by image makers who had fewer funds, less access to information, less sophisticated printers, and probably fewer skills. Secondly, a very large part of the visual story is missing. In what follows we will look for it, outside the margins of print, and paying most attention to the crucial decades c.1530–1570. In that period, we may expect the most interesting information concerning the character, motivation, and background of the collecting of aquatilia drawings, and thus about the formation of the new visual corpus.

3.1 Early Italian Drawing Collections Begun in the 1520s–1540s

The domain of 16th-century naturalia drawings is at the same time wider, more diffuse, and richer in terms of colours and styles than that of printed illustrations. It is also much less certain in terms of dating and chronology, since collections and albums of drawings were often created over several decades and can contain items made by (generally anonymous) painters from several countries in various periods.³⁰ Those uncertainties have undoubtedly contributed to a certain neglect of this material by historians, but a tacit assumption that drawings lost their usefulness and relevance once printed works with illustrations took over may have been as important. What follows should therefore not only inform us about the existence of naturalia drawings and albums, but also confirm the continued relevance of drawings in the age of print.

First of all, the almost complete absence of such a visual corpus for the 15th century is striking. It needs no arguing that lifelike representations of animals can be found in Europe ever since Greek and Roman antiquity, and that the fourteenth-century Giovannino de’ Grassi, the early 15th-century Pisanello, and numerous illuminators of the 15th century – to name but a few examples – were more than capable of naturalistically depicting animals.³¹ Some drawings of aquatilia figure, of course, in medieval bestiaria, various 15th-century manuscript books of health and herbals, and the illuminations of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. But no codices, albums or collections of drawings from this period exist to my knowledge that are devoted to fish or contain a large visual corpus of recognizable aquatilia. In contrast, plants are depicted by the hundreds in 15th-century herbals.

Something changed around 1500. An example are the eight beautifully painted fish species that appear on the Fischereipatent of 1506 (a legislative document concerning fishing in the Danube) of the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian I, who was known for his interest in naturalia and his passion for hunting and fishing. The illustrated Tiroler Fischereibuch of 1504, again for Maximilian I, shows scenes of fishing with nets and rods, but no detailed representations of fish species.³² Although these sources are not directly connected with the study of nature, and the tradition of local Fischereiordnungen in Bavaria went back much further in time, these particular sources are visually interesting. The 1506-drawings emphasize that extremely lifelike images of living creatures were produced at the very start of the 16th century – and not only in the workshops of contemporary masters such as Dürer, Da Vinci and Carpaccio.

The real boom of aquatilia drawings started in the 1530s and early 1540s, some ten to fifteen years before the major wave of the illustrated printed works discussed above.

The earliest evidence that points to the presence of actual fish in collections comes from Mantua and Venice; it is not precisely dated, but can be traced to before 1530 and most likely after 1500. In her collection of rarities in the Gonzaga palace in Mantua, Isabella d’Este (1474–1539) had not only narwal teeth (then classified as unicorn horns), but also other teeth of fish as well as corals. Her son, Duke Federico II Gonzaga (1500–1540), expanded this collection: an inventory of 1540 refers to his museo naturalistico and describes how sea fish, including five colombi di mare (a name used for rays, which in this case probably had been dried to look like small sea dragons) and ‘other marine monsters’ were hanging in his study between portraits. There were also several crocodiles, the skin of a large sea fish, the sword of a sword fish, teeth of fish, and eleven seasnails.³³ Similar evidence comes from Venice: an inventory made in 1532 of the enormous collection of antiquities, medals and coins, paintings, sculptures et cetera of Andrea Odoni – who belonged to an extremely rich family originally from Milan – also included several crabs, petrified serpents, a dried chameleon, and bizarre fish. These may have come from an even earlier collection owned by the Venetian Francesco Zio (also Giglio).³⁴

These were fishy objects in what looks like early manifestations of curiosity collections. The very earliest reference to an album specifically with fish drawings comes from this context of rich Venetian collectors too. Gabriele Vendramin (1484–1552) was a notable patron of artists – he commissioned Giorgione’s The Tempest – and the owner of one of the most important collections in this city. His collection included (by 1530) a book with animal drawings; one with coloured bird drawings; and a small group of albums with drawings made by a certain Pre Vido Celere (or: Frate Guido Celere) that consisted of one book in quarto of birds; two books in quarto of fish; and two books in quarto of Roman antiquities.³⁵

Of course, it makes sense that naturalists-authors would have begun to collect naturalia drawings as part of the preparatory research for their planned publications, and thus at least months but more probably years before those were printed. It took time and effort to find decent painters and obtain drawings that met the requirements of scientific naturalism.³⁶ Even more time was needed to obtain drawings from contacts in other regions or countries. In fact, Belon, Rondelet, Gessner and Salviani are all known to have collected fish drawings at least several years before their respective publications came out in the 1550s.³⁷ But were all those drawings actually made for print?

A closer look at five of the earliest still traceable collections of aquatilia drawings can help us understand what kind of interest in living nature they served or expressed, and clarifies to what extent these drawings were connected with publication projects or served other purposes. All originated in the 1540s. Three of these five collections are no longer extant, but we can trace their origins and sometimes their contours. Two further and still extant ones continued to expand during the 1550s and early 1560s. All are closely linked with Italy and the Mediterranean.

An almost completely forgotten image collection was created by the German physician-botanist Valerius Cordus (1515–1544).³⁸ Its former existence is well hidden in a few sentences in letters by Conrad Gessner that date from some twenty years after Cordus’s death. Gessner published several works by Cordus, who died very young of fevers in September 1544 in Rome in the course of a peregrinatio medica undertaken in Italy with a group of young fellow physicians and medical students from north of the Alps. Cordus was by no means only interested in plants. He also investigated minerals and ores during his travels in the Alps and Dolomites in the winter and spring of 1543–1544. In this same period, he also discovered the pleasures of studying aquatic creatures, as the quotation at the start of this essay indicates. Those investigations took him from Padua to Venice – a key town for the investigation (and eating) of fish from the Adriatic. Gessner himself had spent some weeks in Venice almost exactly one year earlier (summer 1543), where he examined Greek manuscripts in the famous library of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and fish on the Venetian fish market.³⁹

Cordus systematically collected information about fish during his stay in the Veneto. A series of very accurate descriptions of 66 different marine fish put together in Venice by Cordus, as well as a group of big and beautiful images of aquatilia that Cordus had had made during his stay in Italy in 1544 ended up with Gessner. The fact that Gessner was still thinking of using Cordus’s material in 1563 and 1565 suggests that it only reached Gessner after the latter’s major fish publications in Latin (1558, 1560) had been published.⁴⁰ For present purposes it is more important, however, to point to the early dating and systematic nature of Cordus’s aquatilia collecting, to the central role of Venice, and to how images and verbal descriptions already belonged indelibly together as a research apparatus in the 1540s, following the model of botanical collecting and describing.

A second lost collection of fish drawings is connected with the Medici court in Florence. Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici invited the Neapolitan physician and philosopher Simone Porzio (1497–1554) to lecture in medicine at the University of Pisa, and Porzio wrote several of his most important works during his years in Tuscany (c.1545–1553/4). It may indeed have been Duke Cosimo I himself, a passionate collector of and expert on naturalia, who commissioned Porzio’s short treatise on fish (Tractatus de piscibus, datable to c.1548/49–1553), which remained unfinished and unpublished.⁴¹ Some letters from Porzio to Cosimo I certainly confirm their shared interest in aquatilia. One (1549) contains a fairly accurate description of a Mediterranean monk seal. In another (1550) Porzio describes rare fish that have reached him from La Spezia (north of Pisa) and sends Cosimo their drawings, which had been made for him by the Medicean court painter Francesco Bachiacca – who is also known for his (now badly decayed) wall paintings of plants in Cosimo’s studiolo in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Porzio was, therefore, collecting visual documentation to accompany his fish treatise in manuscript. The whole may have eventually been intended for publication, but there is no doubt that the fish drawings and the dried fish themselves first of all served study and entertainment. In fact, Porzio writes (Sept. 1550) that the Cardinal of Santa Croce had asked him for rare fish because they helped to dispel his melancholic moods.⁴²

That remark is not merely evidence of the pleasure that naturalia offered. This cardinal was none other than the erudite humanist Marcello Cervini (1501–1555), collector of rare editions and Greek manuscripts, key member of the Roman Accademia Vitruviana, and Cardinal Supervisor of the Vatican Library. He became Pope (Marcellus II) in 1555, but died within a few weeks after his election. Cardinal Cervini was personally connected with Hurtado de Mendoza, in whose Venetian library Gessner had studied. Cervini was also a key figure in Salviani’s project to publish a great work on Roman fish. Salviani’s model drawings are the third example of an early but lost collection of aquatilia images of which we can trace some contours. As Salviani wrote, Cardinal Cervini ‘mi consigliaste che io facessi dipingere e incidere in rame le immagini di tutti i pesci che mi fosser venuti alle mani’ (advised me that I should have images made and cut in copper plate of all fish that I could lay hands on). Cervini also provided Salviani with the necessary funding to cover the great expense of these engravings. Salviani acknowledges Cervini’s generous support more than once in his fish work, and in the first dedication of that same work to Cervini – then still a cardinal – which was removed when Cervini died before the printing was completed.⁴³

Cervini’s role went even further than this crucial sponsorship. In 1549–50 and perhaps earlier, he actively helped Salviani obtain drawings and information from both Italy and abroad concerning the aquatilia that the latter wanted to include in his book. As Salviani writes: Cervini,

col vostro eloquente parlare e col vostro esempio eccitando altri tra’ cardinali a far lo stesso, come anche facendo che a spese vostre molte sorte di pesci a noi sconosciute, e senza le quali imperfetta sarebbe stata questa mia storia, venissero esattamente dipinte dalla Francia, dall’Allemagna, dal Portogallo, dalla Brettagna e per fin dalla Grecia.

by your eloquent conversation and example stimulating other cardinals to do the same, as well as taking care that at your expense many kinds of fish that were unknown to us and without which my history would have been imperfect, would be accurately depicted from France, Germany, Portugal, Bretagne and even from Greece.⁴⁴

In precisely the same years when this melancholic cardinal received Porzio’s dried fish, Cervini thus used church diplomatic and personal contacts in order to obtain coloured drawings of fish from abroad that were inaccessible to Salviani: the apostolic nuncio in Lisbon, for instance, sent Cervini twelve drawings of Atlantic fish for Salviani. At least a part of the model drawings for Salviani’s work, therefore, originated outside Italy and was made in different countries and by different painters.⁴⁵

Salviani himself throws some further light on the relations between patrons-collectors and naturalists, and on the importance of the naturalia drawings themselves. Four interesting points emerge. First of all, Salviani (a physician and anatomist by profession) declares that he loved the study of aquatic creatures even better than that of birds and land animals. Second, he describes how his collecting of fish images triggered his deeper interest in their names, identifications, and characteristics – a remarkable reversal of what we usually hear about the humanist interest in nature, which was supposed to arise mainly from (classical) texts and then move on to the visual domain and direct observation:

Ita animus ardentior factus, neque sola nudarum picturarum voluptate contentus, priscis etiam nominibus piscium indagandis, atque reliquae eorum cognitioni sese applicuit.

I became more eager and not content with just the pleasure of the paintings alone, I applied myself to the study of the ancient names of the fishes and other knowledge about them.⁴⁶

While discussing his controversy with Rondelet which centred on accusations of copying model drawings, Salviani makes further interesting remarks. He states that he visited his patron Cardinal Cervini together with Rondelet in 1549–50, some four to seven years, therefore, before the printing of Rondelet’s big works on fish (1554, 1555, and 1558) and of Salviani’s own work of 1554–58. During this visit Rondelet had shown the cardinal his book of fish drawings, which were only in black and white and definitely crude according to Salviani. The latter argues that he would never have copied or taken images from Rondelet, since anyone could see how inferior the quality of Rondelet’s woodcuts was to his own illustrations:

Quae quidem praeter id quod non nativis coloribus, sed solo atramento erant pictae; rudes etiam et ineptae erant adeo, ut nullo prorsus pacto eorum piscium, quorum erant icones, faciem repraesentarent.

Which apart from not being painted in the natural colours but only in black, were also so crude and absurd that they in no way conveyed the appearance of the fish of which they were images.⁴⁷

The point here is not the controversy itself, of course, but the fact that such original drawings – the eventual models for print – were clearly held in great value, plus the fact that Rondelet carried his model drawings with him on his travels. Perhaps they also served as a kind of visual catalogue with which to compare new fish that would still need depicting.

Finally, shortly after this visit to Cervini in 1549–50, Salviani hired Bernardo Aretino (from Arezzo) to paint fish for him: Bernardo lived for two years in Salviani’s house, was paid by the latter on a monthly basis, and left under a shadow.⁴⁸ Salviani emphasizes that Bernardo’s drawings, of which some twenty were seen by Rondelet before the latter left Rome, were of top quality: ‘Nostras ad vivum egregie depictas, et quam verissime ipsorum piscium similitudinem repraesentantes’ (Ours are splendidly painted ad vivum and give the likeness of the fish themselves very truthfully).⁴⁹ Behind the consistently beautiful and accurate printed copper engravings in Salviani’s work lies a long and intricate story, therefore, of model drawings, painters, engravers, sponsors and collectors [Fig. 6.3]. The fish drawings made for Salviani in Rome – mostly by Bernardo Aretino – were definitely not his only visual stock, since he received further drawings from various European countries and Lisbon via Cardinal Cervini and from (or via) several other Italian collectors and naturalists. These drawings cannot possibly have been uniform in style and quality. It seems likely, therefore, that Salviani’s engraver must have contributed much to the fairly consistent style throughout most of the illustrations that were eventually printed.⁵⁰

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St Peter’s fish. Copper engraving in Salviani Ippolito, Aquatilium animalium Historiae liber primus. Cum eorundem formis, aere excusis (Rome, Ippolito Salviani: 1554–1558)

Public domain: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/82337

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Some drawings in Salviani’s image collection had been gifts from the Venetian patrician, church official and humanist Daniele Barbaro (1514–1570), poet, expert on architecture, optics and mathematics as well as one of the key founders of the botanical garden in Padua. Salviani acknowledged his visual debt to Barbaro’s image collection when he wrote in 1558: ‘Dell’ pesci depenti da messer Plinio, che stà con Monsignore Daniello Barbaro, io ne so informatissimo, et me ne so anco serviti di alcuni, perché Monsignore è molto mio patrone’ (I am extremely well informed about the fish painted by Maestro Plinio, who is with Monsignore Daniele Barbaro, and I have used some of them, since Monsignore is very much my patron).⁵¹ Barbaro was the creator of the fourth systematic collection of aquatilia images pre-dating the 1550s to be discussed here. He was nominated Patriarch of the town of Aquileia between Trieste and Venice in 1550, but is better known as humanist-author, young founding member in Padua of the Accademia degli Infiammati (created 1540), diplomat, and friend and patron of the painter Paolo Veronese and the architect Andrea Palladio.⁵² His collection of fish drawings was known as the Libro dei Pesci del Patriarcha.

More is known about Barbaro’s images than about any other of these early lost collections, thanks to the fact that he let naturalists such as Aldrovandi, Belon and Salviani borrow his drawings and copy them.⁵³ The collection probably took the shape of an expanding set of loose sheets with drawings. It may have been bound at some later stage. Thanks to the testimony of Belon, who met Barbaro while the latter was Venetian ambassador at the English court in 1549–51, we know that the collection was already sizeable at this time; that Barbaro employed a painter, Maestro Plinio, for eight years at his own expense; and that this painter accompanied him also during his stay in England.⁵⁴ Belon reports that Barbaro had instructed Maestro Plinio to use most of his time during his eight-year employment to depict all sorts of fish, not only from the Adriatic, but also from the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the rivers and lakes of Italy. He had done his work so well, that Barbaro possessed (in 1550):

le portraict contrefaict au naturel des vives images non seulement de ceuls qui ont estés apportez au marché ou es poissoneries de Venise, mais aussi des autres qui luy ont estés singulierement envoiez des ports et plages d’Esclavonie; lesquelles peinctures sont beaucoup plus de trois cents de compte faicts.

the lifelike portrait in accurate images not only of those brought to the market or fishmongers of Venice, but also others that have been sent to him one by one from the ports and the beaches of Slavonia. There are many more than three hundred of these paintings all added up.⁵⁵

Barbaro clearly also carried this visual material with him during his longer stay abroad in England. This suggests that he needed it to check whether a fish observed there should be newly portrayed or was already present in his collection. In England, Maestro Plinio did not paint only fish. He may actually have worked as a visual documentalist for Barbaro: ‘luy [i.e. Barbaro] qui est prudent et diligent inquisiteur des haults faits de l’Eternel, ne voulant rien laisser en arriere, avoit un peintre avec luy, pour luy representer ce qu’il trouvoit digne’ (he who is a judicious and diligent investigator of the wonders of Creation, wished to leave nothing undone and had a painter with him to depict for him what he found worthwhile).⁵⁶

None of the original 300 or more images in Barbaro’s fish book seem to have survived.⁵⁷ As already explored by the art historian Michel Hochmann, we can only surmise what they looked like by inspecting a limited number of illustrations in the printed works of Belon and Salviani that were indirectly based on Maestro Plinio’s drawings.⁵⁸ The Aldrovandi collection also contains some coloured (copied) drawings that are explicitly based on the Barbaro collection [Fig. 6.4]. Aldrovandi borrowed that collection in the course of the 1550s and again in the 1560s, and referred to it as Ex Patriarcha De piscibus. He not only copied images but also a list of some 100 fish names (partly in Italian, partly in Latin), which gives us some idea of the range of fish documented by Barbaro and his painter. That list includes numerous common Mediterranean fish, from mullus and donzella to sparus and fragolin, but also several fish described as ‘di Fiandra’ (from Flanders), the orca, the whale (balena), trout from Lake Garda, and a ‘rocco d’Inghilterra’, which Barbaro perhaps added to his album while in England, just like the fish ‘sandilz’ (a rendering of the English sandeels). Aldrovandi copied the ‘sandilz’ image from an image that Salviani had in his turn received from Barbaro.⁵⁹

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Orbis stellatus in the Aldrovandi collection, second half 16th century, copied after Daniele Barbaro’s fish book. Aldrovandi, Tavole, vol. 4, fol. 43

© Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria

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Finally, the Barbaro collection is one of the few examples in which at least something is known about the principal painter. Hochmann has identified Maestro Plinio as the painter Magister Plinius – son of Francesco Scarpelli from Tolentino in the Marche – who acted as a witness to the signing of certain notarial deeds (1546–48) by Barbaro’s friends and kinsmen from the powerful Venetian Grimani family, and to a deed (1566) that involved the painter Camillo Mantovano. Earlier notarial records (1540) from Mantua further show that this Francesco Scarpelli, Plinio’s probable father, had acted as a witness to a payment for a house in Mantua by the painter Giulio Romano. Barbaro had thus chosen to hire a professional but non-famous painter possibly connected with the artists active in both Mantua (the Gonzaga court) and Venice.⁶⁰

Given its content, size, geographical range, and the role of the painter, Barbaro’s Libro dei Pesci del Patriarcha was not merely an interesting group of aquatilia drawings, but an important research collection that aimed to provide a visual survey of fresh water and marine creatures of Italy, and the marine ones of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Barbaro was purposely creating a visual corpus of aquatic life, and as eminent classicist must have been perfectly aware of the lack of such material in the classical sources. Barbaro certainly did not intend to publish these aquatic drawings himself. As befitted an erudite patrician and patron of arts and sciences, he lent his visual material to naturalists for use in their publications. Since much of this image collection was in existence by 1550, Maestro Plinio must have begun painting in the 1540s, precisely in the period when Barbaro was closely involved in the creation of the hortus in Padua. One of the purposes of that garden was to bring together a wide range of plant species, and it seems not too farfetched to interpret Barbaro’s aquatic and botanical projects as linked by similar aims and approaches.⁶¹

Scanty though the information about nearly all of these vanished early collections is, the web of image exchanges thickens, and we have begun to discern a whole world of erudite, humanistically trained, expert naturalia and antiquity collectors in Italy during the late 1530s, 1540s and 1550s who commissioned and exchanged naturalia images. They were members of learned academies, often occupied high functions in the church hierarchy, and were actively involved in the patronage, promotion and sponsoring of publication projects. Cardinal Cervini in particular appears to have been a key figure. We have already seen how he was linked with Porzio and Salviani. There was a personal connection between Cervini and the 13 years younger Barbaro as well. In 1551, for instance, Barbaro sent fish drawings from Venice to both Cervini and Salviani.⁶² Cervini maintained good connections with humanist circles of the Veneto, had himself studied in Padua, and was a friend of one of Barbaro’s teachers.⁶³ Cardinal Cervini thus appears to form a link – as sponsor, background figure, and source of inspiration and information – between the creators of three of the early Italian collections of fish drawings: Porzio, Salviani, and Barbaro.

Although collectors could be rivals, there was considerable collaboration too, and joint efforts certainly furthered the creation of a new visual corpus of aquatilia drawings that served entertainment, documentation, nature research, fashion, self-presentation, and in some cases eventually publication. The French naturalists Belon and Rondelet were engaged in the same pursuit in the same period. We know very little so far about what may have been the fate of their collections of drawings, but it is clear that both had Cardinal-patrons and that Belon and Rondelet as well as their patrons had close links with Italy and with Italian naturalists.

3.2 Gessner’s and Kentmann’s Collections and Their Italian Connections

Two interconnected and still partly extant collections of aquatilia drawings that likewise originated in the 1540s and early 1550s are those of Conrad Gessner in Zurich and of his friend, the German physician-naturalist Johannes Kentmann (1518–1574), who spent most of his life in Meissen and Torgau to the east of Leipzig. Both collections are large.

Kentmann’s collection comprises some 120 folios with coloured drawings of marine and freshwater aquatilia; many sheets show more than one fish. He collected aquatilia drawings from at least 1549 to far into the 1560s [Fig. 6.5].⁶⁴ Kentmann sent many of his drawings to Gessner, who copied and used a number of them for the woodcuts in his Historia Animalium IV (1558). But Kentmann also borrowed from Gessner, while both copied drawings from a third party as well. The Kentmann and Gessner drawing collections therefore contain a considerable number of not-quite-identical copies or replicas. Kentmann personally drew many plants during his travels in Italy, and he may also have painted (or copied) various fish images both in Germany and in Italy. Undoubtedly the drawings and descriptions of a number of fish from the river Elbe in his album are based on his own experience.⁶⁵

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Perca marina. Drawing in the Kentmann Codex, middle to late 16th century, Meissen, Thorgau, Fol 323, fol. 11

© Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Weimar

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Gessner’s collection of aquatilia drawings was even larger. The model drawings of 159 of Gessner’s aquatic illustrations (not counting shells) have been identified in the Gessner-Platter albums, rediscovered in 2012 in Amsterdam, and he must have owned at least dozens more.⁶⁶ Gessner was already busy obtaining fish drawings during his stay in Venice in 1543, where he incidentally also met Pierre Gilles. He continued collecting until his death in 1565.⁶⁷ It may be surprising that two men whose home regions could hardly have been further removed from the seas and who were no great travellers, chose to study fish at all. It must have been precisely their lack of personal access to the marine world, however, that made these drawings as ‘placeholders’ for the actual naturalia crucially important as research documentation. Aquatilia are – besides plants – by far the largest group in both their extant collections, which once more underpins the intriguing parallels between botany and fish studies.

Thanks especially to Sachiko Kusukawa’s research much is known about how Gessner collected animal drawings as part of the investigations for his Historia Animalium, and about the crucial role of his wide European network.⁶⁸ Much of his visual fish material arrived from and via friends. In 1547, for instance, Gessner’s friend the theologian Jean Ribit sent him a letter from Lausanne with a drawing of a troutlike fish (locally known as amble or omble) from Lake Geneva. It was drawn in Ribit’s presence by first laying the fish on paper to draw its outline and then painting it as exactly as possible so that Ribit was satisfied.⁶⁹ In 1556 and 1557 Gessner sent specific requests to experts in his network for drawings of various species of Danube fish, such as silurus and jentling.⁷⁰ And in 1556 he dedicated part of his De piscibus to a man he knew only by reputation – Burchard Mythobius in the far north of Germany – precisely in the hope that the latter would send him drawings of fish from the Baltic.⁷¹

Many of Gessner’s early images must have first served as a visual research collection, as we can infer from his writings; only years later some of these became the models for the woodcuts in his Historia Animalium IV of 1558. The detailed visual comparisons between images to which Gessner refers frequently may have helped him to obtain a better idea of the usual shape and appearance of a species – a fishy equivalent of the ideal or generic image of a plant – and to distinguish local varieties and different species [Fig. 6.6].⁷² Such comparisons certainly led Gessner to reject some drawings in favour of others in terms of accuracy rather than purely painterly qualities. Unlike Gessner, Kentmann seems to have never considered publishing about either plants or aquatilia. His drawings appear to have served purely as study material. But the drawings were also a source of pleasure for both men, and formed the substance of gifts that cemented their friendship and helped to establish new bonds with other naturalists and curiosi.

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Three river fish. Coloured drawings in the Gessner-Platter Animal Albums, collected by Gessner in Zurich, c.1540s–65, Album III C 22, fol. 39

© Amsterdam, University Library

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For the landlocked Gessner and Kentmann their links with Italy – which were forged during their formative years as physicians – may well have been crucial in stimulating an interest in the vast variety of aquatilia. Gessner personally acquired his first large cluster of aquatilia drawings in Venice in 1543, while several further important groups of fish drawings came into his possession via Italy. A large but relatively badly documented group consists of some forty-five drawings of aquatilia made in Venice that survive in the Gessner-Platter album in Amsterdam and were used by Gessner as Vorlagen for his printed illustrations. Nearly all of these drawings are undated, and no names of painters or donors have so far been securely identified in either Gessner’s printed texts or the annotation of the drawings.⁷³ Perhaps this is the material that Gessner acquired himself in Venice.

A much better documented cluster of 37 aquatilia drawings in Gessner’s collection originated with the Dutch-Roman physician and naturalist Gysbert Horst (also Gisbertus Horstius, from Amsterdam, c.1491–1555/1556). Given their diverse styles they were probably copies of drawings in Horstius’s personal collection, or drawings freshly commissioned by Horstius from some painterly workshop in Rome [Fig. 6.7]. Horstius was not merely a provider of images to Gessner, but a Roman hub in an international exchange network of naturalists interested in aquatilia, plant medicine and minerals. It stretched across the Alps into Germany and the Low Countries. He had an international reputation as expert on fish, serpents, poisons, and exotic plants and was very well connected in the Roman world too. Horstius practised during the 1540s–50s as senior physician at the Hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione next to the Forum Romanum and was in touch with the top physicians of Rome and the Vatican of the 1540s–50s. Several North-European physicians on their Italian peregrinatio sought him out for his medical and naturalistic expertise since at least the very early 1540s. And Horstius personally exchanged fish information with Belon and Rondelet, and studied fish on the Roman fish market together with Salviani at the time when the latter was preparing his big publication sponsored by Cardinal Cervini.⁷⁴ It is hard to believe that Horstius would not also have met Aldrovandi, Giovio and Gilles during their respective stays in Rome between about 1549 and 1551.⁷⁵

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Mullus barbatus. Coloured drawing sent by Horstius in Rome to Gessner in Zurich, c.1550s. In the Gessner-Platter Animal Albums, Album III C 22, fol. 88

© Amsterdam, University Library

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Gessner’s friend Kentmann, who was also in personal touch with Belon, discussed plants and probably fish with Horstius, and personally painted some plants and trees in Horstius’ Roman garden during his stay in Rome in 1549. Since Horstius transmitted his fish drawings to Gessner in Switzerland via yet another German physician on peregrinatio, Cornelis Sittardus (one of Valerius Cordus’s companions on the fatal trip of 1544), and tutored the Dutch physician Pieter van Foreest (another companion of Cordus), we can discern the contours of an international cluster of naturalists and fish experts active in or connected with Rome. That cluster linked Central Italy with Southern France, Switzerland, Germany and the Low Countries, connecting Europe south and north of the Alps.⁷⁶

In fact, in this brief period Rome and the Roman fish market were a special site of knowledge with a formative influence on a whole generation of famous fish naturalists. Rondelet was in Rome with his patron Cardinal de Tournon for the conclave of 1550. Salviani and Horstius lived permanently in Rome, and while Rondelet managed to fall out with Salviani over image copying, he made friends with the young Aldrovandi, who was in Rome to be investigated by the Inquisition on the suspicion of heresy. Rondelet and Aldrovandi regularly visited the Roman fish market together in order to ‘osservare i pesci più rari, che capitavano, e studiarne le più rimarchevoli strutture e proprietà’ (observe the rarest fish that could be found there, and to study their most notable physical characteristics and properties).⁷⁷ Rondelet also often discussed fish with Giovio.

The stay in Rome was certainly crucial to Aldrovandi’s scientific development. His eighteenth-century biographer Fantuzzi emphasizes that the erudite company of the fish experts mentioned above stimulated Aldrovandi to extend his interest from the antiquities that could be seen locally to naturalia – first of all to fish, only later to plants. The collection of fish and presumably fish images in Rome in these years constituted the very beginning of Aldrovandi’s naturalia collection.⁷⁸ It is yet another example of the primacy of fish and botanical studies in the larger field of naturalia research and collecting. What is more, that connection was also made explicit by Aldrovandi, as Tosi argues:

Era Aldrovandi a suggerire agli allievi l’indagine botanica come esercizio prioritario nello studio della realtà e della storia naturale, a indicare la ‘pescharia’ come luogo privilegiato della curiosità, palestra formativa come lo era stata per lui ai tempi del soggiorno romano.

It was Aldrovandi who advised his pupils to regard botanical research as leading branch of the study of existence and natural history, and to indicate the fish market as privileged site of curiosity, a training ground, as it had been for him during his stay in Rome.⁷⁹

3.3 Naturalism, Observation and Preservation

The collections of aquatilia drawings discussed so far preceded the illustrated publication wave of the 1550s, but mainly originated after the series of unillustrated 1520s–30s publications on aquatilia, which had been a largely textual continuation of a tradition rooted in classical natural history. Practical experience and personal observation were creeping in, and words were no longer enough. There was nothing fortuitous about this timing. The early collections of aquatilia drawings of the late 1530s–early 1540s fit in extremely closely with the earliest traceable phase of botanical and marine fieldwork by European naturalists in Germany, Italy, South-Eastern Europe and the Middle East (1530s–early 1540s); with the dating of the oldest extant herbaria containing dried plants; and with the creation of the earliest university botanical gardens in Italy in the mid 1540s and that of many private collector’s gardens in various European countries in the same decade.⁸⁰ Such a close correlation suggests that we are looking here at a really new and many-stranded development, and not merely at a phenomenon of which we cannot fathom earlier phases for lack of sources. Geographically, the Mediterranean was the core area with centres of image production and distribution in Venice and the Veneto, Rome, almost certainly in Montpellier, and possibly in Lyon.⁸¹ But interest in aquatilia rippled northwards – following the return paths of the medical peregrinatio by north Europeans and of their journeys in the service of diplomacy and espionage.

The evidence of the early image collections also points to the crucial role of coloured drawings as placeholders. Fish posed exceptional problems of preservation. Only few of their body parts were hard enough to be dried. In the 1540s-circles of Salviani and Porzio, drying techniques similar to those developed for plants were certainly used to preserve fish skins.⁸² But the dried material soon became brittle, as we can see on a few exceptional pages in the German Ratzenberger plant herbarium (1590s) that present dried ray’s eggs, parts of shells, and even fragments of a cuttlefish bone.⁸³ Once out of the water, fish also quickly lose their distinctive colours, and this is not only aesthetically relevant. Colours and shine are as important to correct identification – and therefore fish study – as shape, size and build. While plants posed the painterly-scientific challenge of how to render their various stages of growth in one representation, the major difficulty with (most) aquatilia was how to depict them as colourful and shiny as they looked when alive.

Two letters show how clearly contemporary collectors-naturalists were aware of these problems, and how they discussed them. The first dates from 1552, right in the middle of the wave of fish interest, and shows us the young Carolus Clusius in the rather unusual role of a dried fish collector in Montpellier, where he was staying in Rondelet’s house. The young German physician Lorenz Gryll, who had stayed earlier with Rondelet, wrote to Clusius from Paris, asking him for some thirty species (specified in a list) of dried Mediterranean fish that were unfamiliar to the Germans:

[…] ineunte vere si probe siccati sint pisces, de iis transmittendis consilium non deerit. Seliges autem corpora piscium nec grandia nimis nec minutissima, sed mediae magnitudinis. Uteris tamen tuo arbitrio hac in re quod quidam pisces minuti plane alii sunt, in plerisque autem eadem figura constat quaecumque sit aetas. Dubii autem et qui aridi formam mutant schedulis appensis erunt notandi. Potes hoc indice iuvari, quamvis plures alii tibi succurrere possint. Scis autem quosdam plane integros siccari posse, alios autem exemptis interaneis palea replendos.

By early spring, if the fish are properly dried there will be no lack of advice about their dispatch. Choose the bodies of fish that are neither too large nor too small but of medium size. Use your judgment in this matter for some fish when they are small are completely different, while in most cases they retain the same shape whatever their age. Uncertain ones and those which change their shape when dried will have to be noted in appended labels. You can make use of this list although several others may occur to you. You know that some can be dried as they are, while others have to be filled with straw after their internal organs have been removed.⁸⁴

A second letter, sent from Crete by the Italian naturalist-physician and antiquarian Onorio Belli (1596) shows clear awareness of the relevance of colour to identification:

Hunc[!] scaros, sicut postulas siccos accepies: qui nihil cum recent[e] captis conveniunt, nam colores quibus insigniti a natura sunt omino perierunt. Scari hi duorum sunt generum. Maiores iconem tibi missum aemulantur. Minores vero colore rubri et melli sunt, quibusdam extremitatibus cerulei, ut mirum immodum oculis gratissimi videantur. [….] Figuram, quam Bellonius ad calcem octavi capitis primi observationum libri exhibit, mala est: neq[ue] scarum exhibit: ut ex pisce sicco, et icone missa facillime percipies.

Here are the dried scari, as requested. They are nothing like freshly caught ones, because their natural colouring has been completely lost. These scari are of two sorts. The larger ones match the image sent to you; the smaller ones are naturally red and honey-coloured with blue extremities. […] The image which Belon shows […] is bad: it is not even a scarus, as you can easily see from the dried exemplar and from the image sent to you.⁸⁵

Some experimented with special preservative liquids, as is documented for Grand Duke Francesco I de’ Medici and his painter Jacopo Ligozzi in the late 1570s.⁸⁶ But the more obvious solution was to make drawings as quickly as possible after fish had been caught, and to consult persons who had actually seen them alive or regularly caught or sold them.

Few early modern naturalists actually observed fish alive, out at sea, on the beaches, or immediately after they had been caught. Belon on his Mediterranean voyages, Mattioli during his coastal explorations along the Adriatic, and the Dutch wholesale merchant and specialist in fish Adriaen Coenen (see below) are a few examples. Mattioli, for instance, explicitly refers to his personal, sensorial experience: he had seen many gobio fish in the lakes and rivers of the Trentino; suffered the stings of jellyfish; and had seen on the beaches of Istria how a stingray smashed its hook deep into the wood of a fishing boat.⁸⁷ Belon too emphasized his personal observation when stating that he had often travelled by the night boat from Padua on Thursday evening down the river Brenta, arriving next morning in Venice, where he remained all day to observe fish that had been brought to the famous Venetian fish market. He had also stayed for the whole of Lent in Venice and interviewed fishermen.⁸⁸

Fish markets and ports, especially at Lent, offered some of the best sites to observe common and unusual fish that at least retained a little of their colours and shine. They became even more important when fishmongers and fishermen knew that a naturalist was searching for special and rare items, and probably willing to pay for them. That was certainly the case with Horstius and Salviani in Rome. The former received information about a special catch from the port of Civitavecchia some 80 kilometres northwest of Rome. And Salviani describes how fishmongers at the Roman fish market (located since the Middle Ages in the Portico d’Ottavia that dates back to the second century BC) often sent him messages to come and inspect rarities. On one such occasion, Salviani rushed to the fish market and found a large and rare Mola mola (sunfish), which he recognized because the naturalist Luca Ghini had earlier sent him a drawing of this species. Salviani had the Mola mola transported to his house, where many erudite friends who shared his interest in naturalia admired it. He personally dissected the fish so that they could inspect its inner structure and organs, and corroborate the correctness of his drawing. The drawing of this Mola mola served as the model for his printed illustration [Fig. 6.8].⁸⁹

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Mola mola. Copper engraving in: Salviani Ippolito, Aquatilium animalium Historiae liber primus. Cum eorundem formis, aere excusis (Rome, Ippolito Salviani: 1554–1558)

Public domain: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/82337

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The growing textual emphasis on personal observation and the matching visual emphasis on naturalism and ad vivum depicting formed part of a rhetorical strategy that underpinned reliability by pointing to experientia – a well-known technique by this time that was also used extensively in botanical and anatomical studies.⁹⁰ But even if some of these claims were vastly exaggerated, all naturalists of this period did indeed believe that personal observation was important and that visual representations should be as lifelike as possible in the service of accurate identification. If they had not attached great value to that match between a representation and its subject, men like Barbaro and Rondelet would have hardly carried their drawings collections with them on their international journeys; nor would many naturalists have used their international networks to obtain more accurate drawings. In fact, there would not have been much reason for field observations at all.

The history of the image collections discussed above demonstrates that many drawings – and even some whole collections – were created without any intention to print this material on the part of either painter or collector. Large numbers of drawings were first and foremost intended as study material. Eventually, and in only in some cases, such image collections could also serve as a fund from which to select models for printed illustrations. The whole of the corpus of aquatilia newly drawn in the 1540s–50s attempted a lifelike visual rendering of naturalia. That visual format mainly served identification. On many drawings the names (or short descriptions) of the aquatilia are written on the page close to the drawing – again following the model of plant studies – in an attempt to link the images to fish names used in classical sources, 16th-century vernacular languages and local dialects.⁹¹ The drawings also played an important part in the gift exchanges and construction of friendship networks among naturalists and collectors. And they provided pleasure to collectors, viewers, the naturalists themselves and presumably the painters. They had distinct lives, therefore, outside the domain of print.

4.1 Arts and Sciences

Looking back from the later 16th century, it is hard to avoid the impression that the wave of the 1540s–1550s enhanced – and probably was itself part of – an impressive aquatilia fashion that fanned out from Italy and France to the rest of Europe and lasted until well into the seventeenth century. By fashion I mean a fascination that spread very widely through European society and manifested itself in scientific research as much as in decorative arts, literature, folk songs, and painting. In spite of the general popularity of living nature and natural history in this period, no such wave seems to have occurred with respect to other living creatures. The interest in plants showed a more continuous and steady growth. Birds followed almost immediately in the slipstream of the aquatilia. A fascination with insects came into its own in the later decades of the 16th century. But water and fish dominated the mid 16th century and remained en vogue for a very long time. Here, courtly art and artful science found a perfect meeting point: aristocratic collecting and self-fashioning fused with elite patronage of naturalists and painters in setting visual trends and scientific passions.

Outside the domain of coloured drawings and printed illustrations this fascination can be traced in a series of phenomena that appear to culminate in the 1550s–1560s as well. These deserve to be mentioned briefly here and should be studied together, precisely because they incorporate and link up with the ‘scientific’ information, while fitting into the yet larger context of the partly classically inspired fascination with water, fountains, baths, river gods, cascades, shells, grottoes, and their Mannerist representations and designs.

A cluster of hard to classify texts incorporate both classical fish information and new, 16th-century study of the aquatic world. The best-known example is probably De natura aquatilium carmen (1558) by the French physician François Boussuet (1522–1572). The illustrations and the textual information of this work of epigrammatic verses in Latin about fish are largely based on Rondelet’s Libri de piscibus marinis, which had been published a few years earlier (1554–55) by the very same publisher in Lyon.⁹² All other examples in this genre known to me are un-illustrated. They include a Latin dialogue published in 1554 by the German physician Johannes Lange (1485–1565) in which two German students discuss fish on the Venetian fish market, and the better known and much longer vernacular poems (rime pescatorie) published in the 1550s in that same city, and frequently reprinted.⁹³

An even more intriguing group of texts belongs specifically to the area of Naples. These egloghe pescatorie consist of highly erudite, book-length poems in Latin that focus almost completely on fish and fishermen – transposing the format of Virgil’s bucolic egloghe to the domain of the sea. Their roots reach back to the Neapolitan humanist and poet Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530), author of Arcadia and of five Eclogae piscatoriae that he himself published in 1526. Two of the most famous egloghe pescatorie explicitly link the findings of contemporary, 16th-century natural science with the classical tradition: Egloghe pescatorie by the Neapolitan poet Ber(n)ardino Rota (1560) and Mergellina. Egloghe piscatorie (1598) by the Neapolitan theologian, poet and archaeologist Giulio Cesare Capaccio. They bridge the genres and have been studied by Caracciolo not only as a literary genre with classical roots, but also in the context of natural science and the Kunst- und Wunderkammern tradition. The publication years of these dialogues and poems are as significant in the present context as the fact that many originated in the two principal Italian ports.⁹⁴

A clear manifestation of how the fascination with the world of water entered the decorative arts can be seen in the frescoes (and some tapestries) that decorate vaulted ceilings and more occasionally walls in Italian villas and urban palaces. Many of these show mythological and classicizing scenes with often fantastic water creatures and grotesque fishes, but they also contain lifelike, identifiable aquatilia. That distinction is not only a modern one. In the early 1580s, as discussed by Acciarino, the Bolognese naturalist Aldrovandi emphasized the difference between grotesque and lifelike representations: the latter could serve scientific purposes since they aimed at lifelike representation, while the former had no immediate connection with nature but with fantasy.⁹⁵

Interestingly, the prominence of lifelike fish on frescoes in Italian palazzi and villas chronologically peaks once again between the early 1550s and the mid 1570s. Examples include the vaulted ceiling in Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza (designed by Palladio and built from 1551) with numerous lifelike fish – from tortoises to eels, crabs, lobsters, flat fish, sturgeon, and red gurnard – among the grotesques painted in 1557–58 by Eliodoro Forbicini from Verona, who appears to have worked in other Palladian villas as well; the vaulted ceiling of the entrance to Palazzo Vitelli (constructed c.1540s–50s) in Città di Castello not far from Perugia; ceiling frescoes dated to 1558–61 in the Sala dei Pesci (also of Neptune) in the Palazzo Ducale of the Gonzaga in Mantua [Fig. 6.9]; and ceiling frescoes in the famous Villa d’Este in Tivoli near Rome, built for Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este from c.1561.⁹⁶

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Detail of the ceiling frescoes and stucco of aquatilia on the ceiling of the Sala dei Pesci/di Nettuno in the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua, 1558–61

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Ceiling and wall frescoes in the Stanza degli Elementi of Palazzo Firenze in Rome are an even more impressive example. There is hardly a trace of the grotesque here, and the symbolic grouping of living creatures according to their element goes hand in hand with a highly naturalistic representation. It is easy to recognize several types of blowfish, various flatfish, crabs and lobsters, many shells, and a curled-up eel that looks as if it comes straight out of either Gessner or Salviani; in the fish festoons there may even be the face of a sunfish. As further visual references among the animals (a rhinoceros, a chameleon) show, these frescoes do indeed incorporate contemporary ‘scientific’ and published knowledge. They were painted in the 1570s by Jacopo Zucchi for Ferdinando de’ Medici, at that time Cardinal and later successor of his older brother Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici [Fig. 6.10].⁹⁷

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Frescoes painted by Jacopo Zucchi for Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici in Palazzo Firenze, Rome, 1570s

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The very earliest and highly influential examples of lifelike decorative fish date from much earlier, however, and can be found among the grotesque decorations of Raphael’s Loggias in the Roman Vatican (c.1519). They have been intensively studied and include many zoologically identifiable painted fish, birds (including a very early American colibri) and other animals, in particular on the pilasters.⁹⁸ The influence of these particular fish representations can be traced, for instance, in illuminated decorations on several folios of the Book of Hours painted (1530s) by the Papal illuminator Vincenzo Raimondi in Rome for Eleonora Gonzaga, wife of Francesco Maria I, Duke of Urbino.⁹⁹ And they are directly linked as well with fresco decorations in Palazzo Grimani in Venice. In fact, the same painter, Giovanni da Udine, who was responsible for the pilaster decorations in the Vatican Loggia’s of c.1519 also designed fresco decorations in the Venetian Grimani palace twenty years later (c.1537–39). Two wall frescoes in the Stanza di Psyche of Palazzo Grimani with highly naturalistic frescoes of birds and fish that hang from candelabra-like painted shapes closely resemble those in the Vatican.¹⁰⁰ The Grimani context is particularly significant. Several members of the Grimani family were among the great antiquities collectors of the Veneto, while Giovanni (1506–1593), who in 1558 became the sole proprietor of the Grimani Palace, was not only a collector and bishop, but also Patriarch of Aquileia. He was both a kinsman of Daniele Barbaro and the latter’s immediate predecessor as Patriarch [Fig. 6.11].¹⁰¹

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Wall frescoes by Camillo Mantovano in the Stanza di Psyche of Palazzo Grimani, Venice, detail

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Live fish also played a part in mannerist display, decoration and entertainment. At the very end of the 16th century, Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol personally designed a circular fish pond protected by a pagoda-like roof. It was planned with a central viewpoint that could be reached by a footbridge. From there the viewer would be able to look at all segments of the pond: each should contain different fish species, alternating exotic and European ones.¹⁰² An even more ingenious use of live fish was made in the famous Big Grotto of the Florentine Boboli gardens, created between 1583 and 1593 by Bernardo Buontalenti for the Medici. It foreshadows the tunnel-under-water experience in modern aquariums. Originally, the opening in the ceiling of this Big Grotto was closed off with a large glass slab that let in light and also served as the transparent bottom of an aquarium-pond. Fish thus swam above the heads of the grotto’s visitors, and shadows cast by both fish and water created enchanting underwater effects on the walls of the grotto below.¹⁰³

Yet further evidence of the spreading fascination with aquatilia in the 16th century occurs in manuscript illumination. Three diverse pre-16th century texts about the animal world that originally had no illustrations at all were decorated with coloured illuminations of fish (and other animals) between about 1550 and 1590 – decades to centuries after the texts themselves originated. One of these is a work about the animal world written in the mid-15th century by the humanist Pietro Candido Decembrio (1399–1477) for the ruling Gonzaga family in Mantua. As argued by Pyle, more than a century later an unknown painter inserted finely painted, coloured images of animals in the bottom margins of most pages of its 15th-century exemplar on parchment now in the Vatican Library. Almost certainly an elite collector commissioned these illuminations. They include a large number of aquatilia. Since many of these illuminations are directly based on Gessner’s printed illustrations, they must date from after 1558.¹⁰⁴ The fact that this happened at all tells us that the late 16th-century owner of the Candidus Codex felt the absence of images so strongly that he or she thought it worthwhile to have them added to this valuable manuscript.

Handpainted illumination in colour was, in fact, by no means outmoded and illuminated manuscripts remained highly valued and precious in the mid to late 16th century as one glance at the work of famous illuminators such as Giulio Clovio (active 1530s–70s in Venice, Mantua, Florence, and Rome) and Georg Hoefnagel (active at the Habsburg courts of Prague and Vienna around 1600) demonstrates. Elite collectors, in fact, newly commissioned works by both illuminators and calligraphers. Those works included old and new texts about nature. In the mid-16th century the Cretan calligrapher Angelos Vergekios, who arrived in France via Venice and worked at the French royal court from c.1539 until his death in 1569, produced at least 11 copies of an even older text than the Candidus one. This was a 2000-lines long poem about the natural world, De animalium proprietate, by the Byzantine poet Manuel Phyles (c.1275– c.1345). Vergekios’s manuscript copies are illustrated with coloured animal drawings by an unknown painter. The exemplars differ slightly in both quantity and characteristics: the Vatican exemplar of 1560 has 109 illuminations on 60 folia, the Bodleian of 1564 has 106 illustrations on 62 folia, for instance. There is a notable presence of aquatilia, and again many of these illuminations are based on printed zoological illustrations of the 1550s–60s.¹⁰⁵

A third, far less investigated and equally intriguing example concerns a unique incunable of Pliny, printed in 1481 in Parma: besides the initial and incomplete illumination that presumably dates from the 1480s, a considerable number of extremely finely painted watercolours of aquatilia, a few birds, and some fruits appears in the margins of its later pages [Fig. 6.12]. Even less is known in this case about the number and identity of the painters involved, who commissioned the drawings, and in which year (or periods) they were inserted, except that one image dates from after 1515 and one textual annotation must post-date 1523. So far, no models in either print or drawing have been discovered for the extremely lifelike coloured fish, fruit and bird drawings. Stylistically they seem to belong to the 1570s–1610s.¹⁰⁶ If, however, the aquatilia illuminations in this Parma Pliny would turn out to have been made in the 1530s–40s, they should be rated among the most sophisticated early images of naturalia in Europe.

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Detail of the decorations in Pliny, Naturalis Historia (Parma, Andreas Portilia: 1481), Parma, Biblioteca Palatinense, Inc. 1158, fol. 74v

© Parma, Biblioteca Palatinense

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In each of these three very different codices the illuminations are directly related to the text and literally illustrate it, but they remain separate from it and from each other. Nearly all are painted on the whitish background of the page, sometimes with a trompe-l’oeil shadow to give them further relief, and they are unaccompanied by any other figures or decorative patterns. These were illustrations added to texts at a time when the visual turn was enforcing itself. Their functions were clearly different from those of the image collections discussed earlier. On the one hand these prized miniatures embellished texts about nature and turned precious manuscripts into even more valued (and valuable) exemplars for wealthy collectors. On the other hand, precisely by modelling themselves on printed scientific illustrations, these hand-painted illuminations demonstrated that the collector’s knowledge of living nature was state-of-the-art.

5.1 New Questions

It is impossible to discuss the post-1550s history of aquatilia drawings in the same way as that of the earlier decades because the situation was profoundly different. Before the 1550s basically no printed works with large numbers of aquatilia images existed in Europe. A new visual corpus consisting of very large numbers of mostly coloured drawings was created in the 1530s–50s; parts of that corpus entered into print. By about 1560, in contrast, thousands of aquatilia images – mainly in black-and-white – were accessible in print, while numerous coloured drawings circulated via repeated copying among expert collectors and naturalists.

That raises several questions concerning the making and collecting of naturalia drawings in the context of the study of nature after c.1560. What exactly was the point of commissioning and collecting newly made drawings? Was the visual corpus in print not enough? Was colour so essential to aquatilia identification that naturalists and collectors continued to need drawings? Did the post-1560 drawings collections mainly focus on new fish species that had not yet been visually documented, or that had been unclearly identified? Or were the post-1560 drawings better, in the sense of scientifically more accurate and truer to life? Were they less or more closely connected to printing purposes than before? And who were the principal collectors?

The question about the contents of the later image collections is easily answered. They do indeed include ‘new’ fish species, but all later collections – even those begun around 1590–1600 – continue to depict (both in copied and newly drawn images) an already well-known range of fish species. None of them contains only new species. Repetition of the most common species is the rule. If a quantitative comparison of species in all these image collections would ever be undertaken, it might even indicate a particular set of canonical species that could well go back to the influence of classical textual sources. Furthermore, the fact that hardly any new printed works about aquatilia appeared after c.1560 already suggests that the drawings of the decades c.1560–1610 were usually not made or collected as models for eventual printed and illustrated works – always with the exception of Aldrovandi.

A good example from the late 16th century is the huge collection of naturalia drawings created by the physician-naturalist Felix Platter in Basel. He had no intention to publish them. Both his drawings and the dried plants of his herbarium served as a research collection, a visual and wide-ranging database on living nature, in which he incorporated whole earlier collections created by and for others: the most famous one consists of Gessner’s model drawings of animals that dated back to c.1545–1565. The aquatilia drawings that Platter collected personally follow these earlier patterns perfectly. Like Gessner, Platter’s collection method of the 1580s–1600s was encyclopaedic: his range was very wide, and he did not focus on new, additional species. Though painterly styles differ, the visual formats are identical. And both Gessner and Platter collected important clusters of aquatilia drawings in or from Venice.¹⁰⁷

5.2 North-Italian Aquatilia Drawings, c.1560s–c.1580s

Three clusters of aquatilia drawings from the period c.1560–c.1585 help us to better understand shifts in how image collecting of naturalia was connected with changing knowledge about aquatic nature; who collected them; and what the functions of their drawings may have been.

The largest of these interconnected clusters is also the most complex one. It comprises hundreds of aquatilia drawings in Aldrovandi’s massive collection in Bologna; a (now lost) album of fish drawings commissioned by the Venetian herbalist cum barber-surgeon and collector Leone Tartaglini (died c.1576); and a beautiful oblong codex on parchment in the Habsburg collections. That codex (Cod. Min. 83) has only 20 folios, but each of those shows up to five water creatures. The link between these three sets of images is the Medici court painter Jacopo Ligozzi (1547–1627), who is famous for his extremely finely painted and naturalistic drawings of plants and animals.¹⁰⁸ Ligozzi is the probable painter of this parchment fish codex. He also made fish drawings for Tartaglini in Venice, some of whose visual material entered Aldrovandi’s collection via copying. And Ligozzi both made and copied naturalia drawings directly for Aldrovandi, for whom he sometimes also copied his own drawings made for the Medici. The latter were both Ligozzi’s and Aldrovandi’s patrons during a large part of the 1570s–80s.¹⁰⁹

By the late 16th century Aldrovandi’s collection of naturalia drawings (Tavole) had grown to be probably the largest one in Europe. The extant part consists of 10 volumes, some in two parts, each of which contains between 100 and almost 300 figures; there are at least 250 figures of aquatilia [Fig. 6.13].¹¹⁰ The roots of his image collection go back to Aldrovandi’s years in Rome (1549–50), as discussed earlier. His entire collection reflects half a century of nature research (c.1550–c.1600), but since most of the drawings cannot be individually dated, it is impossible to reconstruct a clear chronology of his collecting. Olmi and Tongiorgi Tomasi in particular have shown that Aldrovandi employed a ‘bottega’ of painters in the course of these 50 years. There was a clear division of tasks. In terms of the production process, painters of documentary drawings and of model drawings for print came first. They were followed by those who transferred selected drawings to woodblocks that would then be handed over to the woodcutters. Aldrovandi’s painters did not all work at the same time: some of them coincided in the course of this long period. Some painted large quantities of images for him, others only a few. Furthermore, painters might work on drawings years and even decades before these would be printed, and may not always have known whether their drawings would serve only research or also print.¹¹¹

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Lupus marinus, and coracinus in the Aldrovandi collection, second half 16th century. Aldrovandi, Tavole, vol. 4, fol. 19

© Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria

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Ligozzi was certainly the most famous painter connected with Aldrovandi (from 1577 on), but his total contribution to the latter’s image collection was modest in a quantitative sense: no more than about 30 drawings of naturalia can securely be attributed to him, as Olmi argues. By far the larger part of Aldrovandi’s animal drawings was painted by Giovanni de’ Neri, whom Aldrovandi employed in his home town Bologna and paid for nearly thirty years, c.1558–c.1590. From about 1558 to 1564 Neri may even have been Aldrovandi’s only painter. Neri’s high production rate is reflected in the unimpressive artistic quality of many of his drawings, which clashes especially with those by Ligozzi.¹¹²

Aldrovandi’s collection consisted not only of newly drawn images, however. Like Gessner, Salviani and many other naturalists, he also incorporated drawings sent him by friends. These had been made elsewhere and by other painters, therefore. But more importantly, Aldrovandi’s own painters often copied drawings in the collections of others or made duplicate images of their own drawings. We have already seen that Aldrovandi had a whole cluster of Daniele Barbaro’s Venetian fish drawings copied in the mid 1550s; he borrowed the latter’s fish book again in the late 1560s.

Not much hard evidence is available about the album or book with fish drawings on parchment commissioned by Leone Tartaglini in Venice, but it is possible to sketch a few contours and exclude some possibilities. While it is very likely that Tartaglini had some images copied from the older Barbaro album, the Barbaro and Tartaglini fish albums – both lost, both Venetian – were two distinct image collections with different chronological origins, different painters, and very probably a different materiality and functions. First of all, they were two distinct objects: in October 1571 Aldrovandi saw not only Tartaglini and his collection in Venice, but also admired the late Daniele Barbaro’s fish book in a palazzo of the Barbaro family.¹¹³ Barbaro’s fish book was already sizeable by 1550. Tartaglini’s collecting of fish drawings seems to have belonged rather to the 1560s–70s, though an earlier start cannot be excluded. The fish album was only one of Tartaglini’s ‘painted books’ with naturalia drawings, moreover: others depicted birds and plants. Finally, the contrasting ways in which Barbaro and Tartaglini treated their albums offers some important clues. As we have seen, Barbaro travelled abroad carrying around his large aquatilia image collection of at least 300 figures, and lent his albums repeatedly to Aldrovandi. This was a research collection for Barbaro’s own delight that could also be lent to naturalists who enjoyed his patronage. Whatever their scientific quality, it seems unlikely that these were luxury drawings on expensive parchment. Tartaglini’s naturalia drawings, on the other hand, were definitely painted on parchment. And his last will of 1576 indicates that he regarded his parchment books of bird, plant and fish drawings as so precious that he kept them in a safe place, so that no one would touch them but himself and the few persons to whom he gave access. He certainly did not let them out of his sight.¹¹⁴

The intriguing Tartaglini, who originally did not come from Venice but from a small town in eastern Tuscany, combined a number of professional activities. He was an herbalist with his own stall (banco) on the central Venetian Piazza San Marco, a cerusico (barber-surgeon), a collector of naturalia, antiquities and coins, who also owned exotic animals such as a live monkey and a (dead) bird of paradise. Tartaglini dried and sold many fish, including fake dragons, and he had a garden on Murano where he grew herbs and special plants that interested collectors. The rarities he owned included plant drawings on parchment by Ligozzi, marble antiquities, seeds, minerals, and an exotic fish skin. He was both an expert and a commercial entrepreneur who operated in the world of antiquities and naturalia collectors, as Paula Findlen has pointed out, calling him ‘an artisan of nature and a vendor of secrets’. He may well have acted as agent and dealer not merely in the naturalia themselves, but also in the costly images of naturalia on parchment. His last will states that his precious parchment albums of birds, plants and fish should be offered for 70 scudi to the bishop of Verona (Agostino Valier), who had already admired them earlier.¹¹⁵

It seems likely that more than just one painter was involved in the making of Tartaglini’s three albums during the 1560s–70s. Jacopo Ligozzi from Verona, who spent some time in Venice in the 1570s, certainly painted fish and plants for Tartaglini, and there was also a definite link with Francesco Ligozzi, the slightly less talented brother of Jacopo.¹¹⁶

Jacopo Ligozzi’s involvement in the making of the Tartaglini albums might even help explain how Ligozzi gained enough of a reputation to be appointed court painter by the Medici in 1577 – which itself could throw some further light on the dating of other naturalia drawings. Among those are the 20 folios with water creatures of the abovementioned Viennese Codex Miniatus 83, which has formed part of the imperial Habsburg collections since the years of Rudolph II. Conigliello has pointed out that its large format parchment folios and the very fine painterly style with highly realistic details, some fantastic fish, and mannerist traits are reminiscent of Jacopo Ligozzi. She also argues that most of the depicted aquatilia are Mediterranean, and suggests that several animals seem painted from life, but that others definitely go back to printed sources, which range from Belon’s editions of 1551 and 1553 to Salviani’s work of the mid 1550s. There are close visual links as well with some of Aldrovandi’s images. One of the Codex’s two drawings of sunfish (Mola mola), for instance, goes back straight to Salviani’s sunfish. The filiation of its second Mola mola leads us into yet another loop: it is based on Aldrovandi’s Mola mola that itself was copied after Daniele Barbaro’s fish book [Fig. 6.14].¹¹⁷

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Parchment folio with fish drawings, including a Mola mola probably copied after Salviani (cf. Fig. 6.8.). Undated, attributed to Jacopo Ligozzi. Cod. Min. 83, fol. 7

© Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

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Many questions about Cod. Min. 83 still remain open, however, and its drawings have not yet been systematically compared with various other image collections. It seems more than likely that Jacopo Ligozzi was involved, while new research by Concin indicates that he made this album (probably 1577–78) while in the service of the Medici, and that it was part of a lavish set of diplomatic gifts in 1578 from Francesco I de’ Medici to Rudolph II.¹¹⁸ It was certainly possible for a painter to work under both Habsburg and Medici patronage – though usually not at the same time. The miniaturist Daniel Froeschl (c.1572–1613), for instance, worked at Rudolph II’s court in Prague and was responsible for an early seventeenth-century court inventory of Habsburg albums that links Ligozzi’s name with Cod. Min. 83. Froeschl the painter also made at least some naturalia drawings in a heterogeneous and undated codex in Pisa: some of its circa 25 pages with aquatilia drawings are clearly linked with Habsburg codices while others are connected visually with Aldrovandi drawings [Fig. 6.15].¹¹⁹

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Various aquatilia in the Codex Daniel Froeschl – Nicolaes De Bruyn, MS 514, fol. 272, c.1570–1620s

© Pisa, Biblioteca Universitaria

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The group of Habsburg codices with naturalia drawings inventorized by Froeschl comprises two further sets of drawings that focus completely on aquatilia: a coarsely painted and undated large album, and a stunningly beautiful (unbound) series of drawings on very large parchment sheets.¹²⁰ About the former album, Cod. Ser. 2648, very little is known. It supposedly dates from the second half of the 16th century, has almost 60 folios, and contains a large number of drawings of marine aquatilia accompanied by their names in Italian.¹²¹ The beautiful parchment codex of loose sheets (Cod. Ser. 2669) is a very different case. It once more highlights a close collaboration between a naturalist-physician – Pietro Andrea Mattioli – and a painter: Giorgio Liberale da Udine (c.1527–1579). Both were Italians; both worked mainly under the patronage of the Austrian Habsburgs.

Mattioli’s European fame as a naturalist rests on his work on plants, and in particular on his numerous, ever expanding and permanently updated editions of Dioscorides. While printed illustrations began to appear in the 1554-edition, as discussed earlier, increasing numbers of large fish and animal illustrations can be found in the Latin editions of 1563 and 1565 published by Valgrisi in Venice. Giorgio Liberale da Udine was the painter of by far the larger part of all these images – plants and animals. His collaboration with Mattioli started in 1553. Mattioli was not exaggerating when he called Liberale his personal painter if we inspect the quantities and quality of the woodcut illustrations and try to imagine the amount of time that Liberale must have spent on the model drawings. The 1554-Mattioli edition contains some 600 small plant and animal drawings. By 1565 there are some 900 large woodcuts of plants and some 100 of animals.¹²²

Obviously, the chronology of this collaboration is significant. It indicates that Mattioli and his publishers were highly sensitive to the visual turn in the early 1550s. It also suggests that Mattioli was well aware in 1553–54 of the fish works that fellow-naturalists and rivals were publishing and preparing. Liberale’s drawings made between c.1553 and c.1565 for Mattioli were, therefore, intended from the start for print – not for collecting, nor for display, nor exclusively as research material. Presumably for this reason his original model drawings do not survive: they may have been destroyed during the printing process. Other originals by Liberale do still exist, however.

In early 1555, Mattioli moved from Gorizia (north of Trieste) to Prague, where he became court-physician and naturalist of Archduke Ferdinand II, younger brother of Emperor Maximilian II, governor of Bohemia (1547–67), and ruler of Tyrol from 1564. Liberale da Udine appears to have followed Mattioli soon afterwards to Prague, at least for the duration of his work on the large format book illustrations. Ferdinand II extended his patronage to Liberale, and c.1562 commissioned him to create what can only be called a visual fauna of the Adriatic Sea on a princely scale [Fig. 6.16]. The result was the very large format Cod. Ser. 2669 that consists of 100 oblong folios of calf parchment, measuring 88 × 64 cm. They are painted in incredibly fine brushwork, mostly on both sides. There were many delays, however. Nine years after the initial contract, which promised Liberale 200 florins per year, the conditions were changed to payment only for what Liberale actually delivered. The collection of painted parchment sheets thus grew slowly in the course of decades. In 1576–77 Liberale moved to Innsbruck with his family, where Ferdinand II had chosen Schloss Ambras as his new seat as ruler of Tyrol. Liberale eventually died c.1580 with his fish codex not quite completed.¹²³

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Swordfish in a parchment codex, painted by Giorgio Liberale da Udine for Archduke Ferdinand II of Tirol, c.1562–80, Gorizia and Innsbruck. Cod. ser. 2669, fol. 51v

© Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

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The Liberale codex shows marine fish, mammals, molluscs, some serpents, reptiles, and insects. Most or all of the aquatilia depicted belong to the Adriatic Sea or more generally to the Mediterranean. Most sheets represent several aquatilia: from one to as many as two dozen in the cases of small crabs, shells, and the insects. Some pages are unfinished with only the fine outline of the fish sketched. Many completed sheets show not merely the naturalia, however, but a composition with an invented or sketched background of watery environs and rocky or sandy surroundings, and even some coastal scenes. These backgrounds are often evocative and range from the almost completely abstract to the almost completely naturalistic. In nearly all cases the naturalia are depicted ‘on top’ of these backgrounds rather than integrated into a composition, and their poses and grouping per class of animals belong explicitly to the genre of scientific representation. Yet, many sheets also have a decorative frame of trompe-l’oeil painted gems, jewels, pearls and scrolls, that belongs very much to the long tradition of manuscript illumination. The quality of the large format parchments sheets, the painterly style in extremely fine detail, and these precious decorations place this whole image collection in the sphere of courtly collecting, rarity, and treasure.¹²⁴

The large format of Liberale’s parchment sheets is as nothing compared to those of a little known Piedmontese fish album, Album dei Pesci, in Turin. That album contains some 75 paper folios on which cut-out, brightly coloured drawings (also on paper) are pasted of fish and other aquatilia, such as whales, seals, sea urchins, jelly fish, and lobsters. They represent mostly Mediterranean and some fresh water aquatilia, besides a few reptiles. The animals are accompanied by their handwritten names in Italian, some in the dialect of Nice, sometimes in Latin, and often (also) in Portuguese. The truly stunning aspect of this album is the size of many images, which has caused them to be folded several times to fit into the album. Many fish are depicted close to life size. Several drawings are more than 1 meter long; one reaches almost 3 meters. Conte suggests that up to four painterly hands can be distinguished of different artistic quality; the quality of most drawings is good, though not quite at the Ligozzi level. The drawings probably date to the years between about 1580 and 1624. They were thus made during the rule of – and possibly for – Duke Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy (ruled 1580–1630), whose interest extended not only to warfare but also to the Aldrovandi and Medici naturalia collections. Conte has suggested links between some of these fish drawings and patterns in the mosaic floor of this Duke’s (no longer extant) Galleria Grande in Turin, which could point to the drawings as either models for or copies after that floor. They might even have had an explanatory function of the ‘marine encyclopaedia’ of the floor mosaic.¹²⁵ A link that has not been explored to my knowledge is that with Liberale da Udine: a number of the drawings in the Turin Codex show remarkable similarities with Liberale’s drawings in the parchment codex discussed above, for which Liberale also made use of his own model drawings for Mattioli, as we have just seen. There are not merely stylistic similarities, but several aquatilia are also depicted both from above and from below, as in the Liberale album. Could the Turin drawings be connected somehow with Liberale da Udine?

In Liberale we thus find a painter who created aquatilia drawings first of all as models explicitly intended for the illustration of Mattioli’s printed work on natural history, and who then transferred the visual format of scientific illustration (but not the painterly style) into the very different domain – and materiality – of precious illuminated manuscripts made for the Habsburg court, where it would have served courtly display and study purposes. Interestingly, his presentations in the albums are more innovative than those made for printing purposes. For Mattioli, who knew many Adriatic fish by personal observation, Liberale painted a relatively small number of aquatilia. As illustrator he remained tied to the textual discussions of aquatilia by Dioscorides and Mattioli, and he focused completely on the fish. Ferdinand II’s commission, on the other hand, allowed him to create a perhaps incomplete, but certainly impressive visual aquatic fauna, in which he often combines groups of animals on one folio and inserts painted backgrounds. We cannot tell how many of those drawings were based on direct personal observation by Liberale, but it is surely significant that he spent most of his life close to the Adriatic Sea, in Gorizia.

Liberale’s codex for Ferdinand II may well be the very first visual fauna created in Europe. Again, the chronology seems significant. Its production between 1562 and c.1580 coincides with that of two works about plants that aimed at similar regional surveys (in both text and image): Carolus Clusius’ Spanish and Pannonian floras. Clusius researched the former in Iberia in 1564–65 and published it in 1576; the latter was researched c.1578–81 from the Viennese and Hungarian courts and appeared in 1583.¹²⁶ One mid 16th-century Portuguese- German manuscript that is currently being analysed may be an even earlier example of this same trend. It is the História Natural de Portugal written in Lisbon (during 1555–56) in the house of the Portuguese humanist and philosopher Damião de Góis by the Swiss polymath, alchemist-astrologist-physician- apothecary Leonhard Thurneysser zum Thurn (1531–1596). The latter was, incidentally, an almost exact contemporary and fellow citizen of the naturalist and collector Felix Platter from Basel. This manuscript in German contains a long section on plants observed in Portugal that seemed different from those north of the Alps, plus a shorter section of some 18 folios with descriptions of animals, in particular aquatic ones, that could be found in Portugal.¹²⁷ The regional focus of these works and their attempts to provide a survey of a certain category of naturalia seem to indicate a new development in nature studies of the second half of the 16th century. After the vast encyclopaedic works and collections produced during the 1540s–50s that aimed to comprise more or less everything, some naturalists had begun to realize that focus and specialization could contribute to exhaustive surveys.

In spite of the numerous uncertainties regarding the aquatilia codices discussed in this section it is clear that these image collections are linked by lines of filiation and copying. Most originated in northern Italy, but there are links to Bologna, Florence and Pisa southwards, and to the main Habsburg centres in Prague, Innsbruck and Vienna northwards. In terms of function these codices were extremely different, however. Aldrovandi’s vast visual corpus at first mainly served study and research purposes; he intended to publish, however, and selected images were eventually used in Aldrovandi’s (mostly posthumous) publications. His visual documentation helped to expand the number of known species, but was based on the same notion of describing, inventorizing and depicting nature that had inspired the publications of the 1550s. Felix Platter’s herbarium and compound image collection was a display and visual research collection for himself and for friends-colleagues. The lost Tartaglini parchment albums and the Habsburg Cod. Min. 83 did not serve research purposes, but embodied expert knowledge and showed artistic top quality. Perhaps they were made with the elite collectors in mind who eventually came to own them, for knowledge and delight.¹²⁸ There is no better example than Liberale da Udine’s Cod. Ser. 2669, however, to demonstrate that no rigid divide separated scientific drawings from images for delight and display. Fish drawings by Liberale served as illustrations in Mattioli’s scientific work on nature. Given backgrounds, a decorative frame and a new materiality in the form of precious parchment, the same drawings were perfectly suitable at court.

5.3 Moving North of the Alps, c.1565–1600

The geographical focus of this survey has so far been mainly on Italy and to a much lesser extent on France, since no collections of aquatilia drawings from before 1560 are known to me that originated anywhere else in Europe. In this last section we will look northwards, starting from Venice and the Habsburg court cities in Central Europe.

Of the many codices with painted naturalia that circulated at the Habsburg courts in Vienna, Prague and Innsbruck between about 1575 and 1615 some were newly created at court by painters such as Arcimboldo, Daniel Froeschl, and Georg Hoefnagel. Occasionally they even portrayed animals that actually lived in the court menageries. Other albums, such as Liberale’s codex, though commissioned by the Habsburgs, were painted elsewhere. Court painters also copied drawings from other codices, scrapbook collections, model books, and from print. Even within the courtly context a major amount of image re-cycling and copying was thus going on, while many painters active at these courts were, moreover, not limited to the Habsburg circles and cities. They operated in more than one city or at more than one court. They travelled, and their images travelled even more.

The patterns of these movements are multidirectional. We have already seen how images entered the Habsburg court circles from Italy. But naturalia drawings also arrived there from the Low Countries, which – in spite of the Dutch Revolt – were still partly under Habsburg rule. Before 1610 (probably before 1600) Rudolph II acquired, for instance, three albums with animal drawings painted on parchment by the Flemish painter Hans Bol (1534–1593): one with four-footed animals, one of birds and one of aquatilia. The latter contains some 70 illustrated folios. Bol painted these albums in Antwerp, starting possibly as early as 1572. As Rikken has shown, once the albums reached Prague, their motifs entered via copying into animal codices that originated at the Prague court itself.¹²⁹ Copied images of aquatilia also travelled outwards from the Habsburg courts, to the German-speaking countries, presumably to parts of Eastern Europe, and certainly to the Low Countries and Italy.¹³⁰ As Olmi has shown, for instance, the Italian court physician Francesco Padovani in Prague provided Aldrovandi in Bologna with animal drawings ‘ad vivum coloribus delineatas’ (painted ad vivum in colour) in Prague; some of those may have been made by or copied after Arcimboldo.¹³¹ The Habsburg courts functioned, therefore, as centres of naturalia image production, ‘engines’ of circulation, and crossroads in the transit of images between southern and northern Europe. That should make us think anew about the effects and reach that drawings could have – even when made for the eyes of a limited and courtly public. In this context the distinction between a newly made drawing (even one based on direct observation of an animal) and its multiple copies may well have been irrelevant.

There was a conspicuous presence of painters and scholars from the Low Countries at the Habsburg courts between about 1575 and 1610. Some of them were known for a strong interest in naturalia that could even amount to specialization. Father (Georg) and son (Jacob) Hoefnagel from Antwerp were particularly famous for their miniatures on both parchment and paper of shells, insects, other small animals and flowers. Roelant Saverij – a former pupil of Hans Bol in Antwerp – worked at the Prague court from 1603 and produced various well-known animal paintings. Dirck de Quade van Ravesteijn (c.1565/70–1618) from The Hague(?) was the principal painter of the albums known as Rudolph II’s ‘Bestiary’, in which he used various motifs from Hans Bol’s albums; he worked in Prague from 1588 until his death. And Anselmus de Boodt (1550–1632) from Bruges acted as Rudolph’s court physician, specialist in precious stones and their alchemical-medicinal uses, and painter of naturalia.¹³²

Although aquatilia are present in the albums and works by these predominantly Southern Netherlandish painters, they rarely occupy an important place. There are relatively few in the works of the Hoefnagels, while the small number of aquatilia images in Quade van Ravesteijn’s ‘Bestiary’ mainly represent Kunstkammer objects of marine origin (sea urchins, corals, shells, dried specimens and dragons made of dried rays) and not a marine fauna.¹³³ These image collections did not aim to present encyclopaedic completeness, therefore. Anselmus de Boodt’s albums made for Rudolph II, were different and cover as wide a range of animals as possible. In this large collection water creatures form an important segment of some 70 folios, mostly with one or two figures. De Boodt, who spent the years 1587–1614 mainly in Prague, was both painter and compiler of these albums: he personally painted numerous animals, but also copied images that circulated at court and even included various animal drawings painted by others [Fig. 6.17].¹³⁴

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Perch in the albums of Anselmus de Boodt made for Emperor Rudolph II, vol. VI, fol. 42, Prague, late 16th–early 17th century

© Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

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Chronologically the involvement of painters from the Low Countries in the animal painting of the Habsburg courts appears to belong mainly to the years after 1590 or even 1600. The Flemish painters did not turn to naturalia painting once they arrived at the Habsburg courts, however; they were already expert in these subjects, and the tradition of animal drawing in the Low Countries (especially the Antwerp region) went back well before the 1590s–1600s, as was already clear from the example of Hans Bol. Nor did the Netherlandish painters lose touch with that tradition while in Prague or Vienna. Some indeed returned from Prague to the Low Countries at the end of their employment at court or during the last years of their lives.

The question thus emerges of when a Netherlandish tradition of animal drawing originated, and of whether it did so independently from the Italian one that went back at least as far as the 1530s–40s. Or was it an offshoot of that Italian tradition – perhaps via as yet unexplored contacts between the Habsburg courts of Vienna and Brussels in the 1550s–70s, via the even earlier Dürer connection, or via direct contacts between Italy and the Low Countries (especially the major ports of Venice and Antwerp)? This question requires a wide-ranging discussion of European animal drawing and painting that goes far beyond the scope of the present essay, but at least some of the evidence from the Low Countries points in the direction of diffusion rather than an independent development.

Rikken has shown that the earliest known, quite small, groups of animal drawings by painters from the Low Countries were collected in albums – like their southern counterparts. The principal painters involved were Lambert Lombard (1550s–70s), Hans Bol (mainly 1570s–80s), and Hans Verhagen (post 1547 and mainly 1560s).¹³⁵ Chronologically, therefore, none of the extant animal drawings from the Low Countries seems to date back further than the late 1550s or more probably the 1560s. By the 1560s, major collections existed in the Habsburg Netherlands and included marine creatures. The collection of the Spanish humanist and orientalist Benito Arias Montano, who lived in Antwerp during the years 1568–79 and was closely linked with the circles of Ortelius and Plantin, even included a section called ‘The Sea’ which probably included marine material collected in Antwerp.¹³⁶ It is likely, as we will see below, that some of these collections included albums with naturalia drawings, as was also the case in the Habsburg and many Italian cases. As Rijks has discovered, a fascinating but lost Antwerp album with either drawings or engravings of aquatilia is mentioned in the inventory (1625) of a Antwerp collector, the notary Gillis de Kimpe, and may date from the 16th century.¹³⁷ The link between collections and albums with naturalia drawings is far less clear, however, for the Low Countries than for the Viennese-Prague collections or for some of the Italian ones. Animal painting in the Low Countries fairly quickly developed different modes and formats, moreover. During the last quarter of the 16th century the emphasis shifted away from painted albums to print series (Abraham and Nicolaes De Bruyn; Adriaen Collaert; Marcus Gheeraerts; Jacob Hoefnagel) and to oil paintings (from c.1590).¹³⁸

In this context the mainly unpublished and still hardly studied animal drawings of superb quality in the Libri Picturati volumes A16 (aquatilia and four-footed animals) and A17 (birds) may turn out to be crucial to the understanding of how animal painting developed in the Low Countries. The majority of those drawings can be provisionally dated on the basis of watermarks to the 1560s, just like the oldest core of plant drawings in the same collection. All of those oldest drawings were commissioned by the nobleman Charles de Saint Omer (1533–1569): after a military career he retired on account of ill health, at the age of about 30, to a castle in the environs of Bruges. His years of collecting naturalia and their drawings can thus be pinpointed to a relatively short period, between c.1555 and 1569. After c.1595 a new owner of the Saint Omer albums – Prince Charles of Arenberg, who was an expert naturalist himself – added a considerable number of further plant drawings.¹³⁹

The main body of animal drawings in the Libri Picturati depicts birds: volume A17 contains 127 painted pages, for the smaller songbirds with up to 6 figures per page. The water creatures are the next important group (41 painted pages, mostly with one or two creatures per folio), while the four-footed animals occupy 23 painted pages (mostly with one animal per page). While many depicted bird species are typical of the coastal wetlands near Bruges and along the North Sea, a regional focus is much harder to establish for the aquatic creatures. The seal, jellyfish, oysters, and a rarely depicted sea mouse are associated with the Atlantic or North Sea, but many other aquatilia (e.g. sunfish, St Peter’s fish, saw of the sawfish, lamprey, sturgeon, needlefish) occur in both these northern seas and the Mediterranean. Their images are also commonly found in Italian fish image collections [Fig. 6.18].

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Squid in the Flemish Libri Picturati by an anonymous painter, c.1560s, made near Bruges for Charles de St Omer. Libri Picturati, A16, fol. 20

© Kraków, Jagiellonian Library

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Although some animals have most probably been drawn from direct observation, there is at least one definite case of copying among the aquatilia drawings in the Libri Picturati. It concerns the drawing of a ‘tattooed’ tuna fish with strange markings on its skin that look like boats and men of war; this fish had been caught in the Mediterranean. The Libri Picturati drawing copies a printed pamphlet that circulated in various versions in Europe in the 1560s.¹⁴⁰ Much more significant cases of copying – but in the other direction – occur among the birds (4) and four-footed beasts (1 llama). These provide direct visual links between the Bruges Libri Picturati and the much later Prague albums of Anselmus de Boodt from Bruges.¹⁴¹ Here, style, detail, watermarks and the animals depicted all indicate that the Libri Picturati drawings of the 1560s were the models for the far less sophisticated ones that De Boodt produced in Prague for Rudolph II. Unlike a considerable number of the plant drawings in the Libri Picturati volumes, the animal drawings have never served as model for printed illustrations, and it is unclear whether Saint Omer ever intended them for that use.¹⁴²

Charles de Saint Omer certainly commissioned the Bruges painter Jacques van den Corenhuyze to depict some plants, and the monogram JC (for that same painter?) figures on several of the bird drawings. Peeter van der Borcht from Malines, who also made a large number of model drawings for woodcuts in various Plantin editions, botanical and not, likewise created drawings for the Libri Picturati. But like Daniele Barbaro in the 1540s, Saint Omer also employed several painters on a more permanent basis at his court. The Dutch fish expert Adriaen Coenen reported in 1565 that Saint Omer was ‘een groot beminder van selsame vremde dinghe van visschen ende vogelen. Hij hadde twee scilders die hem alle dagen selsame vogelen ende visschen uutscilderde dese scilders hadde hij al binnen zijn hof’ (a great lover of rare and curious fish and birds. He had two painters who daily painted rare birds and fish for him, these painters were at his court).¹⁴³ The fact that Saint Omer collected these drawings in albums, the encyclopaedic range of his plant and bird drawings, and his employment of painters specifically for this purpose all suggest that this Flemish image collection of the early 1560s was inspired by models of image collecting from abroad. Given both Saint Omer’s social position in the very top of the old nobility of the Habsburg Low Countries, and his friendship with humanists and erudite collectors in the Bruges area, he must have been aware of such traditions in the Habsburg world and Italy.¹⁴⁴

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A rare fish (probably Lampris guttatus) depicted and described in Adriaen Coenen’s Visboeck, 1577–81, Holland, Ms 78 E 54, fol 264r (old nr. 260)

© The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek

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Two of the most intriguing and charming extant aquatilia albums created in 16th-century Europe largely support this tentative reconstruction of patterns in naturalia image collecting in northern Europe, but also raise new questions [Fig. 6.19]. The Visboock (Fish Book, 1577–81) and the Walvisboock (Whale Book, c.1584–85) are bound manuscript albums full of illustrations in water colour devoted to marine creatures – though there is some space for insects, sea birds, and natural phenomena in the skies. Together with an unfinished fragment of a third painted manuscript on fish (c.1586–87) and a now lost earlier fish album, the Fish Book and the Whale Book were the results of a lifelong fascination with the underwater world of the Dutch fish merchant and expert Adriaen Coenen (1514–1587). Coenen not only wrote but also painted these colourful encyclopaedic manuscripts.¹⁴⁵

Coenen’s albums are highly unusual for a number of reasons that include their very wide-ranging contents; the combination of book learning and practice-based knowledge; Coenen’s social and educational background; and the wealth of information that he provides about how he collected information about marine life. Coenen was born in Scheveningen, a fishing village a few kilometres from The Hague, as the son of a fisherman. He worked his way up to become a well-to-do and respected local notable and wholesale merchant in fish who traded long distance with the German hinterland and the region of Bruges, Mechelen and Antwerp. Coenen had no formal education beyond the local elementary school and never learnt Latin, though he could speak and read German and French, and perhaps some English. Coenen’s richly illustrated manuscripts are the only known extant encyclopaedic albums of animal drawings in 16th-century Europe created by a man from a lower to lower middle-class background. The texts of Coenen’s manuscripts reveal much of his approach to nature, marine life, fishing, and nature study. He also discusses the making of his albums, repeatedly mentions and demonstrates his critical attitude to his sources, and shows how he modestly but systematically privileges personal experience and observation of natural phenomena above book learning – even when this means calling in doubt the greatest authorities of antiquity and of his own time, from Aristotle to Pliny and from Gessner to Belon and Rondelet.¹⁴⁶

Coenen did not intend his fish albums for print. They were inspired, as he explicitly states, by a lifelong curiosity about living nature that mixed scientific interest (the need to know) with his vision of nature study as honouring God. He intended his albums as a repository of knowledge and information, made and consulted for personal enjoyment and sociability. But he also used them for commercial purposes (showing them on the local fair for payment), and for self-presentation as an expert in marine matters, which promoted his access to higher social circles. Probably shortly before 1576–78 he used his very first fish album – now lost – as a gift to Prince William of Orange, at that moment leader of the Dutch Revolt, in order to obtain a personal privilege and (unsuccessfully) an appointment for his young son as a page at the Prince’s court. Though Coenen the painter was no great artist, his albums were seen as valuable objects in his own time.¹⁴⁷

A considerable quantity of textual information and an even larger percentage of the visual information in Coenen’s fish albums had come from print in the first place. His albums are, in part, a massive compilation and amalgam from the major published and illustrated works on aquatilia that he could consult.¹⁴⁸ For textual information he was obviously limited to vernacular editions, but among his main visual sources were most of the famous fish publications of the 1550s (e. g. Belon, Rondelet, Gessner, Olaus Magnus, the German Heyden edition of Pliny) besides older chronicles and contemporary illustrated pamphlets. The albums offer much more than excerpts from printed works, however. Per fish or group of fishes, and where applicable, Coenen inserted his own lifelong practice- and observation-based experience of marine life in the Atlantic and North Sea in text and sometimes in image. Moreover, important sections on North Sea fishing, herring, cod, plaice, salmon and so on, and on beached whales and other curious fish in the Channel are almost exclusively based on his own observation and on that of the local fishermen of Scheveningen. As Coenen proudly states, he generally names his sources. Often, he indeed visually separates copied or paraphrased texts from the ones based on his own experience, which are usually written in the first person. In the drawings such distinctions are of course harder to trace.

If we consider Coenen’s albums, created in The Hague, Scheveningen and Leiden, in the context of the question of how Netherlandish animalia drawings originated, the questions of dating the origins of his interest and collecting, and his sources and cultural models are of fundamental importance. Mainly thanks to clues in Coenen’s own texts, we can partially trace both, although that reconstruction is complicated by the fact that Coenen’s life bridged not merely the Reformation but also the Dutch Revolt against Spanish Habsburg rule. Coenen was born as a Catholic inhabitant of the united and Habsburg-ruled Low Countries. By the last two decades of his life, he had become a (moderate) Protestant and found himself living in the newly proclaimed Dutch Republic. These big events were of direct relevance to Coenen’s activities as a collector and student of marine life.

A major cultural influence on Coenen’s collecting and his main access to the publications that he used as visual and textual sources can be found in the circles of top Habsburg functionaries in the Northern Netherlands. The central figure was Cornelis Suys (1514–1580), President of the Court of Holland (1559–72), who shared Coenen’s passion for marine natural history, certainly lent Coenen Rondelet’s work on fish, and regularly received Coenen at his table in The Hague.¹⁴⁹ Via the meals at Suys’s house in The Hague Coenen met a number of high Habsburg officials, nearly all staunch Catholics with international networks that stretched from Portugal to Italy, but also to Ortelius’s circle in Antwerp and Charles de Saint Omer in Bruges, the man who commissioned the watercolours of the Libri Picturati discussed earlier. It was most probably via Suys’s connections that Coenen himself came into personal contact with Saint Omer during the early 1560s.¹⁵⁰

The cumulative evidence of Adriaen Coenen’s contacts with these elite circles between about 1550 and 1565 helps us understand where the cultural models for Adriaen Coenen’s fish albums came from. The men in these circles – whether old aristocracy, newer noblesse de robe, or humanists and local notables – were Catholics and nearly all remained so. Most were directly linked to the courtly Habsburg elite, either in Brussels and Mechelen or in The Hague. Nearly all disappeared from public life or even from the Northern Netherlands once the Revolt gained momentum, especially after the iconoclasm of 1566. Coenen remained in Holland, and became a staunch supporter of Prince William of Orange and the Revolt. These different choices in the years 1565–72 appear to have ended most of his contacts with the extended Suys circle. Most but not all. In the last years of his life Coenen moved to Leiden, where he found himself living almost next door to the old Rembert Dodoens (Dodonaeus; 1517–1585), one of the most famous naturalists in Europe, and a recently appointed professor (1582) at Leiden University. Dodoens had spent much of his life at Mechelen, and a number of years as court physician at the Habsburg court in Vienna. And from his personal collection a small collection of fish drawings and sketches have recently emerged that include a few Coenen drawings, made undoubtedly by Coenen himself for his near neighbour [Fig. 6.20].¹⁵¹

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Fish drawings from a set of loose drawings that belonged to Rembertus Dodonaeus and included drawings by Adriaen Coenen, before 1585. Formerly Collection Van Regteren Altena, fol. 107a

© Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

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Thus far, the information concerning both Saint Omer’s Libri Picturati and Coenen’s series of fish albums – the only larger sets of aquatilia drawings from the Low Countries in this period – underpins the tentative conclusion that animal painting in the Low Countries was not an independent development, but a subsidiary one that derived from international (especially Habsburg) court culture. There is some evidence, however, that challenges this thesis, and it again comes from Coenen himself. It reopens to some extent the debate about the chronological and geographical development of nature collecting and painting in Europe.

Coenen himself explicitly places the early roots of his interest in ‘curious’ fish in his youth and in practice, when he dried and dissected thousands of rays and inspected rare aquatilia while working as assistant to the Scheveningen fish auctioneer. From a very early date he used to take notes and make drawings in what he calls ‘mijn memorijboockxken daer Ic ander zelsame visgen in geteijkent hadde die bij mijnen tijden ander zee gecomen waren’ (my memory booklet in which I had also drawn other rare fish that had arrived in the sea in my time).¹⁵² As early as 1545–1546 Coenen was clearly already known as a man with a pronounced interest in rare and unusual fish who had some of these depicted by a local painter. These are the same years when Valerius Cordus and Daniele Barbaro were creating two of the very early fish image collections that we know of in Italy. Internal evidence to his manuscripts indicates that Coenen must have begun his first (lost) fish book already in the mid to late 1550s. His interest in marine life thus originated before any of the great fish works of the 1550s had been published. Even if the format of Coenen’s fish albums was modelled on encyclopaedic printed works by learned ‘fish de- scribers’ as he called them, while his interest was definitely shaped by Southern Netherlandish courtly and learned traditions of collecting and studying living nature, his very early interest in marine life chronologically developed in parallel with that of Daniele Barbaro and Leone Tartaglini in Venice, Cardinal Cervini and Ippolito Salviani in Rome, and Conrad Gessner, Pierre Belon and Guillaume Rondelet in Switzerland and France.

That finding should make us think twice about the possible divergence between histories of cultural formats (books, albums, practices of collecting and display) and those of interests and fascinations. Depending on our perspective, Coenen can be any of three things. An original and highly individual figure who operated at the geographical margins of the cultural influence of heartland Europe and whose albums reflect rather than radiate. A bridge figure who reflects and radiates at the same time; who embodies the social and geographical transmission and elaboration of new interests in living nature (and marine creatures in particular) and of a critical attitude with respect to both classical and contemporary authority. Or a key witness to the meeting points of largely practice-based popular knowledge, book learning and collecting practices.