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Medusa's Menagerie: Otto Marseus van Schrieck and the Scholars
Current price:
$45.00
Publication Date: March 15th, 2018
Publisher:
Hirmer Publishers
ISBN:
9783777428987
Pages:
232
Description
The precision in the works of Otto Marseus van Schriek—the inventor of the sottobosco still life—continue to fascinate viewers to this day. Always directing the viewer’s gaze towards reality, often with gruesome detail, this seventeenth-century Amsterdam painter’s works show a paradigm shift from book-based scholarship to empirical science. Animal and plant studies served as preparation for his paintings, which in fact went on to provide the illustrations to many scientific works in his time.
This porous relationship between art and science fueled van Schriek’s friendships with scholars such as Johannes Swammerdam and Cassiano dal Pozzo, and inspired his membership in a broader international republic of scholars. Titled after one of van Schriek’s most famous paintings, Medusa’s Menagerie situates the artist for the first time within the context of his scholarly contemporaries, revealing an unknown side of the Golden Century of Netherlandish painting, and illuminating how scientific advances influenced the region’s artistic fascination with the dark, the hidden, and the uncanny.
Praise for Medusa's Menagerie: Otto Marseus van Schrieck and the Scholars
“It is part of the charm of these paintings that they are as much works of Marseus’s imagination as of scientific observation. This is what is so beguiling about his art—one can see in it changing modes of thought at work, a gradual groping toward a world of scientific accuracy, even as the arrangement of the lush, unearthly plants and the animals, with their wonderful, quizzical expressiveness, seems to spring from the mind of the painter, presented for maximum visual appeal and delight.”
— Chris Carroll
“Splendid . . . . [Otto Van Schrieck’s] snake pictures depict a wondrous world of decay and slime, rife with mushrooms, beetles, and chameleons interacting with the liveliness of a history painting—a far from peaceable kingdom in nature’s underworld. . . . Van Schrieck created innovative long perspectives with light and shade and was precociously skilled at depicting scaly snakeskin, shiny beetle shells, oleaginous toad tongues and decay in all its glory.”
— The Art Newspaper