On 17 June 2019 the Rijksmuseum hosted a one-day conference devoted to the extraordinary late Renaissance polymath Anselmus de Boodt (1550-1632), artist, mineralogist, lawyer, physician, and musician active at the Prague court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (1552–1612). The conference, organized jointly by the University of Ghent and a colleague from the Rijksmuseum History Department, Jan de Hond, brought together art historians, scientists and philosophers from throughout Europe in the Print Study Room of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

By Jane Turner

The motivation behind holding the symposium here at the Rijksmuseum is the long-term loan since 2017 of twelve imperial folio volumes of watercolours by De Boodt and other artists that make up the Historia naturalis, compiled for the Emperor between c. 1596 and 1610.

How did this extraordinary collection remain together and how did it come to be on deposit in the Rijksmuseum? I’m the daughter of an entomologist and the wife of a passionate bird watcher, but otherwise I’m a total fraud as the museum’s “animal queen”. Yet at the 2017 TEFAF (The European Fine Art Fair) in Maastricht (out of the corner of my eye) I caught sight of some large albums with images of animals at the ground-floor stand of the German antiquarian book dealer Heribert Tenschert. I nearly missed it. I honestly thought they were just large albums of printed book illustrations. Stopping briefly, I saw the tiniest of labels, no bigger than my thumb [FIG. 1], saying “12 imperial folio volumes, containing c. 750 highly finished watercolours….” 750 watercolours! The entire “Natural History” of Emperor Rudolph II of Prague.

I tried unsuccessfully to find sponsorship to acquire the albums for the museum. Fortunately, a generous donor to the Rijksmuseum was persuaded to buy them and to put them on long-term loan to the museum. For two years now, six albums have been on view in the museum’s Tapestry Gallery (Zaal 2.2), and we just installed a new rotation in May. At this rate, we could go on switching volumes or turning the pages every six months for another 40 years….

De Boodt joined the Emperor’s court as a medical doctor in 1588, and in 1604 he was put in charge of preparing the Historia naturalis, an exquisitely illustrated encyclopaedia of the world’s then known plants, animals and birds. An accomplished artist, De Boodt made and signed many drawings himself. He was also helped, among others, by the Delft painter Elias Verhulst, especially for the flower and bird drawings.

Emperor Rudolph II was forced to resign his crown in 1611 and died the following year, leaving many unpaid bills. De Boodt stayed in Prague for two years, desperately trying to collect money owed him. His efforts failed, so the frustrated artist took all 750 watercolours back to his native Bruges. When he died, unmarried, in 1632, at the age of 82, he left everything to two nephews, with one important condition: they were allowed to sell everything except the three vellum portfolios of drawings of “dieren, vogels, en bloemen.” These, he instructed, were to remain together and pass to each generation’s male heir. They did just that for nearly two and a half centuries. By the late 18th century, however, there was no male heir, and the albums came into the possession of Joseph Antoine van Huerne, Mayor of Bruges. When Van Huerne died childless in 1844, his library went under the hammer. The drawings were then bought by a Belgian nobleman, in whose family they remained for the next 150 years. In 1999, they were acquired by Tenschert. In other words, they have changed hands, other than by inheritance, only four times in 400 years!

Before the modern fields of zoology or botany existed, European scholars set out to record and understand the natural history of newly discovered continents. This was not science based on first-hand investigation: it was a process of amalgamation. There are probably only three studies in the albums that possibly record live animals, either first- or second-hand from creatures in the Emperor’s zoological park in Prague, for they wear collars or are in cages. Other watercolours may have been drawn from stuffed or dried specimens in Rudolph’s Wunderkammer. The majority of studies, however, are outright copies of printed models from various pioneering natural history publications from the Age of Discovery.

My favourite illustration in the De Boodt albums is an Ostrich, with his funny, twisted neck and comical expression. A similar motif appears in a drawing in one of the four volumes of miniatures by fellow court artist Joris Hoefnagel, known as of the Four Elements, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. But the creature there is so tiny, no more than an inch tall. Could De Boodt have drawn his Ostrich from such a small, less detailed prototype [FIG. 2]? Or is our extremely refined Ostrich by Hoefnagel himself, the study for his miniature?

If knowledge of God’s kingdom – every plant, bird and animal – was the goal of the scholars at the intellectual Prague court, it is surprising to find mythical beasts, including sea monsters, plants that grow out of snakes, and a dragon drawn from “the one in the possession of Rudolph” [FIG. 3]. Yet beware of seeing “fantasy” where there’s none. For the rotation done in May, a new colleague chose an “unidentified plant” with little skulls, which she assumed to be an amusing example of artistic license. I was intrigued by the inscription: I grew up with Antirrhinums – snapdragons in English, leeuwenbekken in Dutch – in my parents’ garden. After trawling through hundreds of colourful snapdragon flowers on Google images, I was on the verge of giving up, when – Bingo! – I found images of the seed pods of the snapdragon: little shrunken heads [FIG. 4]. After sharing my story with a neighbour in the UK who is a keen gardener, she brought me some samples. But surprise, they are absolutely minute [FIG. 5]. No wonder I’d never noticed the skulls as a child.

Having told this story at the beginning of the symposium, later the same day in the Study Room we discovered another unusual, seemingly anthropomorphic depiction of a plant in one of the albums not currently on view: a sheet with anemones and an orchid with little green birds’ or ducks’ heads, currently described on our website as a Mirror Orchid (Ophrys speculum), Spiegelorchis in Dutch [Fig. 6]. Close, but actually not quite right. In fact, this is a Laughing Bumblebee Orchid (Ophrys bombyliflora) [FIG. 7]. Yet another one of Nature’s little jokes….

Moral of the story: Never underestimate the knowledge of those botanists of the 16th century! The Prague artists knew what they were talking about, and the visual resources available to them must have been the equivalent of Google Image searches for us. Or, put another way, like the resources and scholarly gatherings supported by the Rijksmuseum’s Research Services Department. Like the artists and scientists active at the Prague court, we who use the Rijksmuseum’s Study Room and Reading Room belong to a community of like-minded scholars and individuals with similar projects and interests, with a high degree of overlap and collaboration. What a fertile network of sharing!

Jane Turner, Head of the Rijksprentenkabinet