Otto Marseus van Schrieck (1619/20--1678) and the nature piece: Art, science, religion, and the seventeenth-century pursuit of natural knowledge.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the art and career of the Dutch painter and naturalist Otto Marseus van Schrieck (1619/20--1678) and his invention of a strange pictorial genre known variously today as the nature piece, bosstilleven, sottobosco, or woodland still life. Marseus' nature pieces were based upon living collections of creatures and plants gathered by the artist and housed in his own vivaria and gardens, both in Rome and Amsterdam. Favored specimens include visually striking poisonous snakes, toads, lizards, insects, fungi, and thistles. These complex pictures display a number of novel concerns and techniques that together form the foundation of this study. Marseus' paintings engage with two critical mid-century scientific debates: the well-documented polemic between proponents of the older humanist and newer experimental forms of producing natural knowledge, and the arguments surrounding the Book of Genesis as a history of the natural world. The novelty of these paintings also lies in the techniques used to construct them and in their preoccupation with some of nature's more horrific and monstrous creations. Marseus was perhaps the first artist to bring natural history materially into the sphere of painting by pasting insect body parts into paintings, and routinely pressing paint-coated plant material onto the surface of his canvasses to render natural imprints. Drawing upon a wide range of materials, including unpublished archival documents, published natural histories and accounts of experimental practice, correspondence between naturalists, accounts of contemporary snakehandlers, biblical commentaries, and pictures and poems about the fall of man, this dissertation seeks to reveal the complex historical significance of an artist and of a kind of painting that brought natural science and material practice into a distinctive marriage in the mid-seventeenth century. This study investigates Marseus' participation in a significant pan-European artistic and scientific milieu, his lifelong Medici patronage, and contemporary scientific interests in the specimens he depicted. It develops two related lines of argument. The first seeks to show how his pictures function as innovative technologies of vision that, like the microscope, mediate between nature and the beholder in an effort to bring knowledge to the senses. The second makes a case for understanding his nature pieces as an attempt to create a new kind of history painting focused on the subjects of natural history rather than canonical narratives.