"Monstrous Creatures and Diverse Strange Things": The Curious Art of Jan van Kessel the Elder (1626-1679).

Abstract

The Antwerp artist Jan van Kessel the Elder (1626-1679) was esteemed throughout Europe for producing finely-wrought, miniature paintings on copper that depict a broad range of flora and fauna, exotic places, and objects of natural and human artistry. Rather than a transparent window onto the natural world, Van Kessel’s pictures avowedly play and toy with nature, bending it in a variety of ways that bring into focus its artifice and hidden aspects. His compositions contributed to the fashioning of his professional identity and created a visual discourse about early modern strategies and techniques for investigating and representing nature. The ‘natural’ world presented in Van Kessel’s art was ambitiously crafted from the art history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Antwerp and informed by the local cross-fertilization of media, materials, and artisanal knowledge. Through a combination of wit, technical virtuosity, self-referentiality, and allusions to art-historical lineage, Van Kessel’s paintings encourage viewers to simultaneously think about art, in terms of collecting, connoisseurship, citation, and media, and think anew about nature.

This study uses Van Kessel’s art as a distinctive lens through which to examine the relationship between craft, curiosity, and the pursuit of natural knowledge in the early modern period. Each chapter situates Van Kessel within a particular context where art and natural history intersected in late seventeenth-century Antwerp. Taken together, these investigations reveal how his production responded to a unique convergence of circumstances in that city which included the growth of a popular, commercial strand of natural history, a thriving culture of art collecting and connoisseurship focused on local artists, and a burgeoning luxury industry. The dissertation argues that Van Kessel’s material and conceptual interventions into the representation of nature, such as his innovative, painted “cabinets without drawers” and witty signatures formed from insects and snakes, enabled him to redefine the scope of natural historical illustration and negotiate the value and status of the small-format cabinet picture.