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Wikimedia Commons · CC0 · Hover to magnify, click for fullscreen
Original fileafter Hendrick Goltzius
This detailed study of animals showcases a variety of textures, including the long, coarse hair of a mountain goat and the feathers of a parrot. The animals are arranged in a sparse landscape, with the parrot positioned on a branch in the upper right while the mammals sit or stand along the ground. The composition reflects a late 16th-century interest in the objective, naturalistic observation of the animal kingdom.
This work belongs to the 'Book of Nature' tradition, where the meticulous depiction of the physical world was seen as a way to understand divine creation. In the intellectual circles of the Haarlem Mannerists and the court of Rudolf II, such natural history studies served as the visual component of natural philosophy, bridging the gap between artistic skill and the emerging scientific impulse to categorize all living things.
HG. Inv. 10
Conrad Gessner
Goltzius's naturalistic animal studies parallel the encyclopedic efforts of Gessner's 'Historiae animalium' to document the diversity of the natural world.
Object
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Engraving
scientific
Digital Source
Wikimedia Commons · CC0
http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.381378
Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication
4312 × 3420 px
425eec3c12dc4536b0276101ce1235745cb64665
December 27, 2019
March 23, 2026
Linked Data
AI AI-cataloged fields generated by gemini-3-flash-preview on April 1, 2026. Getty identifiers are AI-inferred and may require verification.