REQUERIMIENTOS DE PERSONAL E INSUMOS

Artistic representations of animals in the seventeenth century were not just of animal corpses illustrating eating- or hunting-focused pictures.

Many artists painted ordinary live animals such as cows, horses, deer, dogs and birds. One of the most famous pictures in The Hague for over 100 years was ‘The Young Bull’ painted by the Dutch artist, Paulus Potter in 1647³⁵and shown in illus. 48.

For the first time since antiquity, animals are represented on their own account, in the fields and meadows where they live, and not foregrounded or backgrounded in a human context. While ‘Young Bull’ does include an elderly farmer standing behind the cattle and sheep, it was rare for Potter to paint human figures. His subjects were the ordinary domestic farm animals common in Holland at the time: cows, sheep, pigs and goats. One observer of Potter’s work noted that while Dutch artists often included animals in their landscape paintings, the animals were there only to rein-force the rustic nature of the countryside; but Potter ‘painted cattle for their own sake; they were the stars, the landscape a backdrop . . . painted in such naturalistic detail that [in some of his cattle paintings] even the manure clinging to their sides can be clearly seen’.³⁶

Potter’s country cattle were representations of just that – cows in the countryside. But a very different kind of representation became common in the eighteenth century, a representation that returns us to the object-ification and corporealization of animals – prize cattle portraiture.

Pedigree livestock were painted for wealthy breeders who commissioned portraits of their prized animals. Cattle were depicted with huge square bodies emphasizing size and pedigree as proof of their value, which in turn emphasized the owner’s social status.³⁷ Harriet Ritvo writes that the purpose of livestock breeding in the late eighteenth century was to produce animals that would quickly grow very large so they could produce more meat. This ‘accelerated meat production’ was made possible even without special breeding skills by enclosing open fields and feeding the animals turnips, an all-year fodder that put weight on animals that was maintained throughout the winter.³⁸

Cattle were not the only animals being actively bred at the time. Perfec-tion and the ideal type were also inscribed on the bodies of domesticated dogs, particularly the foxhound. While hunting dogs have been bred since antiquity, Garry Marvin notes that the modern foxhound has a short 250-year history of being manipulatively bred for speed and stamina, with a pro-portioned body capable of running 50 miles twice a week.³⁹ By the late seventeenth century, horses were bred to work a wide range of jobs, includ-ing war, huntinclud-ing, agriculture, pullinclud-ing carts, wagons, private transport and sport racing.⁴⁰Sheep were selectively bred indoors in sheep-houses so that their wool was protected from the ‘profit-damaging effects’ of the outside climate.⁴¹

Animal portraiture was also often used to convey political messages during the seventeenth century, particularly in elaborate displays of struggle and violence. For example, intense animal struggle as predator and prey, always a popular cultural representation of animals, found much artistic expression during the Enlightenment. In a particularly graphic sculpture, illus. 49 shows a wild beast attacking a domesticated animal.

Thus, although similar representations have been common since antiq-uity, the intense emotionalism and vivid details of claws tearing into skin and the graphic facial expressions of animals in life-threatening struggle were perfected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Animals were used to represent resistance to outside aggression and defiance of tyranny, as is conveyed in Jan Asselijn’s mid-seventeenth-century painting of an enraged swan defending her nest.⁴² Swans were widely regarded as brave and courageous, and this characteristic is captured in the depiction of a heroic swan protecting her offspring from an approaching dog. The white swan lifts herself up in anger hissing

Looking at Animals in Human History 1 1 0

The Enlightenment, 1600–1800 1 1 1

49 Antonio Susini (active 1572–1624) or Giovanni Francesco Susini (c. 1585–c. 1653), Lion Attacking a Bull, bronze, first quarter of the seventeenth century, after models by Giambologna (Giovanni da Bologna or Jean de Boulogne)

(1529–1608). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

furiously at the dog, wings spread, feathers flying, leaving excrement on the ground. While the creator of the work may or may not have intended the painting to be read as symbolic of a nation under threat from invasion, later owners did, inscribing ‘Holland’ over the eggs and ‘The enemy of the state’ over the image of the dog (England). The swan herself was inscribed with the title ‘Pensionary, Johan de Witt’ a famous public servant who was an ardent protector of Holland’s interests against England.

Dead and live animal portraiture, hunting trophies, representations of biological perfection and political symbolism, were all to be found in images commissioned by and for the wealthy. Few of the animals in the lives of common people found their way into the visual record, with the notable exception of William Hogarth’s prints which are discussed later in this chapter. Animal imagery was however an important part of community ceremonies and rituals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.