This pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low Countries. Insect Artifice explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At its center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel’s encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens.
Marisa Anne Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel’s writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. Bass reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for Art and Music History, Sixteenth Century Society and Conference
Marisa Anne Bass is associate professor of the history of art at Yale University. She is the author of Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (Princeton). She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
"[Bass’] study beds the manuscripts in early-modern empiricism, and beautifully complements the plates—a jewel box of exquisitely rendered sunfish, chameleons, bees, an Indian elephant and more."—Barb Kiser, Nature
"****"—De Volkskrant
"[Insect Artifice] brilliantly brings [the] various facets of the depiction of insects together, in a study of the polymath and artist Joris Hoefnagel."—Kathryn Murphy, Apollo
"Bass brings vast learning, remarkable facility with classical texts and meticulous first-hand analysis of the volumes in Washington to bear on her interpretation of Hoefnagel’s artifice. . . . This is a nuanced study, hovering between critical biography and wider intellectual and artistic history, of an easily overlooked sixteenth-century master. Bass has eloquently channelled Hoefnagel’s message – relevant to our own time – that small things do matter."—Albert Godycki, Burlington Magazine
"This beautifully illustrated and exquisitely printed book offers a poetic reading of the Four Elements manuscripts."—Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, Nuncius
"Bass provides an ideal, humanist reading of Hoefnagel’s oeuvre, positing the painter in opposition to the world of sixteenth-century court culture. . . . Insect Artifice is a magnificently illustrated, erudite, and profoundly insightful book. It offers an original and provocative interpretation of how Hoefnagel relied on art to remedy the wounds that the Dutch Revolt had inflicted upon him."—Dániel Margócsy, CAA Reviews
“An astonishing achievement. Bass turns a study of images and manuscripts into a new and exciting way to write a life. Insect Artifice is a superb and magical book—this is humanistic scholarship at its best.”—Anthony Grafton, author of Worlds Made by Words
"In this beautiful and eloquent book, Marisa Anne Bass sensitively rereads Hoefnagel's stunning nature studies in the light of his experience of war and exile. She unearths much new material about his intellectual circle and their search for refuge, peace, and virtue in turbulent times, a search that informed Hoefnagel's questing brush."—Pamela H. Smith, author of The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution
"Bass tells the story of a great artist who, thrust by war and religious conflict into perpetual exile, sought a new grounding for experience in the minutest forms of animal life. With admirable erudition, she delivers a lesson in political ecology that is deeply relevant to us today. This is a book of uncommon learning, eloquence, and beauty."—Joseph Leo Koerner, author of Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life
