“Counterfeit”: The Trompe l’Oeil and Botanical Art I
As already noted, the verb “to counterfeit” denotes the production of a replica or copy of an object that is so realistic it could be mistaken for the object itself. Deployed in treatises on the visual arts since the Renaissance, the word was used in different European languages to refer to the realistic portrayal of natural history specimens. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), in whose writings the term can be found, produced many such counterfeits, demonstrating their ability to imitate “fragments” of the natural world dal vivo so perfectly that the viewer was taken in by the illusionistic effect. The subject portrayed had an almost palpable “presence” that caused the viewer to forget the hand of the artist.45 Thus, the accentuated realism and mimetic precision that had characterized still lifes and trompe l’oeils since their origins were also central to the Renaissance practice of representing the world of nature, particularly subjects such as plants and animals, as is also demonstrated by the floral still life. As early as the second half of the sixteenth century, the first treatises on botany and zoology printed in Europe were also accompanied by illustrations based on drawings dal vivo. This ushered in a completely new pictorial typology, that of the scientific illustration. Such works not only made a fundamental contribution to the birth of modern science, but assumed an important place in the panorama of the visual arts in the early modern age.46 Like the trompe l’oeil, this new genre was based on the art of “showing” (ostensio in Latin) in a clear and tangible manner, referring in particular to the practice of observation and experimentation, two pillars of the scientific revolution. The specimen was first studied and
then portrayed with the greatest possible exactitude. In the following centuries, artists gifted with a “scientific eye” produced paintings on subjects from the natural world that bear numerous analogies to the trompe l’oeil, and Bunny Mellon acquired many such examples for her collection at the Oak Spring Garden Library. One of the finest practitioners of this form of painting to emerge during the Renaissance was Jacopo Ligozzi (1547–1627); his portrayals in body color (or tempera)47 of plants and animals from the collections of the Medici family (today conserved in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence) are meticulously accurate but are also suffused with a vivid immediacy. Other outstanding naturalistic painters followed, from Nicolas Robert (1614–1685), peintre en miniature to Louis xiv, to the intrepid naturalist and scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717). In the nineteenth century, Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759–1840) would earn an international reputation as “the Raphael of flowers” for his exquisite paintings, which are still greatly admired today. 48 In the accurate portrayal of natural specimens, as in the trompe l’oeil, greater understanding of the physical phenomenon of vision played a crucial role. With the invention of the microscope a hitherto invisible world was revealed, from the reproductive parts of the flower to the anatomy of the insect. During the course of the seventeenth century, further important advances in the field of optics were made by scientists such as Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, whose discoveries markedly influenced the visual arts. 49 In fact, optical devices would play an increasing role in the work of artists. Accustomed to using the microscope as a visual aid in their
Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Still Life of Variegated Tulips, Roses, a Hyacinth, a Primrose, a Violet, Forget-me-nots, a Columbine, Lily-of-the-valley, a Cyclamen, a Marigold and a Carnation, all in a glass vase, with a Butterfly and a Housefly, detail, 1606, oil on copper, private collection (previously in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon).
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