Psalm 145 marks a turning point in the biblical book as a whole: it is both the last of the psalms attributed to King David and the first in a final series of hymns that shift from prayer to praise. The verses extol God’s works and compassion while acknowledging the unfathomable nature of their source. His greatness is to be praised, and yet ‘His greatness is unsearchable’ (v.3). The psalm exhorts us to embrace this paradox, to meditate upon it, and to find solace within it.

But to whom is the psalm addressed? Its last line declares that ‘all flesh will bless his holy name’ (v.21). Are all living creatures capable of praising God’s works and the ‘glorious splendour’ (v.5) of the heavenly kingdom?

In his seminal commentary On the Psalms, St Augustine baulked at the notion that non-rational animals could actively participate in the adoration of the divine. Augustine’s solution was simple: consciously or not, every creation of God’s hand reflects his majesty and thereby honours his name. Speaking to his fellow mortals, this doctor of the Church writes:

And here, in this beauty, in this fairness almost unspeakable, here worm and mice and all creeping things of the earth live with you, they live with you in all this beauty. (On the Psalms 145: 12)

Augustine was not alone in querying humankind’s relation to nature’s most minuscule creatures. Ancient writers such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder had already taken up these questions in investigating the ‘creeping things’ that inhabit the world around us. By the mid-sixteenth century, the inflection of this tradition with a newfound emphasis on empirical observation informed the emergence of natural history as a field of study that engaged European scholars, artists, and collectors alike.

As Renaissance naturalists pursued knowledge of nature’s creatures, they commissioned and compiled images to accompany their written descriptions of various plant and animal species. They also gathered moral wisdom about their subjects from classical, humanist, and scriptural learning, glossing accounts of a given creature’s habits and character as exemplary for humankind.

Joris Hoefnagel’s Four Elements represents a singular response to this development. Like Augustine, Hoefnagel recognized something ineffable in the wondrous beauty and diversity of nature. He applied his creative abilities toward the praise of a divinely created world that he never hoped to understand in full.

His choice of the manuscript medium speaks to a personal engagement with his subjects. The project of Four Elements occupied Hoefnagel for over two decades. The volumes reflect observations made on his extensive travels, his wide reading, and exchanges with fellow scholars and artists. Each verso, inscribed text, gilded border, and meticulously painted miniature index the time and extreme patience that he devoted to his reflections on the natural world. 

Although his son Jacob Hoefnagel, who was also an artist, eventually produced a series of prints based on his father’s collection of studies and inscriptions, there is no evidence that the elder Hoefnagel either sought or anticipated a broader audience for his work at the outset.

Over the course of gathering material and producing the miniatures themselves, Hoefnagel’s life was also in a state of almost constant metamorphosis. He began his career as a merchant in the thriving southern Netherlandish metropolis of Antwerp, though even in his youth, he pursued drawing and painting on the side. But when the Revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish imperial rule wrought havoc on his homeland and his family’s commercial prosperity, he fled Antwerp’s inquisitional climate in search of better prospects abroad. There he found refuge in a second career as a court artist. Moving from Munich to Frankfurt and eventually to Vienna, he continued to reinvent himself as he worked for various patrons and negotiated the political and spiritual upheaval of the times.

In Hoefnagel’s persistent return to insects as subjects, and to the hymns of lament and praise in the Book of Psalms, he embraced a faith grounded in the Book of Nature and untethered from the confessional divides that had fomented the war in the Low Countries. Perhaps Hoefnagel saw in nature’s most skilful artificers something more than the manifestation of God’s wondrous works: a model for negotiating his own career of exile and transformation.

References

Bass, Marisa Anne. 2019. Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

Hendrix, Lee. 1995. ‘Of Hirsutes and Insects: Joris Hoefnagel and the Art of the Wondrous’, Word & Image 11: 373–90

Neri, Janice. 2011. The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

Vignau-Wilberg, Thea. 1994. Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii, 1592: Natur, Dichtung und Wissenschaft in der Kunst um 1600 (Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung)