On the horizon: the ark, tiny, with a line of animals — giraffes among them — walking towards it.
Bible in art · Genesis
The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark
Jan Brueghel the Elder · 1613
Getty Center, Los Angeles
Jan Brueghel the Elder painted this crowded scene in 1613, when he was court painter to the rulers of the Spanish Netherlands in Brussels. Their menagerie let him draw rare animals and birds from life, and he shows off that knowledge here.
The ark itself is almost hidden: a small brown hull on the horizon, with a line of animals walking up to it. In front, pairs of animals from every part of the known world wait their turn — some, like the turkeys and guinea pigs, newly brought to Europe from the Americas.
From the text
- Two of every kind of living creature, male and female (Genesis 6:19)
- Birds, livestock and everything that crawls on the ground (Genesis 6:20)
- The animals going into the ark in pairs (Genesis 7:8–9)
The artist’s own
- A Flemish landscape of woods and water instead of a land of the Middle East
- Animals from the Americas, known in Europe only for about a century
- The ark small and far away, the animals the real subject
Details
The ark
A tree of parrots
Macaws and parrots fill a bare tree, an owl near the top.
The grey horse
A dappled grey horse at the centre, one of Brueghel’s favourite studies.
Turkeys
Birds from North America, still a novelty in Europe in 1613.
Leopards
A pair of leopards rests at the right.
Jan Brueghel the Elder, Flemish, 1568–1625. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (acc. 92.PB.82) · Oil on panel · Images provided here are believed to be in the public domain and are available under CC0 through Getty’s Open Content Program. (Getty record: "No Copyright", http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)