page_title: Jan Brueghel the Elder
section_title: Paradise landscapes
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Brueghel the Elder / Work / Paradise landscapes
context_page_description: Jan Brueghel the Elder was a Flemish painter and draughtsman. He was the son of the eminent Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder. A close friend and frequent collaborator with Peter Paul Rubens, the two artists were the leading Flemish painters in the first three decades of the 17th century.
  Brueghel worked in many genres including history paintings, flower still lifes, allegorical and mythological scenes, landscapes and seascapes, hunting pieces, village scenes, battle scenes and scenes of hellfire and the underworld. He was an important innovator who invented new types of paintings such as flower garland paintings, paradise landscapes, and gallery paintings in the first quarter of the 17th century. He further created genre paintings that were imitations, pastiches and reworkings of his father's works, in particular his father's genre scenes and landscapes with peasants. Brueghel represented the type of the pictor doctus, the erudite painter whose works are informed by the religious motifs and aspirations of the Catholic Counter-Reformation as well as the scientific revolution with its interest in accurate description and classification.
context_section_description: Jan Brueghel invented the 'paradise landscape', a subgenre that involved a combination of landscape and animal painting.  Works in this genre are typically crawling with numerous animals from exotic and native European species who coexist harmoniously in a lush landscape setting.  These landscapes are inspired by episodes from Genesis, the chapter of the bible, which tells the story of the creation of the world and of man.  The favorite themes taken from Genesis where the creation of man, Adam and Eve in paradise, the fall of man and the entry of the animals in Noah's ark.
  Like his flower pieces, these landscapes were informed by the Catholic Counter-Reformation's worldview, which regarded earth and its inhabitants as revelations of a god and valued artistic representation of, and scientific investigation into, that divine revelation. As described above, Breughel's friend and patron, the Counter-Reformation Cardinal Federico Borromeo, had particularly emphasized the beauty and diversity of the animal world. Brueghel tried to render this worldview in his paradise landscapes.  The novelty of Brueghel's paradise landscapes lies not only in the impressive variety of animals, which the artist studied mainly from life but also in their presentation as both figures of a religious narrative and as subjects of a scientific order.
  Brueghel developed his earliest paradise landscapes during his stay in Venice in the early 1590s.  His first paradise landscape known as The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man is now in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome.  The reference to Genesis in the picture appears in a small vignette representing the creation of Man in the background, but the main focus is on the animals and the landscape itself. This work was the first paradise landscape in which Brueghel 'catalogued' animals and depicts common and domesticated types.  Brueghel's interest in the cataloguing of animals was stimulated by his visit to the court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor in Prague.  The emperor had established an encyclopedic collection of rarities and animals.  While in his early paradise landscapes Brueghel seems to have based some of his renderings of the animals on works by other artists, he later could rely on studies from life of the various species in the menagerie of the court in Brussels. Brueghel had also seen Albrecht Dürer's depiction of animals during his visit to Prague and had made a painted copy of Dürer's watercolor The Madonna with a Multitude of Animals (1503). Dürer's representations of animals play a pivotal role in Renaissance zoology, since they are the purest artistic form of nature study. The studies of animals by Flemish artists Hans Bol and Joris Hoefnagel also had an important influence on Brueghel.  In particular Hoefnagel's Four Elements (1575-1582) was the first artistic work to categorize animals in a book format. Hoefnagel's approach to the representation of the animal world combined natural historical, classical, emblematic, and biblical references, which incorporated the various species into the categories of the four elements of the cosmos: earth, water, air, and fire.  Brueghel's paradise landscapes also embodied the encyclopedic attitudes of his time by depicting a wide variety of species.
  Brueghel continued refining his treatment of the subject of paradise landscapes throughout his career.  The many renderings and variations of the paradise landscape produced by Brueghel earned him the nickname Paradise Brueghel.
caption: The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man
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