From Insect to Icon: Joris Hoefnagel and the ‘Screened Objects’ of the Natural World

During the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, insects emerged as objects of study for artists, naturalists, and others as part of the rising interest in classifying, collecting, and representing the natural world. The Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1601), whose exquisite miniatures northern and central European collectors coveted, directed much of his extraordinary artistic talent toward the depiction of the insect world. Hoefnagel's corpus of insect imagery can be found in three of the artist's major works: the illuminated manuscripts Mira calligraphiae monumenta and Ignis , a part of the four-volume Four Elements series, and in the Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii , a series of copper engravings the artist published with his son Jacob in 1592. Although Hoefnagel was not the first early modern artist to represent insects, he was the first to concentrate so extensively on them, and thus it was necessary for him to devise techniques for managing this vast and potentially limitless subject matter. Hoefnagel utilized an array of image-making strategies to restrict the types and forms of insects he depicted, and in so doing was able to achieve the appearance of encyclopedic coverage. By placing strict limitations on his subject matter, Hoefnagel was also able to engage in a sophisticated exploration of the artist's role in the manipulation of "natural" appearances through a complex interweaving of fantastic and naturalistic modes of visual representation.