Spatial Distribution and the Animal Landscape

P and harmony reign in Roelandt Savery’s The Garden of Eden, on this month’s cover of Emerging Infectious Diseases. Animals sprawled across the expansive landscape move languidly, unaware of any danger to them from each other or their surroundings, their graceful contours and anatomic details of greater interest to the artist than their natural temperament. The pastoral scene lends itself to the paradoxical rendition, common in Flanders during Savery’s time, of the imaginary put in realistic terms. Flanders (in today’s Belgium) was the region of Europe known for great cultural achievements, particularly in the Middle Ages and during the 16th and 17th centuries, when Flemish, also known as Netherlandish, art flourished. Landscape painting, which had been merely the setting for religious scenes, became important in its own right in the art centers of Antwerp and Brussels, and when Joachim Patinir, one of the first to create stand-alone landscapes, was praised by Albrecht Dürer as a “good landscape painter,” the term landscape was elevated for the first time outside the context of Italian art (1). The genre was brought to new heights by such masters as Jan Bruegel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. Contemporary of these great masters and the bestknown in a family of artists, Savery was born in the Dutch village of Kortrijk and grew up in Amsterdam, where he studied under his brother Jacob and artist Hans Bol. He traveled widely and worked for Henry IV in France and Emperor Matthias in Vienna, but his stay in Prague, where he was painter and etcher of landscapes, animals, and still lifes in the court of Rudolf II von Habsburg, produced the work for which he is most remembered (2). Rudolf, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and king of Bohemia and Hungary, was known for his eccentricity, one sign of which was his famed menagerie of exotic animals. Obsessive collector of unusual objects and lover of art and architecture, as well as science, the offbeat emperor surrounded himself with such artists as Bartholomeus Spranger and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and with scientists, among them astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler (2). This period saw a rise in the study of mathematics, optics, physics, biology, and the development and propagation of hybrid flowers as scientific and economic pursuits. Savery’s peers in a thriving art community increasingly specialized, producing landscapes unlike any up to this time. He dabbled with and influenced several genres. His spectacular views of precipitous rocks and waterfalls influenced Dutch landscape painting. His much sought-after