Baroque versus Renaissance

Baroque 

  
  This painting was created by Rachel Ruysch in 1711 in the Netherlands, using oils on wood. Ruysch was a Dutch artist who specialized in flowers and still-life paintings. This piece is titled Flowers and Insects and is one of Ruysch's more lively and expansive paintings. Instead of flowers, she includes various fruits, insects, naturalistic items, and other creatures. What I find to be the most interesting aspect of this painting and a few of her others, is that she does not use real still-life items to reference when painting. Rather she uses sketches and composites from studies she and her father had done on these various specimens. This piece truly caught my eye with all the vibrant colors intermixed and the attention to detail is absolutely astonishing, which is one of the reasons why it inspires awe in those who view it. Around the time this painting was created, scientists had just perfected the invention of the microscope which increased the interest in scientific discoveries. Ruysch's father Fredrick Ruysch was a famous scientist of his time who specialized in the study of anatomy, including human anatomy. F. Ruysch, also being an artist, represented his scientific work through the recreations of his discoveries in art, such as drawings. R. Ruysch took after her father and utilized this technique of studying aspects of nature. She did this by implementing them in her art through those references, rather than the tangible items themselves. 

       "An important aspect of Fruit and Insects is the subject matter: it is not flowers in a vase on a ledge, the motif for which she was best known. Instead, this painting is a cluster of fruit and creatures on a mossy, muddy ground. This reflects Ruysch’s connection to another artistic tradition. Paintings of fruits, plants, and flowers with small creatures on the ground in a forest-like or natural space constituted a sub-genre of still life painting referred to as sotto bosco." (Branek, 2023) 


Renaissance


    This piece is titled The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch around 1480-1505. It was created in the Netherlands during the Renaissance. Though this piece is not a still-life, I still couldn't help but be able to compare and contrast it with Rachel Ruysch's painting. They are similar in that they both contain quite the frenzy of different eye-catching details that draw the viewers' attention for more time to explore the piece. They both also contain a variety of vibrant mixes of color with lots of attention to detail. They are different in that they are different styles of painting and aim to describe or tell a unique story. 

"To write about Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, known to the modern age as The Garden of Earthly Delights, is to attempt to describe the indescribable and to decipher the indecipherable—an exercise in madness." (Hickson, 2015)





References:

Dr. Saskia Beranek, "Rachel Ruysch, Fruit and Insects," in Smarthistory, September 14, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/rachel-ruysch-fruit-and-insects/.

Dr. Sally Hickson, "Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights," in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, https://smarthistory.org/bosch-the-garden-of-earthly-delights/.


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