The wonderful world of Roelant Savery, the all-rounder of art

The exhibition “The wonderful world of Roelant Savery” at the Mauritshuis in The Hague finally wants to shed light on this “all-rounder of art” forgotten by the majority of the public and perhaps even by some experts. And it does so by showing over 40 paintings and drawings, including loans from national and foreign museums: a pleasant and above all curious exhibition, thanks to the polymorphic talent of our man who loved not only to range between genres but also, in a certain sense, to invent them.

Landscapes

Roelant Savery (1578-1639) was born as a landscape specialist but his paintings of imposing waterfalls represented a completely new phenomenon in the art painted as an artist at the court of the Austrian Emperor Rudolf II, who in the splendid court of Prague, wanted also “collect” the natural beauty of your country, including the Tyrolean mountains.

Floral still lifes

But Savery was also one of the main pioneers of floral still lifes which were inspired by the many types of flowers in the immense greenhouses of the imperial palace. The first, from 1603, can be described as modest, with only eleven flowers and a few insects, if we consider that in 1624 its composition included a phenomenal bouquet of 64 varieties, teeming with butterflies, insects and small animals, for a total of 45 species: a growing virtuosity.

Animals and people

But Savery achieved his greatest fame with his animal paintings, of which more than 50 have survived. The Prague Palace had aviaries, pheasant gardens, a park with deer, stables and a collection of stuffed animals and, as for the floral still lifes, the artist brings them all together in crowded and astonishing landscapes where dromedaries, foxes, elephants, bears, lions, deer and horses coexist peacefully, adding biblical or mythological stories to make everything plausible. In Savery’s time an animal was already becoming extinct: the legendary dodo. The emperor had him embalmed and so Savery portrayed him too swollen and the depiction of him then influenced the way of representing him for centuries. Savery was also the first artist to use ordinary people as models who he often drew from behind so that they would not realize they were being immortalized, also adding written notes on their clothes as reminders for the subsequent development of the painting.

Five or six drawings of worshipers in a synagogue, probably the Neualtschul in Prague, are the earliest known representations of European Jews