You know, it took humanity quite a long time to become interested scientifically or aesthetically in insects.
It's not exactly hard to see why.
Humans have evolutionary, psychological and cultural reasons to fear and be disgusted by the skittering swarming, disease-carrying egg-laying universe of terrestrial arthropods.
People didn't get serious about understanding insects until the late 1500s, and it wasn't just scientists who turned our attention to these little beasts.
It was the artists.
In the mid-1500s, there was simply nowhere in Europe more exciting than Antwerp.
Its port became the hub for global trade, with goods and people from all over the world passing through.
It was the financial center of Europe too, and even though the Netherlands were part of the Holy Roman Empire ruled by the Catholic Habsburgs, Antwerp in this period was a haven of religious tolerance.
All these things are the ingredients for a cultural flourishing, and that's exactly what happened.
Antwerp was home to the leading merchants humanists, artists and natural historians of the time, though those different fields had a lot of overlap in the 16th century.
In fact, sometimes they all converged in the figure of a single person, a person like Joris Hufnagel, for example.
Hufnagel was, both literally and in spirit, a Renaissance man.
Born to a family of wealthy merchants at the height of Antwerp's glory years, his comprehensive humanist education made him a polymath.
He knew several languages.
He wrote poetry, played musical instruments.
He had an interest in trade geography, natural history and more.
But his true passion was in the visual arts, painting, and illustration.
When he was young, Hufnagel traveled to France, England and Spain, sketching and painting everything he saw.
He was particularly fascinated by the exotic plants and animals that came into the port of Seville from the New World.
Now we don't have any surviving writings from him, but it's clear from Hufnagel's work that he had an enduring obsession with the varieties and intricacies of nature.
In this way, he was a man of his time.
The European Renaissance saw an explosion of interest in the natural world for the first time since the age of Aristotle.
The scholar Brian Ogilvie suggests three reasons for this.
First, a practical reason.
People wanted to understand plants better so they could make better medicines with them.
Second, a renewed fascination with ancient texts drove people to look closer at the world to understand what philosophers like Aristotle were writing about.
And finally, in the 1500s, there was a vogue for curiosities and wonders from around the world, like those exotic things Hufnagel saw at the ports of Antwerp and Seville.
These impulses, says Ogilvy, existed within a wider movement in which people believed that the wonders of nature revealed God's magnificent creativity.
This was especially true for Protestants, who saw nature as God's quote-unquote second book after the Bible.
Reading nature, so to speak, was a way of studying and glorifying God's works.
This way of thinking is what paves the way for an artist like Albrecht Dürer, who pioneered the realistic depiction of nature in the early 1500s, highlighting even the smallest parts of it in works like Young Hare and Great Piece of Turf.
Hufnagel never met Dürer, but was clearly inspired by his work, like so many others in that generation.
As a painter in the royal courts of Northern Europe, Hufnagel was given a rare freedom to pursue his interests in the natural world, taking the baton of Dürer's aesthetic philosophy and carrying it much further.
For my money.
Hufnagel's magnum opus is The Four Elements, a series of around 300 watercolor miniatures of a startling variety of animals.
The series is split into four volumes, water, earth, air, and fire.
The four classical elements comprising the animals that he believed fit into those categories.
So you have the sea creatures in water, the birds in air, the land animals in earth and in fire are the insects.
Now, we don't really know why Hufnagel put insects in the fire volume, maybe because both fire and insects symbolize transformation.
But what we do know is that these insect miniatures are magnificently rendered.
I mean, look again at this update he makes to Dürer's stag beetle.
Hoofnagel literally fills in Durr's gaps between the head, prothorax, and forewing.
He adds definition and texture to the wing cases and uses a greater range of color to capture the play of light off the surface.
Speaking of light, look at the attention paid to the beetle's shadow.
Durr's shadow is flat, while Hoofnagel's is realistically calibrated, giving a stronger sense of three-dimensionality.
Or look at the southern hawker dragonfly.
As curator Stacey Sell points out, each of these spots on the abdomen contains a slightly different mix of green and yellow pigments.
Hufnagel isn't cutting corners here, he's taking pains to achieve precise detail.
I mean, these wings are extraordinary.
Not only is each areola individually shaped but, as Sell notes, Hufnagel makes these minute brushstrokes at varying weights to show us the way light passes through the wing.
Whereas many of the animals in the other volumes were copied from the work of other artists, the insects in the fire volume were almost certainly drawn from life.
We know that because in some cases, Hufnagel actually included part of the insect in his drawing.
But we also know that because at this time, there was simply no other book to copy from.
What you're looking at here is the first book devoted to insects in history, almost a century before the rise of the microscope and more than a century before the emergence of entomology as a science.
Is The Four Elements a work of science or a work of art?
I don't know that the distinction would have made much sense to Hufnagel not in the way that it does to us anyway.
He brought a natural historian spirit of investigation, categorization, and discovery to painting.
He brought a painter's devotion to color, form, and beauty to natural history.
And you can see a spiritual impulse here too.
The desire to celebrate God's artistry in his tiniest creations, in the creatures that so many deem ugly or scary or revolting.
It's sad, but very few people actually got to see the exquisite four elements in Hoofnagel's time.
The series was a personal project created over decades for a small circle of friends and royal patrons.
But at some point Hufnagel must have realized its value to a wider public, not to mention its value to his wallet.
So he worked with his teenage son Jakob, to make another series of 48 intaglio prints, called the Archetypa, that group the animals from the four elements into creative emblematic menageries.
It was these prints that found their way into the hands of artists and naturalists across Europe, that found their way into collections, into natural history treatises and ultimately, into the collective consciousness of a culture growing rapidly more curious about how the world actually worked.
Hufnagel was both a subject and a source of that curiosity.
He pushed our knowledge and our art forward, awakening us to the vastness of the universe at our feet.
Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.
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