Princely beasts. Material culture and pictorial tradition behind the animals on the Wawel Castle First Parents and Noah tapestries

Abstract

The Wawel tapestry sets showing the stories of the First Parents and Noah’s Ark (c. 1548-1553) of the Wawel castle in Cracow are teeming many highly-detailed animals, some of which were barely known in Europe in this period. Bought by Polish King Sigismund II before 1553, the tapestries were made in Brussels by Flemish artists more closely connected to the Netherlandish Habsburg court, its culture and its art, than to the Polish court in Cracow. Therefore, this thesis explores to what extent the animals on these specific Wawel tapestry sets relate to the material and visual culture from the circle of the Brussels Habsburg court. On one hand, this thesis aims to analyse the choice of species from the context of the symbolical and material meaning. Particularly the meanings of knowledge, economical power, ruling power and expansionist power that would have arisen from material culture at the Habsburg court in respect to the collecting of dead and alive animals, the keeping of live animals both as collection object and as functional object, and the role of animals in courtly activities such as hunting and feasting. The second aim of this thesis is to place the Wawel tapestries within the pictorial tradition of the Low Countries, Germany and Italy of depicting the first nine chapters of Genesis with a (varying) multitude of animals. This comparison reveals the degree of innovation on part of the Wawel tapestry artists and their adherence to visual trends that evolved near European courts of the sixteenth century, including the Habsburg court. This study concludes that the Habsburg frame is useful for understanding the Wawel animals. Many animals be directly linked to animals present at the Brussels Habsburg court and the visual analysis shows a congruent trend at other European courts that may even suggest the importance of animal collecting to the emergence of picturing many animals in one scene.