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The Experience of Nature: Arts in Prague at the Court of Rudolf II

19 March - 30 June 2025

The Experience of Nature: Arts in Prague at the Court of Rudolf II

Exhibition: 19 March - 30 June 2025

Great patron of the arts and sciences, Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) was one of the most enthusiastic European sovereigns in the study of nature. He gathered scholars and artists from all over Europe at his court. They who worked in close proximity to each other within the castle walls, making Prague a veritable laboratory, a place of experimentation, in a climate conducive to intellectual and religious tolerance.

In the development of a new relationship with nature based on observation, science and the arts mutually influenced each other. This innovative aspect of art practiced in Prague, in connection with the first developments in experimental science, allows us to rethink the Prague crucible at the time of Rudolf II, less as the last fires of the autonomy of the Renaissance than as the promising bud of modernity.

Organized in partnership with the Národni Galerie of Prague, this exhibition brings together one hundred works (art objects, sculptures, paintings, graphic arts, scientific instruments, manuscripts, prints, etc.), mostly executed in Prague and commissioned or purchased by Rudolf II for his Kunstkammer. They come mainly from Prague collections and the Louvre Museum, but also from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin and the library of the Observatory in Paris.

In the field of the arts, the court of Prague remains associated with a paroxysmal form of late Mannerism, with its sophisticated allegories, its whimsical colors and its canons of artificial elegance, the historical counterpart of which would be the figure of Rudolf, an aesthetic and neurasthenic emperor.

The exhibition wishes to highlight another, less well-known facet of art at the court of Rudolf II. Alongside this “Mannerist” movement, there is a second current, described as “naturalist”: that of the painters of nature, whether they are the landscape painters Roelandt Savery, Peter Stevens and Paulus van Vianen, or the painters of flowers and animals, whether on parchment, such as Hans Hoffmann, Daniel Fröschl and Joris Hoefnagel, or on panel, such as Savery.

Measuring things

The convergence of scientific and artistic views on nature was particularly noticeable at the court of Prague. It was characterized first of all by a new, direct, scrutinizing approach. The artists actively participated in the first stirrings of empiricism, not only by making scientific measuring instruments that were as aesthetic as they were innovative, but also by their drawings of plants and animals, a major contribution to the enterprise of inventorying the living world that then animated the natural sciences: six pages from one of Joris Hoefnagel’s major works devoted to the Four Elements will thus be brought together in the exhibition. Like the scholars, they were also interested in the hidden forces at work in nature, which they evoked through allegory, notably the painters Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Daniel Fröschl, the Hoefnagels again and sculptors like Nikolaus Pfaff. All shared the same humanist culture, essentially literary and inherited from Antiquity, but the coherent system described in these works did not resist the attentive observation of an impermanent and capricious nature.

An impermanent and capricious nature

This visual curiosity, shared by scientists and artists, contributed to the renewal of artistic creation in Prague. Thanks to new practices such as drawing in the open air, the direct experience of nature encouraged the choice of new materials and new motifs, hitherto considered unworthy of being used or represented, as well as a taste for new artistic forms that imitate the singularity of natural forms, their instability inherent in the growth process of living things. The hard stone vases created by Ottavio Miseroni and his brothers are one of the most magisterial examples. As for Paulus van Vianen, a virtuoso goldsmith and inspired and subtle landscape painter, his influence enabled Roelandt Savery and Pieter Stevens to renew their art of landscape.

The exhibition is curated by Philippe Malgouyres, Senior Curator, Department of Decorative Arts and Olivia Savatier Sjöholm, Curator, Department of Prints and Drawings, Louvre Museum.