Vier verschillende soorten ratten

Antonio Tempesta made this print of four different types of rats sometime before his death in 1630. Prints like this were not produced as art for art's sake. They belonged to a wider culture of scientific inquiry in the early modern period. This image would likely have been included in a book of natural history and intended to catalogue the varieties of the natural world. The cultural context here is a humanist one. Humanists believed that careful observation of the natural world would allow access to hidden knowledge. You can see this at work in the way that Tempesta meticulously renders the different species of rat. The purpose here is to allow the viewer to study and differentiate. As an art historian, I can tell you that images like this are valuable tools in understanding how the early modern world sought to classify the world around them and the birth of scientific institutions.