This is one of relatively few paintings showing this race, by Frans Snyders: The Fable of the Hare and the Tortoise from 1600-57. Although the hare is much faster, the tortoise is more persistent, and eventually wins. The first is Æsop’s fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, who race against one another. Frans Snyders (1579–1657), The Fable of the Hare and the Tortoise (1600-57), oil on canvas, 112 x 84 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. There are two well-known stories involving tortoises that might be relevant. However, Rops is, as ever, determined not to provide us with a simple reading. It might also provide a reason for Félicien Rops including a prominent tortoise with butterfly wings in his ribald The Love Fair (The Cage) (1878-81). Félicien Rops (1833–1898), La foire aux amours (The Love Fair) (The Cage) (1878-1881), pencil and watercolour on paper, 27 × 20.5 cm (10.6 × 8.1 in), Musée provincial Félicien Rops, Namur, Belgium. That may explain the goal of Marchetti’s putti, and the diminutive tortoise crawling across the lap of these Elegant Lovers in about 1550. The Romans and Greeks of Classical times associated the tortoise with love, and reproductive fertility, and even made the animal an attribute of Aphrodite. Artist not known (Prague School), Elegant Lovers (c 1550), oil on wood, 38.1 x 26.7 cm, Private collection. Marco Marchetti’s Putti with a Tortoise (1556-58) is more modest in its ambitions. In ancient times, tortoises have had a more fundamental role in the cosmos, almost as much as in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, where Great A’Tuin is a vast turtle who bears four huge elephants, who in turn bear Discworld itself. Marco Marchetti (c 1526-1588), Putti with a Tortoise (1556-58), fresco, dimensions not known, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Wikimedia Commons.įelix Esterl’s Still life with Skinned Hare, Chicken, Fish and Turtle (1929) provides more worrying company for a tortoise or turtle. Felix Esterl (1894–1931), Still life with Skinned Hare, Chicken, Fish and Turtle (1929), oil on canvas, 82 x 110 cm, Leopold Museum (Die Sammlung Leopold), Vienna, Austria. Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with Musical Instruments (1623) seems an ideal setting, matching the shape of the body of a lute, and the colour of wood. They appear occasionally in still life paintings too, where they are probably one of the most appropriate animals for the genre. Pieter Claesz (1597/1598-1660), Still Life with Musical Instruments (1623), oil on canvas, 69 x 122 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. In European painting, they have inevitably appeared in portraits as new faunas have been discovered, as in Albert Eckhout’s Study of Two Brazilian Tortoises (c 1640). Albert Eckhout (c 1610–1666), Study of Two Brazilian Tortoises (c 1640), tempera and gouache on paper mounted on panel, 30.5 x 51 cm, Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis, The Hague, The Netherlands. One relatively recent example is Shibata Zeshin’s Jurōjin, Deer and Tortoises in a Landscape (1889), where three tortoises seem to have swept up at speed towards the wizened figure of Jurōjin compared with the static deer, they are part of an enigmatic reversal of reality. Outside Europe, and particularly in east Asia, tortoises have a long and glorious history of depiction in art. Shibata Zeshin (1807–1891), Jurōjin, Deer and Tortoises in a Landscape (1889), ink and colour on silk, Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii. So here is a short pictorial journey to discover more about the significance of tortoises in paintings. The only explanation that I could find in the literature is that “they may be read as symbols of immortality (but also of silence)” (Cooke, p 62), leaving me more puzzled than before. If you’ve come across Gustave Moreau’s painting of Orpheus (1865), you will have noticed that there are a couple of tortoises in the right foreground. Sometimes we see things in paintings that are strange and appear unexplained.
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