Joannes Stradanus’ Venationes
Stradanus, Joannes. Venationes Ferarum, Auium, Piscium. Pugnae Bestiarorum: & mutuæ Bestiarum. Two series in one volume. Antwerp, Johannes Gallaeus, circa 1585.
One of the most spectacular engraved suites of the late Renaissance: Joannes Stradanus’ Venationes, comprising 104 oblong folio copper engravings depicting hunts, animal combats, gladiatorial spectacles, bird-catching, fishing scenes, exotic creatures, dragons, and violent encounters between humans and animals across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the imagined edges of the known world.
Complete copies are of the utmost rarity. The present example survives in extraordinarily fresh condition throughout.
Edition & Bibliographic Information
Engraved title and 104 numbered copper engravings with one- or two-line Latin captions. Oblong folio (295 × 374 mm).
Modern brownish-red morocco binding with gilt spine title and blind-stamped cover title, with silk guards throughout; housed in a half-leather slipcase with gilt spine title.
The series first appeared in 1578 in two separate parts, the second beginning with plate 62. Around 1580 a further issue followed under the imprint “a Philippo Gallaeo,” while the present third edition appeared circa 1585 under “A Joanne Gallaeo” in Antwerp.
The engravings were executed by Jan Collaert, Carol de Mallery, and Cornelius and Theodorus Galle after designs by Joannes Stradanus.
Joannes Stradanus and the Renaissance Hunt
Joannes Stradanus (1523–1605), born Jan van der Straet in Bruges, trained in Antwerp under Pieter Aertsen before relocating through Lyon and Venice to Florence, where he joined the circle of Giorgio Vasari and worked for the Medici court.
His artistic language fused Flemish realism with Italian Mannerist dynamism. Particularly important were the vast hunting cartoons he created for Cosimo de’ Medici’s hunting villa at Poggio a Caiano, where naturalistic observation merged with theatrical movement, violence, and invention.
The Venationes emerged directly from this artistic environment.
A Universal Theatre of Violence
Across 104 engravings, Stradanus constructs an encyclopedic theatre of pursuit, conflict, survival, and spectacle in which every creature may become either hunter or prey. Lions attack men from behind. Bulls gore hunters. Wolves tear through deer. Dogs overwhelm boars and bears. Elephants battle serpents. Gladiators confront wild beasts before Renaissance audiences.
Elsewhere pygmies wage desperate war against cranes after Homeric tradition, dragons emerge from caves, unicorns are hunted through forests, and monstrous sea creatures surround heavily laden ships beneath swelling sails. The scenes unfold on land, underground, at sea, and in the air, extending from recognisable Central European landscapes to Persia, India, Ethiopia, Egypt, and fantastical “barbarous regions” at the fringes of the Renaissance imagination.
The work repeatedly collapses the boundary between observation and fantasy. Renaissance zoological knowledge remained limited despite the age of exploration, and Stradanus freely allows mythological creatures and exotic speculation to enter the visual field beside recognisable animals rendered with astonishing naturalism.
From Chivalric Hunt to Mannerist Spectacle
The Venationes also reveal a major transformation in European hunting culture.
In Maximilian I’s Theuerdank, hunting still functioned primarily as a demonstration of knightly virtue and aristocratic discipline. By the late sixteenth century, Stradanus instead presents hunting as spectacle, danger, choreography, and sensory intensity. Falconry appears only briefly; Alpine chamois hunting survives almost as a historical remnant. What dominates instead is conflict itself.
The series becomes a vision of nature as permanent instability — an endless chain of pursuit and destruction in which neither animals nor humans possess lasting control.
A Masterpiece of Antwerp Print Culture
The engravings rank among the finest achievements of late sixteenth-century Antwerp printmaking. The broad horizontal format allowed Stradanus to orchestrate unusually complex narrative scenes filled with movement, diagonals, layered action, and dramatic spatial depth.
At the same time, the plates contain moments of remarkable observational subtlety. A stag quietly scratches behind its ear while danger approaches unseen. Terrified monkeys display unmistakably human expressions. Ostriches, crocodiles, whales, cranes, bees, and coral divers are rendered with equal attention and imaginative force.
The result is simultaneously natural history, mythology, ethnography, theatre, and spectacle — one of the most ambitious visual encyclopedias of violence and survival produced during the Renaissance.
Provenance
Hans Dedi (1918–2016), with illustrated ex-libris depicting a medieval hunting scene. Accompanied by his typed note:
“Die Blätter habe ich lose bei Fleury in Paris gekauft, 1972 und bei Ringer in Nürnberg binden lassen.”
Literature
Cf. Adams S 1920 (different edition); BM STC Dutch 194 (different edition); Brunet V, 558; Ceresoli 501; Ebert 21837 (different edition); Funck 397 (different edition); Graesse VI/1, 508; Nissen, ZBI 4012; cf. Schwerdt II, pp. 226ff. (1578 and 1580 editions); Souhart 446; Thiébaud 858; on Stradanus see Thieme/Becker 32, 149f.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 64:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume II
