A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BESTIARY

Animal: Exploring the Zoological World

Introduction by James Hanken, London: Phaidon, 2018, hb., 352 pages, £39.95

Any volume examining ‘humankind’s fascination with animals’ can only hope to be a conspectus, but Animal is unusually ambitious and thoughtful, handsomely produced and with an introduction by a Harvard zoologist. It ranges far and wide, from prehistoric paintings to 2018’s XROMM technology, which allows us to watch animal skeletons in action. 

Images are paired cleverly, sometimes touchingly, to show how our fascination evolves – Francisco Goya’s void-falling bulls with a 1906 image of deer startled by a camera flash – a Greek Bronze Age fresco of introduced monkeys with a 2016 photo of Japanese snow monkeys naturalised in Texas – the puissant monkey-god Hanuman with Francis Bacon’s caged and screaming baboon – Eugène Delacroix’s sensitive dreaming tiger with today’s ‘unorthodox taxidermy’ in which animals are arranged in death-like rather than life-like poses. Nematodes’ swirling imprints echo Aboriginal cosmos-creating lizards, William Blake complements Grayson Perry, and twitching jerboas face onto pitifully chained goldfinches. 

Many of the illustrations are part of common cultural zoogeography – Pablo Picasso’s bull, Uffington’s White Horse, Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros, Walt Disney’s orang-utans, Tutankhamun’s scarabs, Robert Hooke’s flea from Micrographia, King Kong, Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom – but intelligent captioning offers new angles even on these (Edwin Landseer’s Monarch is really a royal stag, with only 12-point antlers).

Many others will be less familiar, and some strikingly new – huge 6,000 year old giraffe carvings from Niger, Papua’s Ambum Stone, Aztec anthropomorphic myth as depicted for the conquistadores’ far-off King, Charles Le Brun’s human-animal phrenologies, John Ruskin’s kingfisher, a harvestman stalking a night-time pine forest, and four artworks created for this book. 

Animal captures admirably two interlocking intoxications – the thrill of ever expanding zoological knowledge and the sheer joy of looking at animals, who look right back and into us in challenge and entreaty. 

This review first appeared in the 7th November 2018 issue of Country Life, and is reproduced with permission