Sottobosco

From the series Clara and Crawly creatures

Still life with insects, amphibians and reptiles, Otto Marseus van Schrieck, 1662

Around 1650, crawly creatures got their very own genre of painting, known as sottobosco, or ‘forest floor’. These works depict a fascinating, dark and clammy realm of rotting tree trunks, funghi, mosses, and tiny slithering and hissing creatures – here, it is they who are the stars of the show.

Outcasts of creation

Associated with the devil, sin and death

A new way of seeing

Renaissance artists paint crawly creatures

Table ornament Table ornament

Uniting art and nature

Crawly creatures in the Kunstkammer (‘art chamber’)

The small print in the book of nature

Crawly creatures and God’s creation

Miraculous transformations

Maria Sibylla Merian studies Surinamese insects

Sottobosco

Crawly creatures get their own genre