Looking at Paintings with Animals 1 Jan Brueghel the Elder paints them two by two playing flying, lounging, and rough-housing before they enter Noah’s Ark-- elephants and turtles, bats and birds, lions and dogs, camels and turkeys-- no sense of foreboding or doom in 1613, no sense of the coming days as the world turns and floods and mankind and other animals stand ill prepared to perish. What nourishes us before we finally sleep? What ark are we waiting for? 2 Hans Holbein the Younger paints a lady with a squirrel and a starling—the blackish dark of bird, woman, and squirrel merging. The lady looks away, the starling intersects. The year: 1526. I like the animals she claims for her time, the meeting of the tame and wild, the face harboring secrets. The lady’s fur hat a trapezoid rime hemmed to fit her head, the whitish shawl on shoulders, her body cloaked in a black dress. She in communion with squirrel and starling, all similar and different, all relevant. 3 Diego Valázquez paints the head of a stag up-close and direct in 1634, no noble portrait of ruminant but one that allows the young stag to be no one but his youthful silly self, as naked as a human counterpart. His look frank and without flattery. Sky half green with storm and half in cloud frames his head, no body or land in sight to anchor. Two in relationship-- subject and viewer, animal to animal. By accretion and comparison we come to know something. Sharon Tracey Sharon Tracey is the author of three poetry collections – Land Marks (forthcoming, Shanti Arts), Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Shanti Arts), and What I Remember Most is Everything (All Caps Publishing). Her poems have appeared in Radar Poetry, Lily Poetry Review, Terrain.org, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. sharontracey.com
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The Ekphrastic Review
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February 2025
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