This 17th-Century Flemish Painting Held A Gnarly Bat Secret

To Jan Brueghel the Elder, paradise could not be contained to a single biome.

Many of Brueghel's paintings teem with menageries of birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish that would never ordinarily meet in the wild: monkeys from the Americas mingling with birds from Europe and ungulates from Asia.

Brueghel's paintings were also striking for their scientific accuracy, as Arianne Faber Kolb wrote in her study https://www.getty.edu/publications-reports/item/243S6Q">Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark.

In the 1500s, European exploration and subsequent exploitation of other continents introduced Europe to many exotic new species which wound their way into fine art.

Unlike other painters of his age, Brueghel avoided including mythical creatures like unicorns in his landscapes.

To Brueghel, the newfound abundance of the planet's species was heaven enough.

Many Renaissance painters illustrated exotic animals from descriptions, leading to fantastical or off-kilter representations, such as Francesco Bianchi Ferrari's 16th-century https://www.ashmolean.org/arion-riding-on-a-dolphin">Arion riding on a Dolphin, which which calls into question whether Ferrari had ever seen a dolphin or a child.

But Brueghel painted many of these foreign creatures from life.

In 1606, when Brueghel was appointed to be a court painter for Archduke Albert and Infanta Isabella, cousins and co-monarchs of the Habsburg Netherlands, he visited their extensive menagerie and saw animals only recently transported from the Americas.

There was a fishpond stocked with tortoises and crayfish.

There was an aviary with turkeys, canaries, Indian hens, white and colored peacocks, grouse, pheasants, partridges, nightingales, quails, Icelandic sparrow hawks, a scarlet macaw, and a toucan.

There were tiny lion tamarin monkeys, cotton-head tamarins, and marmosets.

There were camels as well.

Brueghel did not just sprinkle these exotics in his 1613 painting https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RJT">The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark; he placed them in situ.

He tried, to the best of his knowledge, to illustrate them interacting with each other and the world just as they would in their own wildernesses.

Brueghel's 1611 painting https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Jan_van_Kessel_-_Air.jpg">Air represents the apex of such an imagined aviary, with toucans, peacocks, swans, both scarlet and blue-and-yellow macaws, turkeys, owls, and an ostrich.

Each of these exquisitely rendered species surrounds the Greek muse Urania, who holds an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillary_sphere">armillary sphere.

But Air is not just the domain of the avian.

Four other fliers populate the painting.

They are bats, and Brueghel's naturalist bent means the bats, too, are identifiable.

The bat in the left corner is a vesper bat, distinguished by its long ears.

The two in the middle appear to belong to the family Vespertilionidae.

And the bat at the top right looks to be a noctule bat with a bird in its mouth.

As such, a new study in https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2536525123">PNAS suggests that Brueghel's Air represents the first direct evidence of bird-eating noctule bats.