Painting 101: A picture of Noah’s Ark, please
About yay big: Französischer Meister’s Noah from around 1675 compares today’s popular perception with Leonardo’s drawing “Deluge” from around 1511.
Assignment: Paint a picture of the biblical ark in as much detail as possible. You need to include Noah and his family (Mrs N, Ham, Shem and Japheth and their ladies) and all of the animals enumerated in Bishop John Wilkins’ 17th-century “Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language”:
One pair each, horses, hogs, lions, asses, baboons, bears, camels, apes, tigers, elephants, monkeys, sloths, porcupines, dogs, cats, polecats, hedgehogs, civets, squirrels, ferrets, martins, armadillos, stoats, tortoises, weasels, otters, wolves, foxes, badgers, rhinoceroses, hares, rabbits, marmots, guinea pigs, stonebucks (he meant ibexes), camelopards (giraffes), ant-bears (anteaters), pards (panthers or leopards), ounces (lynx), castors (beavers), caraguya (opossums) and jackalls (?!) …
And, to do the heavy lifting, seven each of bulls, urus (aurochs), bisons, bonasus, buffalo, elk, reindeer, roe deer, bucks, antelope, harts, goats, shamois, sheep, broad-tailed sheep (?) and stepciseros (kudus).
Have we forgotten anyone? Parrots, slugs? We’ll get to them in a minute.
A detail from “The Animals Guided onto Noah’s Ark”, done in the 1570s by Jacopo Bassano. He painted the whole herd all over again in “Noah’s Sacrifice”.
It wasn’t until the Renaissance that the logistics of the ark story were analysed. In the 15th century Alfonso Tostada sorted out how the air was probably circulated and what Noah did with all the shit, and in the 16th, Johannes Buteo calculated the size of the boat’s various quarters, including space for grinding mills and smokeless ovens.
Gustave Doré’s “The Deluge”, 1865
As Todd Charles Wood’s essay on Wilkins and the ark (online here) points out, even as learned a man as Samuel Pepys took heart in the clergyman’s measurement of the ark and his tally of its passengers, proving “that there was room enough for them and their food and dung, which doth please me mightily”. See the rest.
