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”.
Jan Brueghel the Elder’s undated “The Flood with Noah’s Ark”
Wood calls Wilkins (1614-72) “an important science populariser” who championed “natural religion” in his attempts to defend the literal Great Flood “by the meer principles of Reason, improved by Consideration and Experience, without the help of Revelation”. This despite acknowledging that no one could rationally explain “how ’tis possible that such a general Flood should come, by any natural means”.
Wilkins borrowed from Buteo’s 1559 reckonings as to the ark’s size but tossed his “fabulous” animals overboard and stuck to counting sheep. He ended up with a design for a partitioned, three-storey vessel, beasts on the bottom, their food in the middle and humans and birds on top.
Beneath the feet of the animals, deep in steerage in the “sink of the ark”, he stuffed the snakes, worms, lizards, frogs and toads. Rats, mice and moles could go anywhere they liked — no point trying to stop them anyway, then as now. Presumably the same applied to insects, but see Julian Barnes on the question of woodworms.
“As for the Morse [walrus], Seale, Turtle, or Sea-Tortoise, Crocodile, Senembi [iguana],” Wilkins wroteth, “These are usually described to be such kind of Animals as can abide in the water, and therefore I have not taken them into the Ark, tho if that were necessary, there would be room enough for them.”
The skipper tries to get his ducks in order in Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s “In Front of Noah’s Ark”, circa 1650.
When the New World appeared on the horizon in the 17th century, with all its fresh species of animals, they had to be taken into account too, and the problems really began. Biblical scholars like Justus Lipsius and Athanasius Kircher set their minds to making the story work scientifically, but they ended up bolstering the study of natural history — not religion. The scientific consensus, having come this far with the Bible, evaporated.
Charles Willson Peale’s “Noah and His Ark (after Charles Catton)”, 1819
But faith is a mighty edifice, and you only have to google the topic to get a flood of websites applying even newer knowledge to the accuracy of Genesis. (If you’re nagged by the question, “Could the ark have flown?”, try WorldWideFlood.com). Then there’s the search for the ark, ongoing since 1876 despite the fact that many have claimed to have already found its timbers.
It was an imaginative story to begin with, and imagination has never left it alone.
A detail from Michelangelo’s Deluge on the Sistine ceiling
