Jona und der Hai Zu einem frühneuzeitlichen Hai-Präparat zwischen Exegese und Naturgeschichte

• Published in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte
• Main Author: Bauernfeind, Robert
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Walter de Gruyter GmbH 2019
• Subjects: Visual Arts and Performing Arts; Porbeagle
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zkg-2019-2002; http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/zkg.2019.82.issue-2/ZKG-2019-2002/ZKG-2019-2002.xml; https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ZKG-2019-2002/xml; https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ZKG-2019-2002/pdf

Abstract A seventeenth-century dry preparation of a porbeagle which was combined with a wooden sculpture of the prophet Jonah is analyzed using pictorial theories that emphasize the paradox of preparations being both subject and material of a visual representation. It explains the combination of Jonah and the shark by referring to speculations of early-modern natural history that the large fish that devoured Jonah must have been a shark. The preparation’s characteristic posture appears to be an adaptation of the depiction of a great white shark in Konrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium (1558), which had itself been drawn after a deformed dry preparation. The preparation of the porbeagle – probably made in an ecclesiastical context – thus represents less itself than a large shark.