Relative values

Created in the 1580s and owned by the Amsterdam merchant Jacob Rauwaert, the three paintings by Cornelis van Haarlem considered in this article add an important dimension to the artist’s focus on the human figure by underscoring how the animal played an equally important part in Cornelis’s practice. Seen together, the paintings exhibit the attention to both human and animal bodies that Karel Van Mander encouraged artists to pursue. Yet, the hierarchy of human over animal indicated by Van Mander’s writings is, I argue, subverted by the particularly violent iconographies of Cornelis’s paintings. Suggesting human fallibility and a potential breakdown in the natural order, the paintings can be seen as reflecting the social conditions permeating life in the Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt. This article concludes by speculating how a dialectic of violence, one that encouraged beholders to recognise a relativity of viewpoints, may have served the paintings’ first owner.