Resumen de Pictura's fertile field: Otto Marseus van Schrieck and the genre of sottobosco painting
The writer discusses the so-called sottobosco, a very special kind of still-life painting that emerged suddenly in the 1650s. The subgenre of sottobosco paintings of botanical and zoological life in dark underwoods or at the humid edges of pools was invented in Italy in the 1650s by Dutch painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck, and was adopted by, among other artists, Rachel Ruysch and Elias van den Broeck. Most sottobosco paintings were connected to the notion of spontaneous generation, a concept that was especially popular in intellectual and clerical circles in Rome, but was tested and discredited in Florence and the Netherlands at the end of the 17th century.
