The following concluding three chapters are concerned with depictions and discussions of animals in seventeenth-century art and in the history of economic thought. This might seem a rather unusual methodological pairing, but it is based on a consistent logic. The detailed explanation of this logic will become apparent in the following pages. For now, the short explanation will do, which is that both in art and in economics a new conceptualization of animals emerged, one which objectified them in a manner distinctly different from the traditional modes of discussing them which had prevailed in philosophical, literary, and scientific discourses, from antiquity till the early modern era. This change began with the increasing emphasis on the historical importance of utilizing animals, and nature in general. But in the late eighteenth century, as the modern science of political economy began to take shape, this outlook became a validation of this utilization for the sake of necessary economic progress.

The first type of animal paintings we will consider is that of dead animals. Still-life painting of dead animals emerged as an iconographic genre in early modern art, mainly in seventeenth-century Netherlandish painting. In what follows, the term “Netherlandish” will refer to both parts of that region which had effectively separated in the late sixteenth century following the war with Spain – the Southern Provinces, which remained under Catholic Spanish rule in the seventeenth century, and the new and independent Dutch Republic, with its Calvinistic religious makeup. In both countries a great artistic tradition was continued in different stylistic terms: on the one hand the Flemish baroque school under the influence of Rubens, and on the other the great Golden Age of Dutch painting. An unprecedented flourishing of profane iconographic genres developed in both countries, including genre, landscape, and still life, the latter subdivided into many sub-genres, including several types concerned with the depiction of dead animals. This chapter will investigate the interaction between this artistic genre and the general history of attitudes toward animals.

Modern viewers of early modern depictions of dead animals may well feel perplexed.