Animal Drawing

The study analyzes the presence and the depiction of exotic animals in Florence from the late 14th century to 1492, year of Lorenzo de' Medici's death and of the discovery of the Americas. In well-documented interdisciplinary research, the book sheds new light on a topic mainly neglected by attention to a number of sources: travellers' and pilgrims' descriptions of the exotic animals, documents mentioning their presence in Florence, drawings, paintings and frescoes depicting them, and the symbolism attributed to owning these creatures.

Paper delivered October 30, 2021, 3pm at Museo e Istituto Fiorentino di Preistoria in Florance Italy as part of Art Before Art: L'uomo Cosciente e l'arte delle origini: con e dopo Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti on the occasion of the anniversary of the paleo history book by art historian and critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, The Conscious Man, organized by the Fondazione Centro Studi sull'Arte Licia e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (Lucca) and the Museo e Istituto Fiorentino di Preistoria (Florence)

The handwritten hermeneia of the painter Jovan Četirević Grabovan, kept in the library of the Orthodox Church in Nyíregyháza, Hungary, contains, in addition to the main text, other records, texts, and drawings that father and son, Jovan and Nikola Grabovan, entered until the middle of
the fourth decade of the 19th century. The paper analyzes the origin and content of this heterogeneous group of texts, which provides insight into the range of their professional, intellectual, and
also everyday practical interests and needs. The records and drawings in the manuscript also testify
to the divergent influences and sources of knowledge to which they were exposed, primarily in terms
of contact with the contents of Western European publications in medicine, pharmacy, chemistry/
alchemy, and perhaps even geography and zoology. Special attention is paid to the identification
of the sources from which the transcribed texts originate, with most of them being determined quite
precisely. The variety of texts that appear on the pages of the manuscript makes it a kind of multifunctional family thing in which the two authors noted important dates, practical knowledge that
marked work and everyday life, as well as very special excursions into the world of exotic animals and alchemy. Most of the texts remained related to the painting profession, while two drawings of animals
were specially analyzed in the contexts of their symbolic and iconological potentials. The content of the manuscript raises the question of determining the educational and intellectual achievements of Jovan Četirević and Nikola Grabovan who were primarily grounded in the South Balkan tradition and modern Greek scholarship, open at the same time to different Western European influences.