Historical art can hide scientific secrets

In the upper right corner of his 1611 painting “Air,” Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder drew a bat holding a songbird in its jaws. While the painting might have been an allegory, the bat’s behavior was real — though scientists would not officially observe the behavior for another 400 years.

Artists are often keen observers of nature. Whether mimicking the reality in still lifes and landscapes or imagining a composite world filled with symbolism and fantasy, some artists show real biological phenomena — from predator-prey interactions to insect metamorphoses. Working closely with art historians, some researchers are spotting scientific insights in artistic works, often reflecting the deep interests of their creators.

For Pedro Romero-Vidal, an ecologist at Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, the bat in the Brueghel painting was “completely unexpected.” It was a greater noctule bat (Nyctalus lasiopterus) carrying a bird. While the bat usually dines on insects, the artist may have heard about the bird-eating behavior during visits to the bat’s home range in Italy. But scientists would document evidence of bird-snatching from the bats’ fecal remains only in the early 2000s and confirm the behavior by listening in on songbird snacking in 2025.

The bat finding was something of a side quest, says Romero-Vidal, who published the analysis earlier this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He and colleagues have been scanning historic paintings for “monkeys and parrots, since these animals were often transported from distant places, and we can glean interesting [ecological] information from their appearance in paintings from different centuries.” Many paintings fit the bill. “We’ve identified more than 1,500 works,” with these animals, he says. Repeated depiction means the artists at least knew about the critters, either by observing menageries or hearing about them from other people.

“Where it gets really exciting is when [art historians and scientists] come together and share their expertise.”

Christopher Atkins
Museum of Fine Arts historian

Jan Brueghel the Elder wasn’t the only artist painting ecological folk knowledge ahead of scientific ideas. Others, such as German-born artist Maria Sibylla Merian, who was active in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, used detailed still life paintings to show ecological relationships. “She figured out — and people hadn’t done this before — matching the insects with the host plant,” says art historian Anna Knaap of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Merian’s work influenced people like Carl Linnaeus, who’s considered the father of modern taxonomy. “She was a scientist ahead of her time,” Knaap says.

In 2025, the museum put on an exhibition of the works of Rachel Ruysch, another late 17th and early 18th century artist. While preparing, Knaap and another Museum of Fine Arts historian Christopher Atkins wanted to collaborate with researchers, knowing the potential scientific importance of the works. So they turned to biologist Charles Davis of Harvard University.

Davis was immediately impressed with Ruysch’s botanical knowledge. “There’s all these little kind of nerdy botanical details that only an expert would know,” he says. “They’re in many cases representative of the species’ identity.” For example, the artist depicted flower parts such as sepals and anthers with careful accuracy, which Davis used to identify specific species and their origin in the Dutch colonial territories.

He also found an amusing mistake. “In one of her most famous paintings, there’s a carrion flower,” Davis says. The flowers mimic the smell and appearance of dead animals, attracting flies as pollinators. But Ruysch’s work depicted an unlikely partner dancing toward the bloom: a swallowtail butterfly (Papilionidae). “I sort of laughed,” he says. Ruysch probably never saw the flora in its natural habitat with its usual pollinator, having encountered it only in botanical gardens.

Art historians have many tools to figure out whether an artist meant to portray something with realism or took artistic license. “We look at what visual evidence exists. We make comparisons,” Atkins says. “So within a particular artist’s work, for example, you can see sometimes repeated motifs, which suggests then that that is not necessarily a completely realistic feature.” Art historians can also look to an artist’s original sketches of a landscape and compare it with the final product.

These artists may not have left written records of any scientific musings, but they certainly pictured them, Atkins says. A collaboration between art historians and scientists can reveal those insights. “These things have been sitting in pictures for hundreds of years,” Atkins says. “Where it gets really exciting is when the two sides come together and share their expertise.”