Why has mankind always loved to draw animals? David Attenborough explains the fascination

Animals were the first things that human beings drew. Not plants. Not landscapes. Not even themselves. But animals. Why? The earliest known drawings are some 30,000 years old. They survive in the depths of caves in western Europe. The fact that some people crawled for half a mile or more along underground passages through the blackness is evidence enough that the production of such pictures was an act of great importance to these artists.

Head of a White Stork, attributed to Vincenzo Leonardi

But what was their purpose? Maybe drawing was an essential part of the ceremonials they believed were necessary to ensure success in hunting. Maybe the paintings were intended not to bring about the death of the creatures portrayed but, on the contrary, to ensure their continued fertility so that the people would have a permanent source of meat. We cannot tell. One thing, however, is certain. These drawings are amazingly assured, wonderfully accurate and often breathtakingly beautiful.

This practice of painting images of animals on walls has persisted throughout our history. Five thousand years ago, when men in Egypt began to build the world’s first cities, they too inscribed images of animals on their walls.

There is no doubt about the function of at least some of these: the Egyptians worshipped animals as gods. But Egyptian artists also delighted in their natural beauty, for they adorned the walls of their own underground tombs with pictures. The mummified dead in the next world would surely wish to be reminded of the beauties and delights of this one.

The distinction between animals as gods and animals as themselves is also apparent in the manuscripts of medieval Christianity. Scribes provided their saints with emblematic animals. Saint Mark has his lion, but it is a lion with wings; and Saint John is accompanied by an eagle, but often one of such magnificence that it is scarcely recognisable as the brown bird of reality.

But other less exalted and more earthy creatures also crept into their manuscripts. The monks introduced on to their pages the wild creatures that abounded in the natural world outside. Squirrels run up the margins; rabbits chase one another around the capital letters.

In the early 12th century, such animals began to escape from the breviaries and Psalters into books of their own. These bestiaries seem to be a particularly English phenomenon, an early indication of a special national affection for animals that endures to this day. Among these recognisable images there are some fantastic animas – unicorns and dragons, sea monsters, and griffins that were part-lion and part-eagle. The scribes had not seen them but they certainly believed in their existence.

By the 15th century however, the new scientific spirit of the Renaissance swept through Europe. Scholars began to examine the world with fresh eyes and to question the myths of the medieval mind. Leonardo da Vinci started to look at animals and plants in a new way. He wished to understand how they grew, moved and reproduced themselves, so he not only drew them in action but dissected their bodies.

Other scholars began to assess the variety of animal life that lay beyond their own countryside. For explorers travelling south down the coast of Africa, east to the Indies and west to the New World were bringing back completely new kinds of creatures.

The natural world needed a catalogue, and the first to compile one – thus earning the title of the father of zoology – was a Swiss doctor, Conrad Gesner. To illustrate it, he assembled drawings from wherever he could get them. Some he commissioned from artists, who drew many of the skins and skeletons that Gesner himself had collected. Others, he asked to use their imaginations to produce pictures of animals that neither they nor anyone else had ever seen, and some images he simply appropriated. All these pictures, Gesner published from 1551 onwards in his Historia animalium.

Gesner’s illustrations in turn were plundered by an Italian encyclopaedist, Ulisse Aldrovandi, professor of natural sciences at the University of Bologna. Like Gesner, Aldrovandi amassed an immense collection. His cabinet of curiosities was said to contain 4,554 drawers of specimens. For years, he wrote and rewrote descriptions of his objects, quoting from all kinds of sources, including references from classical poets. The myths of medieval times had not yet entirely vanished, for Aldrovandi firmly believed in the existence of dragons and he accordingly devoted a section to them – some with wings and some with seven heads.

Aldrovandi’s illustrations, like those in most printed books of the 16th century, came from wooden blocks on which the design was cut in relief. The simplicity of the technique inevitably imposed limitations on detail. Many of Aldrovandi’s images are banal representations of banal subjects: worms, a tooth, lumps of stone. But there are also many that have an undeniable grandeur, such as the huge crabs, shown full-page, which glower at the reader from within their splendidly armoured and articulated shells.

	The compulsion to draw animals is a tradition that stretches back 30,000 years

Aldrovandi’s works were firmly based on his own collections of specimens. However, in the first half of the 17th century, a new kind of collector appeared, who accumulated not objects but drawings of them.

Such a one was Cassiano dal Pozzo, whose interests took in classical statues and architecture, plants, animals and fossils. These drawings, which would ultimately fill many huge vellum-bound volumes, constituted what he called his museo cartaceo, or his “Paper Museum”. He was more rigorously scientific than Aldrovandi: goneare the mermaids, dragons and centaurs.

Cassiano himself investigated the anatomy of many of his animal specimens as Leonardo had done 150 years earlier – though the records his artists produced are no match for Leonardo’s. But they did produce drawings that convey with great mastery the colour, texture and details of their subjects. Occasionally, they succeeded in giving their drawings of the most ordinary objects a monumentality that the originals probably never possessed.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, the influx of strange and wonderful plants and animals from overseas supplied the artists of Europe with abundant new subjects. Eventually, the time came when some decided that they would themselves travel to far-flung places to find animals and plants in their original settings.

One of the first of these adventurous artists was a divorced middle-aged woman by the name of Maria Sibylla Merian. She lived in Amsterdam, where she earnt her living as a flower painter, but she also had a passion for insects. In 1699, at what was then regarded as the advanced age of 52, she set out for the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America. She wanted to discover and chronicle the stages insects passed through during their life cycles. And she drew them, sitting on their particular food plants, often with other small and quite unrelated invertebrates alongside them.

Merian’s work is unmistakable. Style in natural history drawing is often subtle – indeed, sometimes it is almost unidentifiable. The artists are often too concerned with correctness and accuracy of detail in what they are portraying to mould its contours to their own particular taste. There is no room for vague impressions. There are no costumes to bring a sense of period. Since backgrounds are often omitted, there is no need to use the conventions of perspective. So a drawing of a flower made in the 16th century may be hard to distinguish from one of the same species made in the 20th. But Merian’s pictures display clear clues to their authorship. She has a special fondness for curls and she draws them whenever she has the opportunity. Given the chance, her snakes squirm into extravagant coils.

Twenty years later and farther north, in Virginia, another European artist also began to delineate the natural history of the New World. Mark Catesby, a young naturalist born in Suffolk, often gives his subjects settings that are neither accurate from a naturalist’s point of view nor even to scale. His flamingo is placed against a branch of so-called black coral, a gorgonian, which lives only in coral reefs, where flamingos never go.

Most bafflingly of all, he sets his biggest subject, the magnificent one-ton American bison, against a spray of a Robinia tree, drawn to a completely different scale. None the less, Catesby’s images have great freshness and charm. He engraved them himself on copper plates, and between 1729 and 1747 published them as The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.

This was the first in a series of illustrated books on the natural history of North America that culminated in 1827 in perhaps the greatest and certainly the most gigantic of all bird books, entitled The Birds of America, by John James Audubon. Audubon hunted birds with an unquenchable passion and he drew them with equal enthusiasm. He thought that the standard static profiles, which, since ancient Egyptian times, had been the almost universal way of representing birds, gave no idea of their vivacity and grace.

He determined to draw them in motion, so he took one of his newly shot victms and fixed it on to a board with a squared grid drawn on it. He manipulated the bird’s wings and neck into what he considered life-like attitudes and fixed them in position with skewers. The process must have been a fairly blood-spattered one, since his specimens were newly killed. The results, however, did indeed bring life to his images. Terns swoop, eagles crouch over their captured prey, and hummingbirds hover in front of flowers. Audubon brought these dramatic drawings to Britain in order to get them engraved for reproduction. They were, however, among the last important natural history drawings to be printed in this way.

That was because a German printer had discovered that a line drawn with a wax pencil on a fine-grained limestone could be inked and printed. He refined the process to such an extent that soon the lithographic process was in use all over Europe, offering prints that could reproduce the most delicate lines directly from the artist’s hand. The process led to a new flowering of natural history books.

Among the most spectacular were those produced by John Gould, who employed a series of artists, perhaps the most talented of whom was the 18-year-old Edward Lear, later to become more famous for his nonsense verse. Gould’s sumptuous folio volumes appeared in imposing ranks on the shelves of aristocratic libraries throughout Britain

By the beginning of the 20th century, it seemed that the age of great scientific natural history painting was coming to an end. Photography was beginning its reign, and it was soon possible to capture an exact image of the creature in front of you with the press of a finger.

Now the tiny electronic camera can record high-quality pictures in light so low that even the human eye has difficulty in perceiving what is in front of it. Optical cables can carry images from underground nest chambers at the end of long narrow tunnels. New vibration-proof mountings allow the camera to record close-ups of an animal while hovering in a helicopter a thousand feet above it.

You might think that these latest developments would finally bring to an end a tradition that stretches back 30,000 years. Not so. Today large-scale monographs devoted to particular groups of plants and animals are still produced by artists who welcome the double demands of aesthetic delight and scientific accuracy.

And they always will do. For no matter what the ostensible motive for their work, whether it is to lighten the reverential atmosphere of a monastery or to invoke animal spirits in a fertility ritual, to explore anatomy or to catalogue a discovery, there is a common denominator that links all these artists. It is the profound joy felt by all who observe the natural world with a sustained and devoted intensity.