Forest floor still life with mushrooms, a snake and butterflies

This kind of picture had barely existed a generation earlier. Otto Marseus van Schrieck more or less invented the forest-floor still life, the sottobosco, a close-up of the damp undergrowth where mushrooms, snakes, lizards and moths carry on out of sight. Fellow Dutch artists in Rome nicknamed him the Sniffer for rooting about in the dirt after his subjects, and back home he kept a plot of land stocked with live reptiles and insects so he could paint them from life. Here a snake threads through the fungi while butterflies catch the only light in the gloom. The Medici in Florence were among the collectors who wanted these strange, exact scenes, which is how this one reached the Uffizi.