Orpheus Charming the Animals

Just below Orpheus, near the bottom of the panel, a turkey stands with its tail fanned out. When this was painted, early in the 1600s, turkeys had been in Europe for less than a century, brought over from the Americas. The museum's own description sums up the crowd as domestic and wild, local and exotic, even fantastic. A dog in a red collar and a pair of herons share the ground with a lion and a leopard, a tortoise crawls along the lower edge, and a white unicorn stands up on the slope among the goats and deer. The museum lists the panel in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder, and recent scholars see it as a good copy of a lost original. In the Borghese inventory of 1790 it was still given to Paul Bril, a Flemish landscape painter who worked in Rome.