The Hare

In 1631 a Venetian nobleman offered the Florentine sculptor Pietro Tacca 300 sequins, Venetian gold coins, for this picture of a hare. Tacca turned him down. As the biographer Filippo Baldinucci later told it, he said he knew how to earn sequins, but if the hare went he would never get it back. He believed it was by Albrecht Dürer. So did Cardinal Giovanni Antonio Guadagni, a nephew of Pope Clement XII, who later gave it to the Corsini family as a Dürer.

It is in fact by Hans Hoffmann of Nuremberg, and it was probably painted in Prague around 1585, during his years at the court of Rudolf II. The model is Dürer's famous Young Hare of 1502, in Vienna, but Hoffmann sets the animal in a small meadow, every plant and insect drawn with a botanist's precision. The museum names them. Lady's mantle grows at the right, the broad, fleshy leaves of dock fill the bottom, a pink flowers at the left, and a little grasshopper sits at the lower right. Higher up a fly has settled, the detail the museum singles out as the height of the painter's virtuosity.