Hare

Product Description

Colourfully described by early natural historians as the fastest, hairiest, most lascivious, & most melancholy' of mammals, the hare is no less remarkable for its actual behaviour & capacities than for the intriguing ways in which it has been imagined & exploited throughout history. Hare examines how this animal has been described, symbolized & visually depicted, as well as utilized for its fur, flesh & exceptional speed. Tracking the hare from ancient Egypt, where a hieroglyph of the animal signified existence itself, to the serial hare works of artist Joseph Beuys, who once notoriously declared that I am not a human being, I am a hare', Hare finds its subject in many surprising places & forms: from Crucifixion scenes, Buddhist lore & Algonquin creation myths, to witch trials, treatises on logic, contemporary poetry & an art installation in a Dutch brothel. It is the principal subject of the first ever hunting treatise, king of all venery', for Renaissance theorists of the hunt; & it appears in the first known description of a still-life painting, in the first signed & dated picture of a single animal, & in early medicine, where it was credited with having the most curative properties of any beast. The first monograph on the subject for 35 years, & richly illustrated, Hare combines the most recent natural history with an eclectic account of the animal's symbolic values. Hare will be of interest to art historians & literary critics; to those for & opposed to hunting; & to both the general & the lagophile reader alike.