In the upper right corner of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s luminous 1611 painting Air, a small drama unfolds in paint: a bat, wings spread and jaws clamped around a songbird, hangs against the sky. To most viewers, the image might have looked like a fanciful allegory, a symbolic struggle between night and day, or perhaps a moral lesson about predation. But to ecologist Pedro Romero-Vidal, it looked like something far more literal: a record of natural history, painted four centuries before scientists officially confirmed that such a thing actually happens. Brueghel, a Flemish master known for intricate landscapes and allegorical scenes, was no zoologist, but he was a keen observer of the world around him. And sometimes, as researchers are increasingly discovering, the details tucked into old paintings are not just artistic flourishes—they are ecological truths, preserved in pigment and brushstroke long before the rise of modern science.
Romero-Vidal, who works at the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, came across the painting almost by accident. He and his colleagues had been scanning old European paintings for images of monkeys and parrots, hoping to learn something about how those animals were known, traded, and understood in earlier centuries. But when he looked closely at Brueghel’s bat, he felt a jolt of recognition. The animal was not just any bat; it was a greater noctule (Nyctalus lasiopterus), one of Europe’s largest bat species. And it was carrying a bird in its jaws—a behavior that scientists had only begun to suspect existed in the early 2000s, when they found bird remains in bat droppings, and which they definitively confirmed only in 2025 by eavesdropping on the bats as they hunted songbirds at night. In other words, Brueghel had painted a biological fact that would not be officially documented for another four hundred years. How could that be? Romero-Vidal believes the artist may have heard stories about the bats’ bird-eating habits while visiting Italy, where the species lives. The painting, then, may be a piece of folk ecological knowledge made visible—an early, artistic testimony to a predator-prey relationship that science has only just caught up with.
This discovery is part of a larger, quieter revolution in how we understand both art and nature. Artists are often far more attentive to the living world than we give them credit for. In still lifes, landscapes, and even mythological scenes, they paid close attention to plants, animals, and the relationships between them—sometimes with astonishing accuracy. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German-born artist and naturalist active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was one of the first people to systematically observe and depict the connections between insects and the plants they depend on. She matched caterpillars with the host plants they ate, figured out metamorphosis by raising insects herself, and documented species in ways that would later influence Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy. Merian’s paintings are not just beautiful; they are scientific documents. Art historian Anna Knaap, of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, notes that Merian understood something that no one had really articulated before: that insects and plants live in intimate, specific relationships. Her work helped pave the way for modern ecology, even if it was made with watercolor and fine brushes rather than microscopes and field notes.
But not every detail in old paintings is scientifically perfect. Sometimes artists made mistakes, or at least took liberties. Consider the work of Rachel Ruysch, a Dutch artist famous for her lavish flower still lifes in the early eighteenth century. In one painting from the 1730s, Ruysch placed a carrion flower in the lower left corner, alongside a striking swallowtail butterfly. In reality, as ecologists point out, a swallowtail would never pollinate a carrion flower. The carrion flower, as its name suggests, is pollinated by flies, which are attracted by the smell of rotting meat. So why did Ruysch pair these two? The likely answer is that Ruysch had seen the flower only in botanical gardens, far from its original habitat, and had never observed its natural pollinator. She painted what she knew—or what she imagined—rather than what a field biologist would have recorded. This mismatch is not a failure on Ruysch’s part; it’s simply a reminder that art captures a particular kind of truth, one shaped by observation, memory, cultural context, and imagination. The careful viewer can learn a great deal from such scenes, but not always the same kind of lesson.
Art historians have developed a toolkit for understanding when an artist is being realistic and when they are inventing. They look for repeated motifs, patterns across an artist’s body of work that may reveal symbolic meaning rather than direct observation. They compare finished paintings with preliminary sketches, which often show more careful attention to anatomy, proportions, or botanical structure. They consult written records, letters, and inventories to figure out what an artist might have seen, owned, or studied. Christopher Atkins, a historian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, points out that many paintings contain “little nerdy botanical details that only an expert would know”—details that are often accurate enough to identify specific species, sometimes down to the origin of the plant. In Rachel Ruysch’s work, for example, flower parts such as sepals and anthers are rendered with remarkable precision, even when the overall scene is imagined. These details matter. They suggest that artists were not merely copying a generic idea of a flower or animal; they were paying attention, recording what they saw, and embedding that knowledge into their compositions. The problem, Atkins notes, is that artists rarely left written records of their scientific musings. They may have been thinking deeply about nature, but they did not tell us directly. Their paintings, however, speak for themselves.
That is where collaboration becomes so exciting. When art historians and scientists come together, they can see things that neither could see alone. An ecologist might spot a behavioral clue in a painting that an art historian would overlook; an art historian might recognize a symbolic convention that a scientist would mistake for realism. Together, they can separate fact from fantasy and uncover the hidden knowledge that has been sitting in pictures for hundreds of years. Atkins describes this moment of shared expertise as the real thrill: “Where it gets really exciting is when the two sides come together and share their expertise.” This interdisciplinary approach is already bearing fruit. Romero-Vidal and his colleagues have identified more than 1,500 paintings featuring monkeys and parrots, using them to trace how these animals were known, transported, and understood across different eras. Merian’s paintings are being reexamined for their ecological insights. Ruysch’s work was the subject of a 2025 exhibition in Boston, where curators worked alongside scientists to explore the natural knowledge embedded in her florals. The result is a richer, deeper understanding of both art and natural history—a reminder that the boundary between science and art is far more porous than we often assume.
In the end, these old paintings offer us something more than beauty. They are windows into a world where human curiosity about nature did not wait for formal science to arrive. Artists like Brueghel, Merian, and Ruysch were making sharp observations about the living world long before ecologists had names for the behaviors they recorded. Sometimes their details are startlingly accurate, like the bat with its songbird prey. Sometimes they are charmingly imperfect, like the swallowtail butterfly dancing toward a carrion flower. But in every case, they remind us that the impulse to understand nature is not a modern invention. It is as old as human imagination itself. And so, when we stand before a centuries-old painting, we are not just looking at art. We are looking at evidence of a shared, enduring curiosity about the world—a curiosity that crosses time, culture, and discipline. The bat in the corner of Brueghel’s painting may have been waiting all this time for someone to notice it, to wonder, to look closer. And when we finally do, the painting begins to tell a story that no one had ever told before. That is the magic of looking, and the promise of collaboration: a world where art and science, together, let us see the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary, and the future hidden in the past.
