Introduction

A small group of images from sixteenth-century Antwerp depicting the butchering of beached whales is introduced as exemplary of the cetaceous unit, an iconographical compound representing Europeans’ relationship with the ocean. That unit changed only slightly throughout Western society’s history, and consistently signified humanity’s dominion over and exploitation of the natural world. The Antwerp group presents a transitional moment between the medieval world’s moralizing approach and the seventeenth century’s empirical, Baconian consideration of nature. The chapter positions the Antwerp whale images with regard to their naturalistic style and a rhetoric of art made ad vivum , the authority derived from repeated imagery, empirical investigatory practices and epistemic images, and early modern monster discourse. The book’s ecocritical approach and chapters are introduced.