From religious paintings to cartoons, rabbits have been portrayed as both enigmatic and aggressive. But which portrayal is your favourite?
Bunny rabbits have inspired some great art and, as Easter is upon us, here is an artistic survey of the season's creature: my top five rabbits in art.
The most beautiful rabbit in art is surely the white bunny in Titian's Madonna of the Rabbit in the Louvre. It is also one of the most touching in its association with childhood and pets ? which is not to say it has no theological significance as a symbol of the mystery of the Incarnation. In Renaissance art the young Christ is seen with all kinds of animals, from birds to cats, but Titian's rabbit is somehow one of the funniest, most natural childhood scenes in a religious painting.
Albrecht Durer's 1502 portrait of a rabbit ? or is it a hare? ? is a very different work. Where Titian paints a white rabbit as part of a scene of childhood in the countryside, as a prop in an essentially human setup, Durer concentrates with rapt attention on the rabbit or hare as a thing in itself, without people or landscape. This is at once enigmatic and troubling: what is in its brain? What does it see? It is a very serious bunny.
It's almost a relief to go from Durer's alien beast to John Tenniel's Victorian illustration of the White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Or is it? Tenniel's study of what a rabbit might look like in human clothes, standing upright and looking at a pocket watch, is so meticulous that it takes on a hallucinatory truth that has haunted the modern imagination along with the rest of his Alice illustrations. It seems that as soon as you move away from Titian's family picnic with an Easter bunny, the rabbit in art becomes uncanny. The mildness of this creature offers a blank slate on which artists have imagined strange personae and possibilities.
The blankest of all bunnies is Jeff Koons's Rabbit, cast from an inflatable toy, its silvery skin a perfect mirror. This is the most uncanny rabbit of all. It is a metaphor for art itself, which it suggests is reflective and ethereal. Not something to touch but something that vanishes, like a dream. A form, but also just light. Koons is a tricky genius and his Rabbit a slippy customer.
Koons's Rabbit is almost as slippy as my favourite artistic rabbit: Bugs Bunny. Created at the end of the 1930s by a team of artists who included Tex Avery, the carrot-chomping, wisecracking Bugs is one of the great popular artworks of the 20th century. His design, like a thin-limbed 15th-century statue, makes him always aggressive, pert, and restless. Rabbits reached their apotheosis with Bugs. If mice are cute and cats are cruel in cartoons, Bugs Bunny is a free spirit, the rabbit as hero. Happy Easter.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/apr/22/top-five-rabbits-in-art
Nicolas Anelka Virginia Manchester United Chamonix Russia Tony Cottee
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