Carnegie Museum of Art, Bequest of Charles J. Rosenbloom "The Peaceable Kingdom," an 1837 work by the American painter Edward Hicks is including in the exhibit "Fierce Friends" at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Click photo for larger image. "Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750-1900" Where: Carnegie Museum of Art. When: Sunday through Aug. 27. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. Sundays, but open at 10 a.m. March 26 only. Admission: $10, seniors $7, students and children $6, members free. Information: 412-622-3131 or www.cmoa.org. Schedule of events: Fierce Friends, Artists and Animals, 1750-1900.

Anyone who's taken a family vacation to Yellowstone National Park has experienced firsthand the complex relationship humans have with the planet's other animals.

"Bear jams" on the park roads are caused by visitors who pull their cars over when they spot the lumbering animals, and who sometimes send their children to stand next to one of the cuddly creatures for a photograph. The park service warns that such actions court a mauling, but it uses friendly cartoon character Smokey Bear as a symbol to teach forest fire awareness. Tourists want safe passage in the park but also to see wild animals in their native habitat. And environmentalists strive for a functioning ecosystem where all inhabitants are respected and protected.

A groundbreaking exhibition opening this weekend at Carnegie Museum of Art explores, through fascinating artwork and scientific materials, the roots of contemporary attitudes toward animals both domestic and wild.

"Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750-1900" looks at how the way people thought about, and what they knew about, animals changed during a period that embraced the social and political rationalism of the Enlightenment, the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species," and a shift from agriculture to the Industrial Age.

The exhibition makes claim to being the "first serious, full-scale examination of the subject of animals in art" and the "first to incorporate scientific materials and concepts." The array of imagery displayed is curious as well as scholarly, exhibiting qualities as varied as humor, pathos and unimaginable beauty. Nothing is predictable, even within such seemingly commonplace categories as pets, agriculture or circuses and zoos.

	Das Stadel, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut und Stadtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main "The Jealous Lioness," was painted by Paul Meyerheim in approximately 1880. Click photo for larger image.

British artist Edwin Landseer, for example, imbues his circa 1839 painting of Grafton, a bloodhound, and Scratch, a Scottish terrier, with human-like personality by employing stylistic conventions of portraiture, and equates viewer and subject by placing the former at dog level. A change at some point of the original title, "Dogs," to "Dignity and Impudence" assigned a symbolic content based upon a reading of human characteristics in the canine faces.

The viewer can almost feel the hot breath of "The Jealous Lioness" as she thrusts clawed paws between the bars that separate her and her mate from the gowned female trainer who seductively scratches the lion's mane. Did German artist Paul Meyerheim, who was noted for his animal depictions, paint his circa 1880 subject from observation, simply anthropomorphize his feline, or base the painting on controversial theories of evolution and natural selection set forth in Darwin's 1859 book?

A moving depiction of "Peasants Bringing Home a Calf Born in the Fields" of 1864 by famed French artist Jean-Francois Millet shows two men slowly transporting the calf on a straw-covered litter while the undernourished cow comfortingly licks her newborn. It was derided as a contrived composition with religious overtones when it was exhibited; Millet countered that he'd witnessed the scene and charged the critics, part of the growing urban population, with being uninformed about rural life.

PETS TO PESTS

	Carnegie Museum of Natural History Leopold Blaschka and Rudolf Blaschka used glass, wax, and pigment to sculpt "Colonial jellyfish (Discalia medusina)," in the 1880s. Click photo for larger image.

Domesticated animals were sure bets as subjects for interesting and enlightening material, but pests eventually ranked among the favorites of co-curator Louise Lippincott.

"That was one of the big surprises for me," Lippincott says. "When we started I thought about beautiful, exotic animals." Then the likes of ants, rats and pigeons began to turn up -- "animals not considered glamorous, either aesthetically or any other way."

"The artworks that depict them are exceptional," she says, "but it was discovering how important studying, using and living with these creatures were for ordinary people" that grabbed her attention.

Darwin wrote about the significance of even a small grassy patch of land behind a house, she says. "Just by studying a microcosm environment one could unlock the secrets of nature. Ants and snakes are as important to study as lions and tigers in the African jungles."

When Van Gogh painted the "Great Peacock Moth" and "Crab on Its Back" in 1889 while undergoing treatment in the Saint Remy asylum, he wrote to his brother Theo that he was beginning to paint again by doing small still lifes. "But he also believes that a moth or a dead crab are a much bigger part of the scheme of life in some ways," Lippincott explains.

	Vincent van Gogh Foundation The Dutch artists Vincent Van Gogh painted "Crab on its Back," in 1889. Click photo for larger image.

The exhibition premiered at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in October and attracted appreciative crowds and rave reviews during its run. The Carnegie is its only other venue. It was co-curated by Lippincott, Carnegie curator of fine arts, and Andreas Bluhm, former head of exhibitions and display at the Van Gogh Museum and current director of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, Germany.

The official Pittsburgh opening Sunday coincides with the celebratory launch of "Pittsburgh Roars," nine months of coordinated programming by local cultural institutions and attractions. But tomorrow night, following the curators' lecture at 7, you can get an early peek at the galleries.

Lippincott and Bluhm are the same pair who organized the highly praised "Light! The Industrial Age, 1750-1900" of 2000-01.

While they were installing "Light!," Lippincott says, Bluhm suggested doing an exhibition with an animal theme. "The minute I thought about it, I said, great," she says. They began work on "Fierce Friends" almost immediately.

	National Gallery, London Pietro Longhi painted "The Rhinoceros" in 1751. Click photo for larger image.

Aside from the time period, the exhibitions have in common an interdisciplinary connection with science and a collaboration with Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which was important for this show, Lippincott says.

Some 95 paintings, sculptures and decorative arts objects make up the "core of artworks" exhibited at both venues. Those are complemented here by 250 more objects Lippincott borrowed from the Carnegie Natural History and Art museums, as well as other collections.

The juxtapositioning of elements from two disciplines often considered disparate -- art and science -- inspires new ways of thinking about long-held assumptions.

THE BIBLE AND DARWIN

J.M.W. Turner's "The Evening of the Deluge," a circa 1843 painting by one of Britain's foremost artists, inspired by the story of Noah's Ark, hangs not far from fossilized bone specimens and from a large 1808 rendition of "The Exhumation of the Mastodon" by patriarch American artist Charles Willson Peale. The latter, who opened a museum of art and natural history in Philadelphia in 1787, sponsored the 1801 excavation in New York state of two mastodon skeletons, a species that would later be confirmed to be extinct (although Thomas Jefferson had held out hope that some would be found in America's unexplored wilderness). Each of these represents aspects of the pitched debate between creationism and evolution that continues today.

	Carnegie Museum of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection Johann Gottlob Kirchner is credited with creating the porcelain "Monkey Eating a Pear" at the Meissen Factory in Germany between 1725 and 1735. Click photo for larger image.

Volumes from illustrated books, such as John J. Audubon's extraordinary "The Birds of America," share specially constructed vitrines with taxidermied examples of the birds illustrated. Other species are also displayed, but you'll have to trek over to the Natural History Museum to see the king of taxidermic dramatic narrative, the "Arab Courier Attacked by Lions" created by the French firm of Jules Verreaux for the Paris International Exposition of 1867 and in the Carnegie collection since 1899.

Lippincott points to a late-19th-century set of photographs that show the process of taxidermying a Cape water buffalo and muses aloud about where the end product, like so many other objects in the exhibition, falls: science or art, sculpture or not?

One of the most significant discoveries made while researching the exhibition is a group of glass models of animals, many of them in actuality microscopic, created in the late 19th century by the esteemed German father and son team, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, who made the celebrated glass flowers in the Harvard University collection. They were purchased around 1900 by the Natural History Museum as science displays from Ward's Natural History Establishment in Rochester, N.Y., and retired when they became outdated, Lippincott says. More than 30 of them have had their original sparkle restored for the exhibition. Some of the specimens rendered may be found illustrated in one of a dozen nearby sheets from "Art Forms in Nature (Kunstformen der Natur)" (1899-1904), a compendium of 100 chromolithographs of drawings by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel that are masterworks of detail, accuracy and design.

DARK PSYCHES

	Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris The French artist Henri Coeylas painted "Reconstruction of a Dodo in the Taxidermy Laboratory of Emile Oustalet" in 1903. Click photo for larger image.

"There's lots of gorgeous stuff," Lippincott says, "but cute and pretty is not the overriding theme."

Four general headings give coherency to the galleries: "Property of the Human Race" (e.g. domestic animals and pests), "Beauties of Nature" (aesthetics in scientific classification and connoisseurship), "Mysteries of Life" (anatomy, behavior), and "Creatures of the Imagination" ("domestic comedies, combat thrillers, fantasies, satires, histories ..." Lippincott rolls off).

The walls of the first gallery are painted pastoral light blues and greens. "The aesthetic of this room is cow pasture," she quips.

Walls grow progressively darker. The exhibition is "more and more about human psychology the more deeply we move in," Lippincott says, so it's "sort of scary" by the end.

As they worked their way through the enormous amount of artworks and other materials they uncovered, the curators looked at the relationships between representation and interpretation, scientific methodology and artistic license.

They asked at every step, Lippincott says, "What was the artist looking at? What did he think was important? And what was he trying to do?"

It came down to a sort of "six degrees of separation between a living animal and its representation in a work of art. In the 19th century especially, they would capture the animal, kill or preserve the animal, draw the animal, make a print of it, another artist would make a work of art based on that print ... it's like that children's game of telephone."

Overall there is the sense, she says, that "imagination and creativity come into play even in the most [scientifically] rigorous rendering."