Curator Stacey Sell will lead us through the National Gallery of Art’s fascinating new exhibition on the intersection between art, natural history, and books in the 16^th and 17^th centuries: “Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World.”

The centerpiece is Joris Hoefnagel’s four-volume collection of miniature drawings of animals, organized in broad environmental categories of Air, Water, Land, and Fire.  The exhibition expands to explore Hoefnagel’s and his contemporaries and successors’ works, including most notably those of Jan van Kessel.  These artists were particularly focused on insects and depicted them with astonishing detail, scientific accuracy, and beauty.  The exhibition includes displays of the materials and tools that artists used in those centuries, from pigments to gold leaf to the actual wings of butterflies, as well as specimens from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History for comparison with the drawings.

To avoid over-crowding in the galleries, this event is…