Fighting Animals as Allegory of the Combat between Virtue and Vice

Dated 1658 and held at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, this allegorical composition of fighting animals as a representation of the combat between virtue and vice is Boel's most explicitly moralising work — elevating his animal painting specialism into the register of formal allegorical discourse. The tradition of animal combat as moral allegory had ancient roots in Aesop's fables and was continued through Renaissance emblem books; Boel's version translates this literary tradition into visual terms using his empirically observed animals rather than the schematic creatures of emblem illustration. The virtuous animal — perhaps a lion or horse — and the vicious one — perhaps a serpent or wolf — would have been identifiable to educated viewers through their established symbolic associations. The Städel's collection of Flemish and Dutch masters provides an important German context for this atypical Boel subject.

Allegorical animal painting requires that each animal read both as naturalistic creature and as symbolic carrier — a dual demand that Boel meets by maintaining his empirical animal rendering while deploying compositional and lighting choices that encode symbolic hierarchy. The virtuous animal would typically be better lit and compositionally dominant; the vicious one darker and compositionally subordinate.