Crawly Creatures runs from 30 September 2022 to 15 January 2023 in the Phillips Wing of the Rijksmuseum. 

This autumn the Rijksmuseum will be teeming with more than a thousand colourful butterflies, hairy spiders and shiny toads. People once associated these crawly creatures with death and the devil, but later on their beauty gripped the imagination of artists and scientists such as Albrecht Dürer, Wenzel Jamnitzer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and Maria Sibylla Merian. Crawly Creatures, the exhibition, sheds light on the changing perceptions of these tiny beasties in the arts and sciences.

Museums and private collectors all over the world have loaned the highlights of their collections for this exhibition, including the recently rediscovered specimens – pres– preserved in formaldehyde – from the world-famous collection of the 17th-century apothecary and zoologist Albertus Seba from Germany, and Medusa painted by Peter Paul Rubens in 1617-18 from the Czech Republic. The exhibition also fast forwards to the present with installations of renowned artists Tomás Saraceno, as well as Rafael Gomezbarros. 

The exhibition is made possible in part by the Don Quixote Foundation through the Rijksmuseum Fonds and Stichting Thurkowfonds.