The Goldfinch in Raphael’s masterwork symbolises the crucifixion of Christ, by virtue of the bird’s red head markings. Legend says that the bird was splashed by blood as it removed a thorn from the Messiah’s crown.
6 : Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch
1505
The Goldfinch in Raphael’s masterwork symbolises the crucifixion of Christ, by virtue of the bird’s red head markings. Legend says that the bird was splashed by blood as it removed a thorn from the Messiah’s crown.
Little actual ornithology, at least as we would recognise it, occurred during the Middle Ages, though falconry texts occasionally went into detail about the behaviour of birds of prey, and recognised that many raptors migrated rather than hibernated, as was thought by Aristotle.
Though birds were widely represented in Byzantine and Gothic art, it was in the Renaissance eras – with pioneering science, exploration and the dissemination of the printed word – that artistic skill and accuracy of observation combined to produce many artefacts of bird species rendered in detail, and imbued with symbolic religious, folkloric and sometimes even biological meaning.
Common in European renaissance art is the Goldfinch, usually held in the hands of the infant Christ to imply the fragility of the soul or the resurrection and sacrifice, and present in at least 486 devotional paintings by more than 250 artists. Europe was constantly under the threat of plague between the 14th and 17th centuries, and this had the effect of imbuing the Goldfinch with a more portentous role: that of healer or redeemer.
Many other accurate renditions of bird species are present in the flowering of Christian art, including the Peacock (more accurately called Indian Peafowl) to variously represent pride or the all-watching eyes of the Church (due to the eye-like patterns on its elongated tail-coverts); White Stork representing spring, piety or chastity; eagles symbolising Jesus himself; and most obviously, doves representing peace and chastity.
Hand-in-hand with Renaissance art, though usually accompanied by less accurately illustrated birds, were the first bird books (see pages 28-29). Among these early publications was the first avian anatomical work, Zootomia Democritaea (1645) by Marco Aurelio Severino, which compared the anatomy of birds to demonstrate the variety of Creation.
This, and other published advances in embryology and physiology, would have a profound effect on the classification of birds, as would parallel refinements in the taxidermy of bird specimens. However, early explorers were able to bring back the skins of numerous exotic creatures, as well as the occasional live specimen, for public display. This almost certainly explains the zoogeographical hodgepodge of artists like Roelant Savery, with his Ostrich from Africa and his Scarlet Macaws from South America in Vögel in einer Landschaft (1622), or the incongruous meeting of Purple Swamphen and Surf Scoter (from the freshwater marshes of North Africa and the inshore seas of Atlantic North America, respectively) in Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Breughel’s The Garden of Eden (c.1617).
Renaissance art was a direct influence on the more literal and figurative artists that followed, many of whom began to paint and draw beautifully detailed and scientifically accurate avian portraits. These were often intended to act as visual appendices to zoological descriptions or museum catalogues, or frequently to be sold to collectors and wealthy aficionados.