After 36 days of sailing westward, the tired crew of the Santa Maria, sun-bleached and salt-cured, encountered a flock of noisy red-and-green birds so copious in number that, according to Christopher Columbus, they eclipsed the sun. Further south, off the coast of Brazil, the navigators encountered a close relative of those birds in the form of the blue-and-yellow macaw, a handsome creature with a Roman nose of a beak and iridescent feathers of celestial azure and solar gold. “My name is Parrot,” wrote the English poet John Skelton in a verse pennedless than 30 years later in 1521, “a bird of Paradise.” It’s arguable whether or not that bliss is preserved in the Florentine artist Jacopo Ligozzi’s gorgeous pen-and-wash drawing of a macaw, made between 1580 and 1600 and held by the Uffizi, but the work inarguably suggests a sense of a real bird from an earthly place as opposed to a mythological paradise. Ligozzi, who succeeded Giorgio Vasari as director of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, honors the parrot by presenting us not with a symbol, but an animal. That transition from cipher to creature tells the story of how science developed, and the ways in which art facilitated that evolution.
From the banks of the Amazon and the Orinoco, the feathers and taxidermied remains of macaws, a type of parrot, made their way to European wonder cabinets, a startling demonstration of exploration and discovery, but also of colonialism. Such collections, writes Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Europe (1985), were an “attempt to reappropriate and reassemble all reality in miniature, to constitute a place from the centre of which the prince could symbolically reclaim dominion over the entire natural…world.” Living birds would also be transported from the rainforests of South America to the Florentine Wunderkammer of the banking scion Cosimo de’ Medici, where they existed not only as scientific exhibits, but also as an expression of that princely dominion.
In a 1599 woodcut by Italian artist Ferrante Imperato, Cosimo’s room of curiosities appears overstuffed with preserved animals adorning every square foot of the mansard-roofed abode, including a swordfish, crab, pelican, and crocodile directly overhead. There are also several birds, some of which could be macaws — but it’s hard to be sure. While Imperato’s woodcut is adept, and certainly conveys the sense of wordliness Cosimo desired in his commission, the animals appear more allegorical than real, creatures from an alchemical text or a Medieval bestiary rather than nature, more basilisk than Crocodylus niloticus. Even at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, the operative concern was not empirical observation, but the impartation of wonder (and power, wealth, etc.). Images, therefore, were to depict not the animals themselves, but imagined ideas of them. Parrots, the cousins to macaws known even to the Ancient Greeks as unforgiving chatterboxes, were long depicted mythically rather than faithfully to life. In a French medieval bestiary from the middle of the 15th century now held by the Huis van het Boek in the Hague, Netherlands, for instance, a blank-eyed and green-feathered parrot faces left upon a grassy, green earth beneath a stylized cobalt-blue sky, his positioning reminiscent of heraldry, an animal sejant erect to dexter (standing erect to the right), to use the jargon of that format. This is not a parrot, but a fantasy of one.
Only a bit more than a century later, Ligozzi would make his deft drawing of the macaw, an illustration of such careful verisimilitude that it’s shocking to realize it was accomplished in the 16th century, and not in the 19th by John James Audubon or the 21st by David Allen Sibley. The macaw’s carefully delineated blue rectrices, with delicate vanes extending from the hollow shaft of the feather; the green crown and the curve of her regal black beak, all as conveyed from life. Ligozzi had accomplished something novel — the perfect capture of the macaw’s image, as clear as when Columbus’s sailors had first seen them off the American coast.
There is another element of the drawing, however, that is decidedly unrealistic, even more so for how easy it is to overlook: This parrot is framed by an undifferentiated field of white. In other words, the bird is placed in a nowhere, circumscribed by a nothingness that captures her, constrains her, cages her. In one of the earliest instantiations of this practice of depicting creatures sans context, Ligozzi gives visual expression to the developing myth of empirical objectivity, of being able to carefully select and separate a specimen where it can be collected, measured, analyzed, and categorized. The specimen exists beyond time and space — no longer in a mythic field of green as in the Medieval bestiary, but not in the Amazon either (or the Florentine wonder cabinet, for that matter). Shorn of context, the macaw becomes dominated in a particular way, for as Ligozzi’s contemporary Francis Bacon infamously wrote, “Knowledge itself is power.” Whereas Cosimo de’ Medici was a man of the Renaissance, concerned with wonder (and power), his son, Grand Duke Francesco I, a patron of Ligozzi’s, was already living in modernity, and concerned instead with collection, measurement, analysis, categorization (and also, of course, power). In the transition from the Medieval to the modern, an artist like Ligozzi hasn’t abandoned wonder — he’s merely traded the fabulism of the mind for that of nature.
Edwin Arthur Burtt wrote in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924) that the Scientific Revolution of the early modern period envisioned a “world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity.” Such a transition in perspective wasn’t limited to just the physical sciences, but extended to biology as well. In fact this wasn’t merely an intellectual — or philosophical, or technological — transition, but also an aesthetic one, a fact often overlooked. Before modern science could develop, viewers had, for better and worse, to change their ways of seeing. As an artist, Ligozzi played a crucial role in disentangling science from myth, observation from allegory.
His interests weren’t limited to the ornithological. In his role as Francesco’s court scientific illustrator, Ligozzi accomplished the first genuinely accurate representations of flora and fauna in a continent on the verge of the Scientific Revolution. A black-eyed, hunch-backed marmot with slick gray fur and a toothy murine smile next to a branch of purple plums; a wide-eyed, finned grouper with pearly fangs, the fish’s scales a shimmering chartreuse and roseate; a petite desert jerboa with spindly legs and erect ears. Then there are his botanical obsessions, Ligozzi being among the most adept illustrators of the plant world — an unripe, crowned, pineapple; the pink flowers and heavy bulbs of the passion fruit; the stiff, spiny green tendrils of an American agave.
Botany provided subjects for Ligozzi’s most exquisite illustrations. In a composition rendered sometime between 1577 and 1587, the artist combines the zoological and the botanical in a drawing of a female and male finch — American immigrants like the macaw — upon the branches of a fig tree. As with all these illustrations, the tableau is divorced from reality, the branches severed on one side with a jagged rip as if shorn from a tree that floats in the ether, as if preserved in formaldehyde — yet the black-and-orange finches stand, unperturbed, as if the tree were still whole. The uncanniness of the scene is a reminder that for all the accuracy of Ligozzi’s technique, the objective perspective is another fantasy among many, often as odd as any other.
Another thing worth noticing: the brown curl at the very tip of a green leaf, barely perceptible, and the slight pucker of rot in the purple flesh of the fig. Skelton’s parrot might be from paradise, but there is rot even in Arcadia. A tendency to disorder is the inviolate rule of reality in faith and science, fantasy and empiricism. Darwin has extinction and Maxwell the law of entropy, but in religion they call it “fallenness.” Consider the apocalyptic harbinger encountered by Columbus’s crew of the sun blotted out by flocks of the Cuban macaw, a species shortly hunted to extinction. From the front window of his studio, Ligozzi was privy to a view of the Giardino dei Semplici, or “Garden of Simples,” a still-extant Florentine horticultural institute founded by Francesco that is a fragrant pleasure palace of myrtle, caper, and helichrysum. The bounty of the Columbian invasions would also have been in evidence: peppers, tomatoes, sunflowers. Evidence of a world being destroyed.
A pious Catholic, Ligozzi was intimately aware of the idea that our reality is fundamentally broken. In addition to his scientific illustrations, Ligozzi continued to work in the idiom of allegory, producing religious paintings and altars. The 1604 composition “Natura Morta Macabra” provides a memento mori in the form of a decapitated and decomposing head, which appears not unlike portraits of the Ligozzi himself. The artist doesn’t place humans in that same domain of undifferentiated space he reserves for animals; rather, this head has been placed atop a thick volume of worldly learning, surrounded by pearls and pottery, stones and bones, and all manner of marvels that you might encounter in a wonder cabinet of the Medicis. Regardless of perspective — extinction, entropy, fallenness — he seems to suggest, decay is inevitable to our existence.
