Whatever the case, Brisson’s career ended abruptly with the death of his employer Réaumur when the ambitious and successful Comte de Buffon took over. The collection was moved to the Cabinet du Roi located at the Jardin du Roi that was directed by Buffon since 1739. Professional enmity between Buffon and Réaumur caused Brisson to lose access to the birds, while Buffon was keen on increasing the Jardin’s influence through this precious addition. He was also one of the harshest critics of Réaumur and Brisson’s methods; unsurprisingly, his Histoire naturelle des oiseaux is quite at odds with Brisson’s approach. This is interesting because, as mentioned before, both had recourse to the same bird specimens and Buffon even hired the same engraver, Martinet, to create bird images in supervision of nearly eighty other artists. Where Brisson had tried to soberly describe species and fit them into a classificatory order, Buffon wanted to assemble an encyclopedia of living beings that would be capable of philosophically grasping the aliveness of the natural world. In this regard, Spary writes that “Brisson’s text was supposed to appear scientific thanks to its minimal aesthetics; Buffon however enveloped his species’ groupings and efforts for exactitude regarding body sizes and physical features in a narrative context, which tended to focus on luxury, rarity, and a preciousness that was considered the result of nature’s limitless creative ability.”⁴⁶ In this sense, Buffon often described a bird by lending it a certain literary affect and comparing it to a fancy gemstone or, in other cases, to monstrosities and absurd errors. At the same time, he doubted that extensive written descriptions were the appropriate and sufficient means to portray a bird and is quoted by Farber lamenting: “There are not even the proper terms in any language to express the nuances, the hues, the reflections, and the blendings.”⁴⁷ This might explain why the illustrations in Brisson and Buffon are mostly so different. Brisson had wished to limit visual representation to the factual, objective. While made with great attention to detail, Martinet’s birds created for Brisson evoke the less animated style already known from Renaissance depictions: Here, the birds are usually perched on branches, shown in profile, stiff-legged and upright, their wings held tightly against their bodies and the heads erect with a lifeless gaze.