John G.T. Anderson, Deep Things Out of Darkness: A History of Natural History(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), xiii.
︎︎︎
This theme is elaborated in Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin, “Compensatory Postures: On Natural History, Necroaesthetics, and Humiliation,” in Theatre,
Garden, Bestiary, eds. Vincent Normand and Tristan Garcia (Berlin: Sternberg
Press, 2019), 161–72.
︎︎︎
This essay is an extensively revised and edited version of a previous piece, “Inter
Folia, Aves: Reading Bird Books as Curatorial-Editorial Constellations,” inPublishing as Artistic Practice, ed. Annette Gilbert (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016),
134–52. In that former iteration, I attend more to the question of how to use the
adjacencies, connections, and negotiations observable in the creation of early bird
books as a prism for situating curatorial-editorial practice in cultural history.
︎︎︎
See Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Stephen T. Asma, Stuffed Animals and
Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001); also, Carol Freeman, Paper Tiger: How Pictures
Shaped the Thylacine (Hobart: Forty South, 2014).
︎︎︎
Indeed, it seems necessary to reflect on the proliferation of European colonization as
aided by the printing revolution. Even if in the early Renaissance printer-publishers
may still have focused more on the dissemination of ancient texts, as Elizabeth
Eisenstein claims, mechanical printing allowed narrations of voyages to be published
and promoted faster and more cheaply than ever before; with sailors diffusing the
material across the whole continent and beyond, and inspiring the rich to fund more
expeditions. In this context, it is also crucial to remember the dramatic effect on the
other shores of the ocean, as Walter D. Mignolo elaborates: “Misunderstanding went
together with colonization. Once something was declared new, and the printing
press consolidated the idea among the literates, the descriptions of people for whom
nothing was new about the place they were inhabiting, except for the arrival of a
people strange to them, were suppressed.” In: Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of
the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press, 1995), 259. See also Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as
an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
︎︎︎
Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: !e Biological Expansion of Europe,
900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
︎︎︎
Claus Nissen, Die illustrierten Vogelbücher (Stuttgart: Hiersemann Verlag, 1953), 11. This, and all subsequent translations from German, are my own.
︎︎︎
Emma C. Spary, “Codes der Leidenschaft: Französische Vogelsammlungen als eine
Sprache der vornehmen Gesellschaft des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Sammeln als Wissen:
Das Sammeln und seine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung, eds. Anke te Heesen and
Emma C. Spary (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001), 41.
︎︎︎
inciane Despret, “F for Fabricating Science,” in What Would Animals Say If We
Asked the Right Questions? (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2016), 37–45.
︎︎︎
Naturalists like Charles Darwin or Alfred Russel Wallace generally use the phrase
“productions of nature” to speak of species; with an inflected, double-meaning, it
is also the title of a forthcoming book currently being co-written by myself and
Etienne Turpin to contextualize and review our exhibition-led inquiry Reassembling
the Natural (2013–21); reassemblingnature.org.
︎︎︎
See Erwin Stresemann, Ornithology: From Aristotle to the Present, trans. Hans and
Cathleen Epstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 26.
︎︎︎
According to historians of science Kees Rookmaaker and Maarten Frankenhuis,
this was reported for instance by Dutch admiral and explorer Jacob van Heemskerk,
who visited the island of Ambon in 1599; “143 – Bird of paradise” in The World of Jan
Brandes, 1743–1808 (Amsterdam: Waanders Publishers, Rijksmuseum, 2004), 425.
︎︎︎
See Fritz Koreny, Albrecht Dürer und die Tier- und Pflanzenstudien der Renaissance(Munich: Prestel, 1985), plates no. 30–34.
︎︎︎
Conrad Gessner, Historia Animalium, vol. 3 (Zurich: C. Froschauer, 1555), 611.
︎︎︎
S. Kusukawa, “The Sources of Gessner’s Pictures for the Historia Animalium,” Annals
of Science 67/3 ( July 2010): 311; Jasmina Mužinić et al., “Julije Klović: The First
Colour Drawing of Greater Bird of Paradise Paradisaea apoda in Europe and Its
Model,” Journal of Ornithology 150/3 ( July 2009): 647.
︎︎︎
Amanda K. Herrin, “Pioneers of the Printed Paradise: Maarten de Vos, Jan Sadeler
I and Emblematic Natural History in the Late Sixteenth Century,” in Zoology in
Early Modern Culture: Intersections of Science, Theology, Philology, and Political and
Religious Education, eds. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith (Leiden and Boston:
Brill, 2014), 360.
︎︎︎
Erwin Stresemann, Ornithology, 18.
︎︎︎
The scientific history of codifying the bird-of-paradise species is inevitably a history
of colonial collecting. The Dutch VOC employee and draughtsman Jan Brandes
(1743–1808) and the French naval apothecary and ornithologist René Primevère
Lesson (1794–1849) are considered among the first Europeans to ever encounter the
birds of paradise in their natural habitats in the 1780s and 1820s respectively. When
Wallace shipped back to London his specimen collection from Southeast Asia this
load included two living birds of paradise that became attractions of the aviaries at
Kew Gardens.
︎︎︎
On the colonial construction of “tropical nature,” see Nancy Stepan, Picturing
Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
︎︎︎
David Attenborough and Errol Fuller, Dawn from Paradise: The Natural History, Art
and Discovery of the Birds of Paradise, with Rare Archival Art (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
︎︎︎
Rick De Vos, “Extinction in a Distant Land: On the Question of Elliot’s Bird
of Paradise,” in Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, eds.
Deborah Bird Rose, !om van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2017), 109. See also Christian Freigang, “Margaretes
Paradiesvogel: Vereinnahmungen des Fremden und Wunderbaren aus der
Neuen Welt im frühzeitlichen Kunstdiskurs,” in Wechselseitige Wahrnehmung
der Religionen im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, vol. 1, eds. Ludger
Grenzmann et al. (Oldenburg: De Gruyter, 2009), 78–9.
︎︎︎
Nancy J. Jacobs makes the point that despite the misreadings, inappropriate
interventions, and racialized exclusions, western colonial science and Indigenous
knowledge cannot easily be separated. See Nancy J. Jacobs, “Intimate Politics of
Ornithology in Colonial Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48/3
( July 2006): 564–603; jstor.org/stable/3879437.
︎︎︎
Erwin Stresemann, Ornithology, 19.
︎︎︎
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 483.
︎︎︎
Conrad Gessner, De Indicibus Librorum (1548), quoted in Markus Krajewski, Paper
Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929, trans. Peter Krapp (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2011), 13.
︎︎︎
See Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines, especially chapter two, “Temporary Indexing.” Here, I am also reminded of the black boards of Aby Warburg’s Mnsemosynepanels that I have written about in the context of the intercalations series, see
Springer, “Melancholies of the Paginated Mind” in Fantasies of the Library, eds.
Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin (Berlin: K. Verlag & Haus der Kulturen
der Welt, 2015), 37–97.︎︎︎
See Jan Nikolai Nelles, “The Beheaded Buddha” in intercalations 5: Decapitated
Economies, eds. Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin (Berlin: K. Verlag &
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2021).
︎︎︎
Erwin Stresemann, Ornithology, 19; S. Kusukawa, The Sources of Gessner’s
Pictures for the Historia Animalium,” 20–22.
︎︎︎
In 1771, Tesser Samuel Kuckahn lamented the difficulty of producing satisfactory bird taxidermy in several letters to the Royal Society in London: “They [bird
specimens] never fail to become humid in moist air and long continued wet weather,
suffer the flesh to rot and even corrode the wires made use of to corrode the birds to
their natural attitudes, till the whole drops to pieces on the least touch or motion.”Philosophical Transactions LX (London: The Royal Society, 1771), 304. “Four letters
from Mr. T.S. Kuckhan, to the President and members of the Royal Society, on the
preservation of dead birds”; royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1770.0028.
︎︎︎
See Heinrich Geissler,“Ad Vivum Pinxit: Überlegungen zu Tierdarstellungen in
der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen
in Wien 82 (1986/7), 101–14; and Karl Schulze-Hagen et. al., “Avian Taxidermy
in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance,” Journal für Ornithologie 144
(2003): 463.
︎︎︎
Ornithologist and poet Drew Lanham makes the point that beyond Western
ornithology there are many ornithologies; “Drew Lanham: I Worship Every Bird I
See – Conversation with Krista Tippett”: onbeing.org/programs/drew-lanham-i-worship-every-bird-that-i-see.
︎︎︎
Lorraine Daston, “The Sciences of the Archive,” Osiris 27/1 (2012): 156–87. Notably, in the chapter “The Book of Nature Transformed,” Elizabeth Eisenstein also fleshes out the dispute between sixteenth-century humanist “book-hunters” and the
empiricists who claimed second-hand knowledge in “old books” should be discarded
to make firsthand observations; see The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 453–88.
︎︎︎
Carsten Kretschmann, Räume öffnen sich: Naturhistorische Museen im Deutschland des
19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 34.
︎︎︎
Ibid., 33.
︎︎︎
Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago,”Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 33 (1863): 233.
︎︎︎
Paul Lawrence Farber, Discovering Birds: The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific
Discipline, 1760–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 72.
︎︎︎
Staffan Müller-Wille, “Carl von Linnés Herbarschrank,” in Sammeln als Wissen:
Das Sammeln und seine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung, eds. Anke te Heesen and
Emma C. Spary (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001), 36.
︎︎︎
Staffan Müller-Wille, “Linnaeus’ herbarium cabinet: a piece of furniture and its
function,” Endeavour 30/2 (2006): 63; doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2006.03.001.
︎︎︎
Ibid., 61.
︎︎︎
Paul Lawrence Farber, Discovering Birds, 7.
︎︎︎
Erwin Stresemann, Ornithology, 53.
︎︎︎
M.J. Brisson, quoted in Farber, Discovering Birds, 10, with further references.
︎︎︎
E.C. Spary, “Codes der Leidenschaft,” 47.
︎︎︎
Farber, Discovering Birds, 14.
︎︎︎
Spary, “Codes der Leidenschaft,” 47.
︎︎︎
Ibid., 46.
︎︎︎
Buffon, quoted in Farber, Discovering Birds, 22, with further references.
︎︎︎
Farber, Discovering Birds, 24.
︎︎︎
Rick De Vos, “Extinction in a Distant Land,” 109.
︎︎︎
Walter D. Mignolo and Alvina Hoffmann, “Interview – Walter Mignolo/Part 2:
Key Concepts,” E-International Relations (21 January 2017); e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts.
︎︎︎
Apparently, Peale’s technique “would not be used again until the early twentieth
century, when the American artists Carl Akeley and James Lippitt Clark developed
a similar sculptural approach to taxidermy.” Here quoting Robert McCracken Peck,
“Preserving Nature for Study and Display,” in Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping
Knowledge: Natural History in North America 1730–1860, vol. 93, pt. 4, ed. Sue Anne
Price (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003), 17.
︎︎︎
Robert E. Schofield, “The Science Education of an Enlightened Entrepreneur:
Charles Willson Peale and his Philadelphia Museum, 1784–1827,” American Studies30/2 (1989): 31.
︎︎︎
James Hatley, “Walking with Ōkami, the Large-Mouthed Pure God,” in Extinction
Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, eds. Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van
Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 28.
︎︎︎
Ibid., 32.
︎︎︎
Tim Dee and Simon Armitage, eds., The Poetry of Birds (London: Penguin, 2009).
︎︎︎
Marc Dozier and Luc Marescot, Frères des arbres—l’appel d’un chef papou, ARTE
France and Lato Sensu Productions, 2017, 85 min; freresdesarbres.com.
︎︎︎
“Shaking the Viral Tree: An Interview with David Quammen,” Emergence
Magazine Podcast (25 March 2020); emergencemagazine.org/interview/shaking
-the-viral-tree.
︎︎︎
Paul Shephard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington D.C. &
Covelo: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1996), 202.
︎︎︎
Thom van Dooren, “Spectral Crows in Hawai’i: Conservation and the Work of
Inheritance,” in Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, eds.
Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2017), 204.
︎︎︎