At the time of Gessner publishing his folio, it would still
be another 300 years until European naturalists would begin
to observe these animals in the wild, with Alfred Russel
Wallace most tirelessly collecting bird specimens in the Malay Archipelago in the 1850s and 60s.18 In that respect,
this early ornithological entry by Gessner is a testimony to
the complex negotiation between facts and fabrication in
-
herent in the process of wanting to gain a “complete knowledge” of nature—a representation progressively shaped
through the observant research and vivid imagination of
scholars, artists, and travelers.19However, what is unique
about the early ornithological history of codifying the “bird
of paradise” in particular, is that their initial presence as
nearly “bodiless” specimens indeed somehow resonated with
the mystical tales circulating about them. [Fig. 02
] Feathers and
beaks made the specimens classifiable as birds but, in contrast to more “normal” ones, their immensely colorful plumage, yet disfigured physique encouraged fantastical imaginations.20 The desire for distant worlds and the strange reality
of the physical specimens thus coincided in these early, deformed bird-of-paradise skins more uncannily than in other
specimens brought to Europe by colonial navigators. But as
the biotic regions in the east of the Wallace Line, which
contain the habitats of the birds of paradise, were claimed as colonial conquests by different European nations, including
the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, and Germans, it is
necessary to process this history critically. There is neither
naivety nor nostalgia in environmental philosopher and extinction scholar Rick De Vos’s words: “The bodies of birds
of paradise became discursively and figuratively hollowed out
and dismantled […], leaving skin and feathers, signs of allure
and desire achieved through the death of other [possible
signs]. Birds of paradise were returned as plumes: signs of
a transferable beauty and rarity.”21 In contrast, birds of paradise have played a vast role in vernacular and Indigenous
cultures of the expansive island region for a very long time,
reflected in language, lore, dance, song, and ancestral spirituality; these life ways and traditions became overwritten or
at least sidelined by the extractivist and racist projections of
the colonizers—even as sedentary ornithomaniacs were at
work far away.22
Early Constellational Thinking
Conrad Gessner compiled some of the most respected illustrated encyclopaedias of flora and fauna of his time. This work
seems to have grown out of an earlier project also driven by a
desire for obtaining a “complete knowledge” that was achieved
before publishing the first edition of his 1555 bird book. In the
sixteenth century, texts were becoming more available and the
holdings of libraries expanded; so Gessner aimed to provide
librarians and readers with a detailed, comprehensive overview
of all hitherto published eruditions in Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew. In the 1540s, he thus set out to produce a publication
series that would eventually amount to twenty-one books on
books. Entitled Biblioteca Universalis, these volumes contain a
lengthy bibliographic index referencing printed texts that
Gessner looked for in Swiss, Italian, and German libraries.
From today’s point of view it appears to be a Borgesian dream
of universal knowledge, for the Biblioteca’s scope surpassed the
already existing device of a library catalog organized per authors’
names. With great ambition, Gessner delivered annotations
that offered evaluations, summaries, and para-textual descriptions of more than 10,000 written works. These were arranged
by subject and thematic keywords, thus promising extensive
insight and understanding without accessing the original work
itself—kind of like a Renaissance version of a contemporary
book-summary subscription app like Blinkist. Writing in 1951,
Erwin Stresemann described Gessner as someone deeply “motivated by an urge to assemble and organize facts.”23 Print culture historian Elizabeth Eisenstein characterizes: “To collect and present ‘facts’ required mastery of records made
by observers in the past.”24 With respect to the Biblioteca
Universalis, this tendency and deftness is reflected in Gessner’s
invention of a visual system used for ordering and classifying
the evaluated scholarship. Unsatisfied with a merely linear list
of available library material, in 1549 he devised a tree structure
[Fig. 03] similar to those later designs known from Linnaeus,
Darwin, or Haeckel (who all created tree diagrams to visualize
living beings in hierarchical sequences). Gessner intended to
use this structure for drawing out connections between possible relationships among the accumulated information.
Indeed, the tree diagram visualizes a constellation of things;
and it organizes these things by situating them spatially. By
foregrounding that meaning emerges from actors, contexts,
and places coming together, the constellation as method can be
one facet of what today we might associate with a curatorial editorial practice.