Where Did That Cockatoo Come From?
Madonna della Vittoria, by the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna, must have looked imposing when it was first installed as an altarpiece in Santa Maria della Vittoria, a small chapel in the northern-Italian city of Mantua. The painting, which was commissioned by the citys ruler, Francesco II Gonzaga, was completed in 1496, and measures more than nine feet in height. A worshippers eye likely lingered on its lower halfwhere the Virgin, seated on a marble pedestal, bestows a blessing on the kneeling, armored figure of Francescoinstead of straining to discern the intricacies of its upper half, which depicts a pergola bedecked with hanging ornaments and fruited vines. In the late eighteenth century, Napoleons forces looted the painting and transported it to the Louvre, where it now occupies a commanding spot in the Denon wing. When Heather Dalton, a British-born historian who lives in Melbourne, Australia, took a moment to examine the painting some years ago, during her first year of study for a doctorate at the University of Melbourne, she was not in Paris but at home, leafing through a book about Mantegna. Although the Madonna image had been reproduced at a fraction of its true size, Dalton noticed something that she well might have missed had she been peering up at the framed original: perched on the pergola, directly above a gem-encrusted crucifix on a staff, was a slender white bird with a black beak, an alert expression, and an impressive greenish-yellow crest. Moreover, without the context of her own surroundings, Dalton might not have registered the birds incongruity. If I hadnt been in Australia, I wouldnt have thought, Thats a bloody sulfur-crested cockatoo! she told me. The sulfur-crested cockatoo is a sizable bird, about twenty inches tall when full grown. It has mostly white feathers on its body and, atop its head, a distinctive swoosh of citrine plumage, which fans upward in moments of excitement or agitationlooking like the avian equivalent of a dyed-and-sprayed Mohawk. Cockatoos, a kind of parrot, are a familiar presence throughout northern and eastern Australia, where they live in parks and in wooded areas. To some people, the cockatoo is a squawking pest that can damage a buildings timbers with its beak; to others, the bird is a cherished companion. In captivity, sulfur-crested cockatoos can learn to mimic human speech, and some have been known to live for more than eighty years. Theres a national pride in the bird: it appears on the Australian ten-dollar bill. Cockatoos are nonmigratory, and their native habitat is restricted to Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines. Most of the twenty-odd species of cockatoo originate east of the Wallace Linea boundary, established in the mid-nineteenth century by Charles Darwins sometime collaborator Alfred Russel Wallace, that runs through both the strait separating Borneo from Sulawesi and the strait dividing Bali from Lombok. In Wallaces book The Malay Archipelago, about the studies he undertook there, in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, he wrote, To the ordinary Englishman this is perhaps the least known part of the globe. Our possessions in it are few and scanty; scarcely any of our travelers go to explore it; and in many collections of maps it is almost ignored. Wallace noted the absence in Australia of pheasants and woodpeckers, birds common on other continents, and wrote that the areas cockatoos were among those species found nowhere else upon the globe.  Although goods from these regions sometimes entered Europe in the centuries before Wallaces explorations, little was understood about their place of origin, or about how they moved westward. Even present-day scholarship of what is now called the Global Middle Agesbetween 500 and 1500has paid only glancing attention to Australasia, in part because of a dearth of written records of trade or other forms of cultural exchange with the continent. In a recent book, The Year 1000, the scholar Valerie Hansen points out that the direction of ocean currents in and around Southeast Asia makes it much easier for boats to go southas the archeological record shows they did, to Australia, fifty thousand years agothan to travel north. She writes that, before the fourteenth or fifteenth century, the people of Australia and Indonesia had very limited contact with people in continental Southeast Asia. Before Dalton put down the Mantegna book, she asked herself, How did a bird from Australasia end up in a fifteenth-century Italian painting? After researching the question for a decade, she published a paper in the journal Renaissance Studies, in 2014, about the cockatoos unlikely appearance. She argued that the birds presence on Mantegnas canvas illuminated the sophistication of ancient trade routes between Australasia and the rest of the world, concluding that Mantegnas cockatoo most likely originated in the southeastern reaches of the Indonesian archipelagoeast of Bali, perhaps on Timor or Sulawesi. The revisionist force of Daltons work attracted attention from many news outlets, including the Guardian and Smithsonian. In Australia, one newspaper came up with the irresistible headline Picture Points to Renaissance Budgie-Smugglers. (Budgie-smuggler is the preferred local term for a Speedo.) The Mantegna painting isnt the only image from the Renaissance that provides hints of at least indirect contact with Australasia. An ink-and-watercolor work by the Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel, made around 1561 and now in the collection of the Getty, shows a furry gray creature seated on a gilded throne, gnawing on a branch. The work is titled A Sloth, but Dalton speculates that it may depict a New Guinean tree kangaroo. Daltons work not only offers visual confirmation that the world has been interconnected for far longer than many people have supposed; it also offers a reminder of the value of a fresh eye. A historian interested in European art who lives on the opposite end of the earth from the Louvre saw a familiar object from an unfamiliar angleand registered something that hardly any onlooker had registered before. Parrots are the nearest birds come to being little human beings wrapped in feathers, Richard Verdi, a former director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, in Birmingham, England, wrote in the catalogue to The Parrot in Art, an exhibition mounted at the museum in 2007. Parrots, which can be found across the globe but are not native to Europe, have been considered remarkable for millennia. Verdis essay noted that Alexander the Great acquired one from the Punjab in 327 B.C. ; the admiral of his fleet, Nearchus, declared that the birds ability to speak was miraculous. The Greeks prized the beauty and the intelligence of parrots from India, which had established overland trade routes with Europe in antiquity; Aristotle remarked that the birds were good mimics, and noted that they were even more outrageous after drinking wine.  Soon enough, parrots began showing up in European art. There are several representations of the bird in frescoes and mosaics found in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, including in a painting that is now lost but was documented by an engraving made in the eighteenth century: it depicted a parrot harnessed to a chariot driven by a grasshopper, which held a set of reins in its mandibles. Parrots were initially incorporated into European art mainly because of their exotic allure. But by the Renaissance parrots were appearing in Christian-themed portraiture because of symbolic links with Mary: among other things, the birds improbable ability to talk was seen as comparable to the Virgins ability to become pregnant. In the early sixteenth century, several years after Mantegna painted his altarpiece, Albrecht Drer made an ink-and-watercolor study in which a parrot perches on a wooden post near the Madonna and Child. Drer was fascinated by parrots, and he eventually acquired some, on a visit to a trading hub in the Netherlands. Madonna with Child and Parrots, a 1533 work by the German artist Hans Baldung Grien, shows Mary with a frowning infant Jesus at her breast. A green parakeet stands near Jesus foot, and a gray parrot balances on Marys shoulder, its mouth open. The composition suggests that Grien was less familiar with parrots than Drer was: given that parrots eat nuts and have beaks with the biting force required to crack shells, the gray birds beak is disconcertingly close to Marys face. Verdi included Mantegnas Madonna della Vittoria in his catalogue essay, noting the presence of what he characterized as a lesser sulfur-crested cockatoo, and remarking on its estimable position in the painting, above the figure of the Virgin. But Verdi did not linger on the implications of the birds geographical origin, even though the cockatoo species he named lives only in the southeastern islands of Indonesia. Facebook  Twitter  Email  Shopping Cartoon by Liana Finck  When Heather Dalton started researching the Mantegna work, she found that other scholars had noted the peculiarity of such a creature appearing in a Renaissance art workamong them, Bruce Thomas Boehrer, a professor of English at Florida State University, whose 2004 book, Parrot Culture, offers a lively popular account of our 2500-year-long fascination with the worlds most talkative bird. But it seemed that nobody had considered the larger resonances. Dalton, who was born in Essex, did not turn to academic history until she was in her forties. Her first degree, from the University of Manchester, was in American studies. She moved to Australia in the mid-eighties, having married a man from the country who had been working in The Hague. Before departing for the Southern Hemisphere, they took a road trip around Europe and stopped off in Mantua. Dalton visited the palace, which served as home to the noble Gonzaga family for nearly four hundred years. Its patriarch, Ludovico I Gonzaga, began ruling the city in 1328. Inside the palace, Dalton saw the works of Mantegna for the first time, and admired the lavish frescoes that he had executed for the Camera degli Sposi in the fourteen-sixties and seventieshis most important commission for the Gonzaga family, for whom he was the court painter. In Australia, Dalton initially worked in publishing and in journalism. To mark the 1988 bicentenary of the establishment of a British penal colony in Australia, she wrote a number of articles on Australian history, including one about the countrys vigorous trade in bche-de-mer, or sea cucumber. For centuries, the bche-de-merwhich is a lumpy, sluglike creature related to the starfishwas harvested off the northern coast of Australia and then sold in Chinese markets, where it was regarded as a delicacy. In 2002, Dalton, by then a postgraduate student in history, returned to the subject. The fishermen, who had gathered sea cucumbers in shallow waters, had formed one end of a significant mercantile link between coastal Australia and Asia, but they had been largely overlooked in the narrative of Australias national founding, which, she said, favored the digger, the pastoralist, and the drover. (The song Waltzing Matilda commemorates an itinerant sheep-station worker.) Dalton, for her dissertation, wrote about a Tudor trader, Roger Barlow, who travelled around England, Spain, and South America; in 2016, she expanded the work into a book, Merchants and Explorers. She told me, I was very interested in the idea that everything is about trade and economics, and the idea that we make discoveries for some national reason is something that you claim afterward.  The cockatoo in the Mantegna painting reminded Dalton of her work on the bche-de-mer. Both animals were clearly part of a bustling, poorly documented trade in luxuries. The cockatoo in Mantegnas altarpiece, like parrots in other Renaissance art works, had a clear religious symbolism, but it also signalled the worldly matter of the Gonzagas immense wealthbling with feathers. The rarity of the bird can be deduced from its singular occurrence in the altarpiece: Dalton could not find another cockatoo in works by Mantegna, or in those of his contemporaries. Although she acknowledges that the cockatoo may be a representation of a representationsay, a copy of an image imported from parts eastshe argues that the birds detailed appearance strongly indicates it was drawn from life. Old Master paintings of cockatoos from the seventeenth century onward typically show the bird in profile, with its crest maximally displayed, as a taxidermy specimen would be arranged. On Mantegnas canvas, the bird faces forward. It therefore holds the viewers eye, just as a curious, intelligent bird that began life in a distant tropical forest might gaze at a painter standing before an easel.