AFA Summer 2020

Summer 100 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Birds in Art and Culture 1620–1820 T here are approximately ten thousand species of birds in the world, ranging in size from the two-inch bee hummingbird to the nine-foot-tall ostrich. Their astonishing variety and presence in every corner of the globe—as well as the ability of most of them to fly—have made birds objects of fascination, even veneration, since the dawn of human society. Pictures of birds are among the earliest surviving images ever made. In Renaissance Europe, birds from faraway lands—sometimes alive, more often as preserved skins—began to be collected in menageries and cabinets of curiosities by monarchs and wealthy merchants. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, corresponding with expanded exploration, colonialism, and the rise of the European trading companies, intense interest in natural history and attempts to classify and categorize it grew as specimens of birds and other natural history objects were collected in great numbers from around the world. The study of birds and their classification made great strides in the eighteenth century, with many illustrated ornithological studies being published in Europe during the century. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, ornithology would be the most developed zoological science. But naturalists and wealthy collectors were not the only ones fascinated by these “rare” and “wondrous” birds. Artists sketched and painted them; moralizers found symbolic meaning in them; middle-class families kept them as pets; and fashionable women wore their feathers as accessories. Rare and Wondrous: Birds in Art and Culture 1620–1820, the latest in a bi-annual series of bird-themed exhibitions at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio, explores through paintings, prints, books, and decorative arts how exotic birds became the objects of scientific inquiry, of popular interest, of status, and even of household decoration and personal adornment. The exhibition opens May 2, 2020 with a tentative end date of August 2, 2020; please visit the www.toledommuseum.org for updates. Rare and Wondrous by Paula Reich