This picture, from a manuscript of Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur produced in the famous workshop of Diebold Lauber, is mysterious in more ways than one.
The bird is identified as a zanclaffer, a “tooth chatterer,” a name that to my knowledge occurs nowhere else for what is obviously the white spoonbill.
Only adding to the apparent confusion, the facing text treats of a bird called “strix” in Latin, and indeed, the description is that of a nocturnal bird known for its call, likened to the sound of a scythe being drawn through the air — a descriptive tradition that is ultimately, if distantly, behind the modern name “saw-whet” for the cutest of our strigids.
The mismatch between text and image, extreme as it is in this case, is not overly unusual in the manuscript tradition of the Buch der Natur. Nearly 20 years ago, Gerold Hayer pointed out that the illuminators responsible for the illustrations rarely bothered to adapt their work to the words of the text, simply lifting traditional iconographic types from herbals and bestiaries.
What I find most striking, and most puzzling, though, is the bird’s right foot. It seems not to be just standing on that fecklessly grinning fish, but grasping the poor creature in its threskiornithid talons.
Probably not a realistic scene.
I don’t know whether there is a standard spoonbill iconography in the late Middle Ages, but if there is, I’d bet this departs from it. How to explain this bird’s weird pose?
Hayer’s observation about the illuminators’ lazy reliance on older models points to a possible answer. Another large wading bird, the crane, is a standard member of the bestiary cast, where its spiritual vigilance is indicated by the stone it holds in its foot. I wonder whether the designer of the leaf in this Buch der Natur had that tradition in mind — or perhaps, even, a bestiary on the table in front of her or him — and decided, in a fit of contaminating inspiration, that those long legs needed something to hold. Not a stone, but, say, a fish.
We’ll never know. But maybe it isn’t that much of a reach.
