Category: Information

This bizarre pictura, part of an emblem from Hadrian Junius’s 1565 Emblemata, is made hardly more comprehensible by the texts that claim to explicate it.

The inscript is straightforward enough, “Faithlessness must be overcome and rooted out.” But what does that have to do with the creatures in the picture? And what are these beasts, anyway?

In his poetic subscript, Junius fills us in — just a bit.

The bird, enemy of serpents, perches atop a scepter,

Which pushes down on the back of the horse of the Nile.

It conquers the haughty and stamps out the faithless,

This scepter of justice, and it destroys the wicked.

The “enemy of serpents” is, its crane-like raised foot notwithstanding, the white stork, and the horse of the Nile, of course, is the hippopotamus, which Junius’s engraver seems to have imagined as something like a perissodactyl bear. The moral signification of these animals and their awkward pose is explained only somewhat less allusively in the prose explication that follows:

The faithlessness of the hippoppotamus is so unbounded … that it will not even spare the life of the father that gave it birth…. But the stork is most certainly the death of snakes … the scepter is the sign of kings …. And it is indicated by this emblem that faithlessness (the foundation of all vices, which contains in itself all sins and crimes) must be suppressed and punished by the sword of retribution and removed from all things, just as storks do to the race of serpents.

All very obscure. Fortunately, though, we know where to look when the early modern creators of emblems reach to Egypt for their inspiration.

The study — “study” — of hieroglyphics before Champollion and Young was dominated by fanciful works, inspired by the apparent forgery attributed to a certain Horapollo, in which members of the humanist elite vied with one another to see who could pile up the most learned lore in explanation of a given symbol. This led inevitably to the creation of hieroglyphic encyclopedias, great sources for the emblematizers and even greater resources for us as we seek to understand just what they were on about half a millennium ago.

One of the most useful is Piero Valerianus’s Hieroglyphica, first published in 1556. Looking under the chapter headings “Stork” and “Hippopotamus” tells us everything we need to know, with an extremely strange illustration as a bonus.

Valerianus begins his interpretation by observing that coins from the reign of Hadrian show a stork with the inscription “pietas augusta,” “the highest faithfulness.” Those words

meant that the noble man should be faithful to his parents … and never desert them, caring for them in their old age…. Storks do not let their parents wander here and there in search of food but bring them what they have, so that the old birds, which bore them and raised them, can stay in the nest and feed from the young birds’ labor…. And the ancient Law of the Stork, commemorating the name of these birds, requires that elderly parents be supported, as we have said.

The Roman lex ciconaria was a frequent subject of sermons on the fifth commandment, as Valerianus points out at length.

And the hippo?

Egyptian priests were quite right to depict a hippopotamus when they meant to indicate that someone was faithless, unjust, and ungrateful….  As soon as the hippopotamus begins to mature, it grows hostile to its father and tries to see whether it can defeat its father in a fight, often challenging it: if it happens that the younger animal comes out the victor, it seeks to copulate with its mother … but if it is defeated by its father or otherwise prevented from accomplishing its criminal desire, its depravity persists for so long that once it is mature, and stronger and more powerful, it attacks its father, now weakened by age, and tears him to pieces.

Valerianus explains his illustration as a reminder to always put faithfulness above ingratitude:

The Egyptians made the scepters of their kings with the image of a stork at the top and the hooves of a hippopotamus at the bottom, desiring to remind us that faithfulness was to be embraced, highly valued, and readily undertaken, but faithlessness, as represented by the hieroglyph of the hippopotamus, was to be done away with entirely.

All makes sense now, doesn’t it?

The lovely hoopoe instantly becomes everybody’s favorite bird when we bump into one on our Birds and Art tours — and of course, I can never resist reminding the group of this common species’ reputation for smellitudinosity.

In nineteenth-century France, that defensive stink should have protected nesting hoopoes from prying hands, but didn’t:

I have known young egg collectors to naively reach into those extremely odoriferous chambers and to find that that strange aroma lingered long thereafter. But this too gentle lesson went unheeded, and those young miscreants returned the next spring to their spiteful destruction of the eggs and young of some of our best allies,

the insectivorous birds.

Hoopoes have little to fear from roving bands of oologists nowadays, I think, but their numbers are decreasing throughout their range. Not much you can do as a bird against habitat loss and global warming — no matter how bad you smell.

François Levaillant was one of the most remarkable figures in all of ornithology, a scientist every American birder should know — and one almost no American birder knows.

Levaillant’s career was a sort of natural historical triangle trade, his travels taking him from colonial South America to Europe to Africa and back. Born a creole in Suriname in 1753, he died in France seventy-one years later, lauded by many and denounced by more. Even today, nearly two hundred years later, he remains controversial: an intrepid explorer, a racist seducer, a gifted writer, an irredeemable liar?

That question mark should be erased. Levaillant was all of those things and more, all at once, and had he written in English and spent more time in North America, he would surely have become the object of a mythology that would long ago have left the Audubon legend choking on his dust. (In fact, Audubon  recognized this himself, I think, to some extent, or he would not have taken such trouble to plagiarize Levaillant’s writings as part of the pathetic effort to embellish his own biography.)

Whatever Levaillant’s failings, and they were many and fascinating, he had a keen eye and a sharp pen when it came to correcting others’ errors. A striking example is the little appendix to his Histoire naturelle des promerops, where he points out in his characteristically vivid way the misidentifications made by others (whom he sniffs at along the way as mere “nomenclateurs”).

Buffon, mildly resented for having offered a young Levaillant nothing more than encouragement, comes in for what is nearly ridicule for his treatment of a bird in Albertus Seba’s Thesaurus:

That bird was first described by Seba under the name of “ani” and is now recognized by everyone as the “bout de petun” of Cayenne. Why then make of it a promerops, especially not having seen it, and especially since no one has ever found any promerops in the New World up to this point?

Levaillant’s notion (and, to be fair, most of his contemporaries’ notion) of just what a “promerops” might be was sufficiently vitreous that one is surprised to find him casting stones.

He was at it again, and in no better mood, in dealing with the ani again in his Histoire naturelle des perroquets:

[Jean de] Laët mentions in his Description of the East Indies a “black macaw from Guyana,” its plumage glossy green, the bill red, and the feet yellow. He says that it lives in unfarmed areas and keeps to the sterile mountains. This description fits the ani or “bout de petun,” which an inexperienced ornithologist like Laët might well have mistaken for a parrot.

Levaillant explains away the odd soft part colors as the product of an overly enthusiastic taxidermist — and takes the opportunity to poke at Buffon again, pointedly reminding the reader that the image of the ani in the Planches enluminées also shows bright red on the face where in life there is none.

Buffon the man was long dead by the time Levaillant composed that withering footnote, but Buffon the book would thrive for many decades to come. (Famously, George Bernard Shaw is said to have been assigned passages for imitation in order to improve his style in French prose.) One of Buffon’s posthumous editors, Charles Sonnini de Manoncourt, himself a frequent object of Levaillant’s unbounded scorn, took the parrot matter as an opportunity to defend the master, or at least to denigrate the carping Levaillant, who

claims that Laët’s black macaw … is the ani or “bout de petun….” But these two groups of animals are so distant from each other that it is impossible to confuse them, even with no education at all in natural history. Furthermore, it seems that Levaillant has never read Laët, because he says that Laët mentions it in his description of the East Indies, whereas the author wrote only of America, which is where he traveled.

So there.

If petty quarrels like this don’t convince you to learn more about Levaillant, then read the reports of his travels in Africa. You’ll never be the same.

 

 

 

 

Writes Heinrich von Höwel in his New and Wondrous Menagerie of 1601,

When their innate natural hatred of the owl causes the other birds to mob the owl and tear out its feathers, as Aristotle informs us in the De animalibus, it sometimes happens that they are easily pursued and caught by the hunter. In the same way, it often happens that when rich people oppress the poor, they are in turn attacked by others more powerful and lose their possessions, or are otherwise beset by war, imprisonment, or other costly penalties. This in fulfillment of the word of God, Is. 33: “Woe to thee that spoilest… thou shalt be spoiled.” And even if sometimes that does not happen, the wrath of God still hangs over them. And because they rob other people of their worldly goods by violence or deceit, they in turn are themselves robbed of their eternal salvation and heavenly inheritance. In whatever way it takes, whether here on earth or in eternity, it comes to pass that in the end all such people find the word of God fulfilled that was issued to King Zedekiah: “My net also will I spread upon him, and he shall be taken in my snare.”