Birds, Colour, and Feet: A "Naïf Portrait" of the Brazilian Tanager in Pierre Belon's L'Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux

Abstract

This article examines the transformations that the Brazilian tanager, a South American songbird, underwent as it crossed the Atlantic Ocean and was represented by the traveller and naturalist Pierre Belon in his bird treatise L’Histoire de la nature des oyseaux (1555). I show that Belon carefully chose his vocabulary and modes of depiction in order to address the constraints of his project, especially in showing colour; and I trace how subsequent representations further modified the imagery of the bird. As this article argues, the case of the Brazilian tanager reveals how Belon’s true-to-nature rhetoric of his vocabulary and modes of depiction were meant to offset difficulties of using flawed or incomplete information in the case of descriptions, drawings, and physical evidence when it comes to preserved birds. Furthermore, I show that the red colour of the bird’s feathers worked as a symbol of access to “exotic” commodities. In comparing Belon’s text and representation to the ones in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s bird treatise Ornithologiae of 1600, I examine the mechanisms of early modern “collective empiricism” through various layers of knowledge transfer.