![]() An exotic ‘white parrot’ from what was then considered furthest India was therefore the perfect gift.Ĭockatoos travel well with people, being gregarious and long-lived. He had many diplomatic exchanges with the ‘Sultan of Babylon’, the fourth Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt (the Kurdish al-Malik Muhammad al-Kamil), who knew the emperor enjoyed falconry and was particularly fond of birds. Restoring one of the world's rarest mapsįrederick’s tastes were a little more refined, however, and he preferred rare books or animals whose behaviour he could study. ![]() In 1251, for example, the King of Norway presented a polar bear to Henry III of England (who kept a menagerie of exotic beasts in the Tower of London), which was allowed to swim in the Thames and catch fish. In the thirteenth century it was common for monarchs to exchange animals as gifts and the larger, fiercer or more rare the animal, the higher its prestige. Based on the fact that my colleagues found red paint flecks in the irises of all four images, they also surmised it was probably a female. This means that the cockatoo gifted to Frederick II was taken from the northernmost tip of what is now Australia’s mainland, New Guinea or the islands off New Guinea or Indonesia. They looked closely at details, like the shape of the crest and the colouring, and concluded the cockatoo was likely to have been either a Triton or one of three sub-species of Yellow-crested Cockatoo. While ornithologists have made various identifications of the cockatoo, its significance had never been explored in depth until my Finnish colleagues studied the drawings in situ in the Vatican Library. This meant that while many scholars, including me, were aware the Sultan had given a white parrot to Frederick II, few were aware there were surviving images of this bird. For a high resolution colour image see article published in Parergon 35/1 (June 2018): 35-60. Lat 1071, folio 20v (© Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana). One of the four images of the cockatoo gifted to Frederick II by the ‘Sultan of Babylon’. But although Wood and Fyfe included many illustrations from the original manuscript, they did not include those of the cockatoo. Many scholars have relied on Casey Albert Wood and Florence Marjorie Fyfe’s English translation of De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, published in 1943 (there is a copy in Melbourne University’s Baillieu Library). The four images in the Vatican manuscript have rarely been reproduced in print. I was intrigued to hear that these images were created 250 years before Mantegna’s painting existed, and so began our collaboration to place this work in historical context and share the story of how an Australasian cockatoo reached Europe in the mid thirteenth century. He and colleagues, Jukka Salo - a zoologist, and Simo Örmä - Intendant of the Finnish Institute in Rome, had been working on identifying the images of the cockatoo in Frederick’s manuscript. I had thought Mantegna’s cockatoo was the earliest European image of a cockatoo until I was contacted by Pekka Niemelä, an emeritus professor of biodiversity and environmental science at the University of Turku in Finland, in February 2015. As this Sulphur-crested Cockatoo or Yellow-crested Cockatoo (also known as a Lesser-crested Cockatoo) appeared to have been painted from a live model, which would have travelled to Mantua primarily overland, I saw this as evidence of the complexity and range of Southeast Asian trading networks prior to direct European contact. In 2014 I published an article on an Australasian cockatoo in an altarpiece painted in Italy in 1496 by Andrea Mantegna. This was previously thought to be the earliest depiction of a cockatoo in Europe. ![]() Andrea Mantegna’s Madonna della Vittoria, painted in 1496, features a cockatoo above the Madonna’s head (above the cross). The discovery of these images, which are published in the journal Parergon, highlight the fact that during the medieval period, merchants plying the waters just to the north of Australia were part of a flourishing trade network that reached west to the Middle East and beyond. Picture: De Arte Venandi cum Avibus / Alamyįour of these images depict a white cockatoo, described in the text as a crested, talking parrot - a gift from ‘the Sultan of Babylon’. The Holy Roman Emperor King Frederick II of Sicily’s falconry book, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Hunting with Birds) features 900 pictures of birds in its margins. In its margins are nine hundred drawings of falcons, falconers and other animals kept by the emperor at his palaces. Among the hand-written documents, books, and ancient artefacts in the Vatican Library is a 13th century manuscript on falconry written in Latin by or for the Holy Roman Emperor - King Frederick II of Sicily.įrederick’s De Arte Venandi cum Avibus ( The Art of Hunting with Birds) dates from between 12.
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