Date: 18-03-2007
Owning Institution: The Barber Institute
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011            
Subject: 17th Century    18th Century  19th Century  20th Century  Now  Renaissance  

The classical author Macrobius wrote that immediately after Julius Caesar had defeated Mark Anthony, at the battle of Actium, he was hailed by a parrot. “Hail Caesar, conqueror and leader,” the brightly plumed bird is reputed to have said, thereby proving not only its unusual intelligence and extraordinary powers of mimicry but also its capacity for prophecy. In the Middle Ages the story was often repeated and, eventually, incorporated into Christian legend. The parrot’s words, “Ave Caesar”, were taken to have prefigured “Ave Maria”, thus becoming doubly prescient – a prediction of Caesar’s triumphant rule that also contained within it, like a riddle or code, a prophecy of the Virgin’s birth of Christ.

All this is by way of background information to the Barber Institute’s light-hearted but thoroughly engaging exhibition, “The Parrot in Art from Durer to Elizabeth Butterworth”. Strictly speaking, this discursive exploration of the parrot’s place in the history of art begins not with Durer but a little earlier. Its first image is a slightly foxed, battered but moving little woodcut, created by an unknown German artist in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. The subject of the picture is the Christ child, who is depicted naked, sitting on a patterned cushion perched on a grassy mound. He is schematic of form and face, but this is an image, nonetheless, full of intimacy and tenderness. On his lap he holds a parrot – to be specific, a Long-tailed Green Parakeet – cradling it in such a way that its head brushes his cheek. It seems that the print was originally designed as a New Year’s greeting card. The image of Christ and the prophetic parrot – bearer of good news about the future – was intended to bring a message of hope for the year to come.

Nearby, Martin Schongauer’s late fifteenth-century engraving of The Virgin with a Parrot, introduces the creature into a scene of the Madonna and Child. Seated by a window, against a landscape abstracted to one tree and a single wind of distant river, the Virgin holds open a book with one hand while supporting the infant Jesus with another. He plays with the eponymous parrot, which inclines its head towards him with appropriate deference.

As well as securing a walk-on part in images of the Holy Family, the parrot also migrated into the Garden of Eden. The parrot’s use of the word “Ave” to hail Caesar and predict the virgin birth (as the medieval mind symbolically interpreted it) was given its own special significance by the ingenious masters of scholastic theology. “Ave”, spelled backwards, makes “Eva”, or Eve – whose sins the Virgin Mary was said to have expiated by giving birth to the redeemer. So now the parrot came to symbolise the Virgin’s future redemptive role, as a “Second Eve”, in representations of the Garden of Eden. That is how the bird comes to appears in Durer’s great early sixteenth-century engraving of The Fall of Man. Perched just above the figure of Adam, who looks questioningly towards the long-tressed figure of Eve, as she proffers him an apple, Durer’s parrot is implicitly contrasted with the devious serpent, twined around the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge. The benevolent bird looks away from the scene of temptation, as if pained by the sight of the Fall of Man. The sprig of mountain ash which supports the parrot also supports a tablet of wood bearing a prominent inscription that declares “Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg made this 1504”. The particular bird that modelled for the Edenic parrot may have been actually owned by the painter. Durer made two other drawings of the same creature – an Alexandrine or Ring-necked Parakeet – in the early years of the sixteenth century. One of the revelations of this show, in fact, is just how many artists have owned parrots – Reynolds, Edward Lear, William Nicholson. Perhaps it is partly because the birds are nature’s equivalent of a palette, loaded with colour.

The exhibition is the brainchild of Richard Verdi, Director of the Barber Institute, not only a distinguished art historian but a lifelong parrot afficionado. His erudition informs the catalogue accompanying the show, which is even dedicated to the memory of a pair of parrots he once owned named Mr Lily and Mr Lotte. This volume contains a fund of information about such subjects as the role of the parrot in antiquity, revealing among other things that the earliest parrot brought to Europe was a member of the same species as the bird Durer may have owned. “The first parrots imported into Europe came from India and among their earliest recorded owners was Alexander the great, who, after conquering the Persian Empire, drove his army to the Punjab in 327 BC. On his return he brought back with him a green parrot with a rose-pink collar and blue cheeks that has subsequently come to bear his name: the Alexandrine Parakeet. Described by the admiral of his fleet as ‘something miraculous’ because ‘it utters a human voice’, the parrot was destined from then on to enjoy a favoured status in the ancient world. Aristotle, Pliny and Apuleius wrote at length about it, focussing upon its intelligence and powers of speech. It also forms the subject of one of Aesop’s Fables (355) and of an elegy by Ovid (Amores, II, 6) of c. 15 BC, which mourns the passing of a beloved parrot nearly two millennia before Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch.”

As it moves into the later Renaissance and beyond, Verdi’s exhibition increasingly explores parrots in the secular rather than sacred context. A prominent Blue-fronted Amazon parrot stands on the dinner table in the company of William Brooke, 10^th Lord Cobham and His Family, in an otherwise typically sober, anonymously painted portrait of the Elizabethan period. The bird’s appearance here suggests the extent to which it had become a kind of status symbol among the European aristocracy – loved not only for its colour, exoticism and rarity, but also for its ability to inspire affection and mimic human behaviour. Less than half a century before Brooke had his portrait painted, the poet John Skelton had encapsulated the bird’s appeal among the royalty and aristocracy of the time: “With my beak bent, my little wanton eye, / My feathers fresh as is the emerald green, / About my neck a circulet like the rich ruby, / My little legs, my feet both feat and clean, / I am a minion to wait upon a queen.”

In Holland too, parrots stood for status, becoming the avian equivalent of the tulip – brightly coloured, highly sought after and subtly symbolic of the reach and the spread of Dutch maritime trade and economic power. Jan Fyt’s mid-seventeenth century A Still Life with Fruit, Dead Game and a Parrot shows an African Grey Parrot – the only living creature on a table heaped high with fruit and the carcasses of grouse and hare – casually nibbling at the tendril of a vine. There is perhaps a concealed classical allusion here, a reference to Pliny the Elder’s famous story about the painter Zeuxis depicting some grapes “so true to nature …. The birds flew down to settle on them.” An even more splendid parrot, this time a Scarlet Macaw, occupies Jacob Fransz. Van der Merck’s Still Life with Fruit and Parrot. Perched by the window in an interior so impossibly heaped with fruit and fabric and fine porcelain that it resembles a cornucopia, the bird’s splendid plumage is contrasted with the grey clouds of a Dutch evening sky.

These are innocent parrots but later representations of the bird are fraught with erotic meaning. During the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the parrot – having once symbolised Eve – became instead an image of sexual lust and longing. Wistful women alone in their boudoirs contemplate their pet parrots as they dream of their distant lovers. The most famous examples of the genre, by Manet, by Courbet, by Renoir, are too precious to have been sought as loans by the Barber Institute. But the exhibition does include two wonderful lesser known examples: A Woman in a Red Jacket Feeding a Parrot, by the seventeenth-century painter from Leiden, Frans van Mieris the Elder; and Giambattista Tiepolo’s smouldering Young Woman with a Macaw, a capriccio executed by the greatest Venetian painter of the eighteenth century for Empress Elisabeth Petrovna of Russia. A blushing young lady, in decolletage so low-cut as to reveal her right breast, stares into space. The parrot she caresses looks out at the spectator with a sharp, proprietorial gaze.

The exhibition also includes, among much else, a fine Goya of superstitious fools treating a parrot as an oracle, as well as  Edwin Landseer’s comically anthropomorphised portrait of Queen Victoria’s favourite parrot, an ineffably superior Scarlet Macaw. It concludes with a number of breathtakingly acute and subtle natural history illustrations by the preeminent modern painter of parrots, Elizabeth Butterworth, although the last image of all is a Christmas card on the theme of cockatoos by Quentin Blake – a subtle harking back to the very first image of all, that late fifteenth-century New Year’s greeting card. Putting the show together has evidently been a labour of love for Richard Verdi and the rumour is that, since he is nearing retirement, this might well be his last ever exhibition – so this is an elegy to the parrot that may also be, so to speak, a swansong.