Fabritius and the Goldfinch (Kindle Single) by Davis Deborah

Author:Davis, Deborah [Davis, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2014-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

From this you learn, always labor wisely,

And understand what time and place require.

J. Claire Wood, an English ornithologist who found himself bedridden for several months, decided to use his own time in “captivity” to make a serious study of the goldfinch in captivity. He placed two males in adjacent cages and monitored their behavior. “They spend the most time upon their perches nearest each other, where they frequently sit and sing together,” he concluded. He acknowledged that “There are emotional people who endow a captive bird with all the mental anguish of a human being torn from loved ones and thrown into prison,” but he saw no evidence that the birds were “pining for freedom.” Rather, he pointed out, “a wild bird is menaced with death from all sides from such sources as weather uncertainty, food supply, accidents, mammals, birds, reptiles, etc., while in captivity it is protected from all of this and the attending hardships. …” When released, one of his goldfinch kept returning to the cage, possibly preferring the safety of confinement to the terrible uncertainty of life in the wild.

The great artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci would have disagreed with Wood and anyone else who endorsed caging. Searching for a way to teach man to fly, Leonardo filled his famous notebooks with detailed sketches of birds in flight, frequently purchasing cage birds to study their anatomy. But when he was finished, he set them free. An early animal rights activist, he believed that wild creatures belonged in the wild.

In addition to drawing birds, Leonardo wrote about them. Like Aesop, he was a skilled fabulist who saw the “animal” in humans and the “human” in animals. He featured a goldfinch in a poignant moral tale about a mother goldfinch who came home one day to an empty nest. She searched frantically for her lost babies, finally finding them entrapped in a cage. She desperately tried to set them free, but after a while, gave a cry of grief, and flew away. The next day, she returned to the cage and fed a deadly herb to her children through the bars. As Leonardo explained, “If its young are imprisoned, it will carry spurge [a poisonous herb] to them, preferring to see them dead than imprisoned.” “Better death than the loss of liberty,” said the mother goldfinch, teaching lessons about maternal devotion and the importance of freedom,

Whether the goldfinch was more prized as a songbird or a symbol, he inspired painters, writers, composers, naturalists, pet lovers, and even theologians, to create myths, fables, folktales, music, and hundreds of works of art. And in 1654, this bird-as-muse caught the eye of Fabritius, who had the unusual idea of painting a proper portrait of the popular puttertje.

Fabritius may have had a pet goldfinch as a child, or during his marriage to Aeltje. Perhaps he kept one in his studio in Delft. But his decision to add a live animal to his expanding repertoire of images was no small undertaking precisely because

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.