In 1594 the engraver Jacques de Fornazeris produced a flight of nine bird portraits — owls, a rooster, a peacock, a pheasant, a duck, an eagle, and a pelican-like bird labelled sacco marino. The Public Domain Review has put the set up in full from the Rijksmuseum. They are beautiful etchings, and slightly absurd ones: the birds pose, glare out of the frame at the viewer, and share their space with frogs, crabs, butterflies, caterpillars, and smaller birds.

What the plates show:

  • Each bird is labelled in Italian and set against its own bit of vegetation, with the occasional small creature as an attendant.
  • The series was printed and distributed by Nicolaus van Aelst, a prolific Flemish engraver-publisher who normally worked in religious and allegorical scenes.
  • Bird studies boomed in the late sixteenth century. MET curator Femke Speelberg ties that to “the growing demand for empirical evidence and widespread collecting interests by scholars and wealthy patrons alike.”
  • But where contemporaries like Jacques Le Moyne pursued tonal and physical accuracy, Fornazeris’ birds perform. They are not nature watched over from outside — they arrive already inside a cultural world.
  • Fornazeris himself is shadowy: possibly born in Piedmont, trained at the Savoy court in Turin, settled in Lyon around 1600 and died there circa 1619. He is better known for frontispieces and portraits of popes and nobles, including two plates of Marie de’ Medici, and for a long collaboration with the bookseller Horace Cardon.
  • Art historian Henriette Pommier credits him with handling the refined Flemish burin technique at a time when it was not yet common in single-sheet engraving — a commercial as much as an artistic distinction.
  • The nine birds are apparently not his only animals: an earlier run of twelve or more smaller bird engravings in a similar style dates to the 1580s and 1590s, along with a possibly attributable lynx.

The collection is a reminder that natural history printing did not simply precede the theatrical use of animals; it overlapped with it. Somebody in Lyon in 1594 was selling etchings of a barn owl because it was useful to know what a barn owl looked like — and because a barn owl glaring back at you is a better picture.