Birds

Marsili devoted his fifth volume to the study of birds, including 59 images of birds and 15 drawings of bird nests, including eggs. His main authorities were the encyclopaedic Historia animalium (Zurich, 1551-58) of the great Swiss natural historian, Conrad Gessner (1516-65); the massive three-volume work, Ornithologiae hoc est de auibus historiae libri XII[I] (Bologna, 1646), produced by Marsili’s compatriot Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605); and the seminal Ornithologiae Libri Tres (London, 1676) by the English natural historian Francis Willughby (1635-72), which had been posthumously edited by his friend John Ray (1627-1705).[1] To these Marsili added the Historiae naturalis de avibus libri VI cum aeneis figuris Johannes Jonstonus,… concinnavit (Amsterdam, 1657) of Joannes Jonstonus (1603-75), a renowned Polish natural historian. Deák notes that while he depended on Willughby as a guide to classification, many of his descriptions owed much to Aldrovandi, Gesner and Jonstonus.[2]

Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus: Observationibus Geographicis, Astronomicis, Hydrographicis, Historicis, Physicis (The Hague & Amsterdam, 1726), v, Plate 3. Gray Heron (Ardea cinerea).

Stoye dryly notes that ‘Marsigli did not normally parade an enthusiasm for ornithology in his writings’ and certainly his volume on birds lacks some of the more interesting additions found in his volume on fish (for example, unlike in Volume IV, he did not provide the local names of birds).[3] Nor does Marsili provide an in-depth analysis of the various birds he included, instead offering the reader a short description of the bird, heavily reliant on the aforementioned authorities. However, that is not to say that his volume on birds has nothing new to offer. At the very least Volume V is full of wonderful engravings of a range of birds, primarily though not exclusively of the Danube.[4] Early in the work we find engaging images of stately herons, including the above image of a Gray heron (Ardea cinerea). This engraving, like so many others, was by Georg Christoph Eimmart (1638-1705), who based it on a drawing by Raimondo Manzini (1668-1744), a Bolognese painter who had worked at the court of the Dukes of Modena and that of Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm of Baden-Baden (1655-1707), who had been a commander in the imperial army.[5] Manzini had made a name for himself as an artist of flowers and animals, so much so that he was given the epithet ‘the new Zeuxis’ after the famous 5^th century BC artist.[6] Marsili described a variety of herons of different colours and thought that a golden yellow heron (Ardea cinerea flavescens), was in fact a new species.[7]

Another ‘heron-like’ bird was the Eurasian Spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia), and here Marsili included a reference to alternative nomenclature from both Aldrovandi and Willughby. The image emphasises the spoon-like bill from which the bird derived its name, a broad (Platalea) spoonbill (leucorodia) which efficiently enables it to shovel up whatever worms, insects or other edibles it came across as it wades through shallow water.[8] The second part of its name specifically linked it to the heron family for leucorodia was ultimately derived from the Ancient Greek for leukos, ‘white’ and erodios ‘heron’, the latter a reference to the mythical Erodios, the son of Autonous and Hippodamia, who had supposedly been transformed into a heron by Zeus and Apollo. The reference to ‘Pelicanus’ may reflect the fact that breeding birds have a yellow patch on their breasts, rather like pelicans.

Marsili classified birds as follows: a) those that live beside water but do not swim in it; b) a second group which is subdivided by their type of feet (i.e. whether they had webbed or separated toes).[9] These groups were in turn further subdivided into local and migratory birds and were in turn distinguished by their feeding habits.[10] Marsili was concerned with factors such as body size, type of foot and number of toes, length of wing, habitat, and shape of the bill, and drew up a table at the very beginning of the work, outlining his system.[11] While evidently interested in aquatic birds, Marsili had difficulty classifying them, and, as Birkhead and Pilastro note, his 59 images do not represent 59 separate species.[12]

There was one area where Marsili was genuinely innovative: his study of birds’ eggs for this was not an area covered by earlier writers such as Gessner, Aldrovandi or Jonstonus, and even Willughby, who was interested in birds’ eggs, didn’t focus on them in his magnum opus.[13] Marsili drew attention to both their exterior and interior features and argued that the eggs of birds living on the Danube had harder shells.[14] He was interested in the differences between the eggs of aquatic birds and terrestrial birds and made a number of experiments on the yolk and albumen of such eggs.[15] He also gave information about the position and size of nests of birds such as the common crane (Grus grus), great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo), and, as in the above example, the mute swan (Cygnus olor).[16]

TEXT: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library.

SOURCES

Anker, Jean, Bird books and bird art : an outline of the literary history and iconography of descriptive ornithology, based principally on the collection of books containing plates with figures of birds and their eggs now in the University Library at Copenhagen and including a catalogue of these works (Copenhagen, 1938; Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1979 reprint).

Birkhead, T. R. & A. Pilastro, ‘Three early books on birds’ eggs: Marsili’s Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus (1726), Zinanni’s Delle Uova e dei Nidi degli Uccelli (1737) and Klein’s Ova avium plurimarum ad naturalem magnitudinem delineata et genuinis coloribus picta (1766)’, European Zoological Journal, 85, no. 1 (2018), 428-445.

Deák, Antal András (ed.), A Duna Fölfedezése. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Tomus I, A Duna Magyarországi és Szerbiai Szakasza = The Discovery of the Danube. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Volume I, The Hungarian and Serbian Section of the Danube (Budapest, 2004).

Kastner, Joseph, The bird illustrated, 1550-1900 : from the collections of the New York Public Library (New York, 1988), pp 44-45 & 123.

Scifoni, Felice (ed.) Dizionario biografico universale (Florence, 1844), iii, p. 899.

Stoye, John, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730 : the life and times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, soldier and virtuoso (New Haven & London, 1994).

[1] Aldrovandi and Willughby were liberally cited throughout Marsili’s volumes on both fish and birds.

[2] Deák, Antal András (ed.), A Duna Fölfedezése. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Tomus I, A Duna Magyarországi és Szerbiai Szakasza = The Discovery of the Danube. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Volume I, The Hungarian and Serbian Section of the Danube (Budapest, 2004), p. 152.

[3] Stoye, John, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730 : the life and times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, soldier and virtuoso (New Haven & London, 1994), p. 157.

[4] Deák, The Discovery of the Danube, p. 152. Deák notes that he also included some birds of the River Tisza. Kastner, Joseph, The bird illustrated, 1550-1900 : from the collections of the New York Public Library (New York, 1988), p. 44 argues that ‘the illustrations were by Manzini who put great elegance into this heron but did not give it much life’ – a rather harsh appraisal to this writer’s mind!

[5] Birkhead, T. R. & A. Pilastro, ‘Three early books on birds’ eggs: Marsili’s Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus (1726), Zinanni’s Delle Uova e dei Nidi degli Uccelli (1737) and Klein’s Ova avium plurimarum ad naturalem magnitudinem delineata et genuinis coloribus picta (1766)’, European Zoological Journal, 85, no. 1 (2018), 430.

[6] Scifoni, Felice (ed.) Dizionario biografico universale (Florence, 1844), iii, p. 899.

[7] Deák, The Discovery of the Danube, p. 152.

[8] Kastner, The bird illustrated, 1550-1900, p. 45.

[9] Birkhead & Pilastro, ‘Three early books on birds’ eggs’, 429.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., See also Marsili, Luigi Ferdinando, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus: Observationibus Geographicis, Astronomicis, Hydrographicis, Historicis, Physicis (The Hague & Amsterdam, 1726), v, p. 3.

[12] Birkhead & Pilastro, ‘Three early books on birds’ eggs’, 430.

[13] Ibid., 428-9.

[14] Deák, The Discovery of the Danube, p. 152.

[15] Birkhead, & Pilastro, ‘Three early books on birds’ eggs’, 430.

[16] Ibid. See also Anker, Jean, Bird books and bird art : an outline of the literary history and iconography of descriptive ornithology, based principally on the collection of books containing plates with figures of birds and their eggs now in the University Library at Copenhagen and including a catalogue of these works (Copenhagen, 1938; Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1979 reprint), p. 162.