ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Seeing and Knowing Iridescence through Watercolor Drawings of Northern Lapwings

• In Event: From Sketch to Knowledge: Visual Mediation in Early Modern Natural History

English Abstract

Iridescence is a complex optical phenomenon which historically was described with the feathers of the pigeons’ necks or the peacocks’ trains. These two animals became emblems of iridescence and featured in several paintings. Yet their paradigmatic display of this phenomenon is rarely visible in paintings and drawings, mostly because painting a play of colors is technically very complex. Natural history drawings of pigeons and peacocks are furthermore astonishingly rare. However, there are several natural history watercolor depictions of northern lapwings (Vanellus vanellus). These depictions represent to different extents and by means of different strategies and methods the striking iridescence of their feathers. The wide range of artistic solutions adopted would suggest a mediation between several actors in the attempt to achieve an image that produced knowledge about an ephemeral feature. A feature that became a central chromatic phenomenon in the investigation of color from the mid-seventeenth century. By comparing early modern watercolor drawings representing the northern lapwing; natural history texts describing as well as illustrating this Eurasian bird species; and painting manuals suggesting how to paint “changing colors”, this paper aims to show the possible image-making process behind the different solutions adopted to display iridescence.

Author

• Giulia Simonini, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome