Notes on the Function of Early Zoological Imagery

Abstract

When writing a review for ISIS, the Journal for the History of Science, published some years ago, I started by taking the reader to the Florentine Baptistery, to pause in front of the famous bronze doors by Lorenzo Ghiberti. Framing the biblical scenes on the door of Paradise are a number of plants and animals portrayed with painstaking naturalism and thus in accordance with the artist’s own pledges in his Commentarii. The animals are easily identified, except for a few that still defy attempts at finding their equivalents in nature. Although non-existent, they seem to have been inspired by living specimens. Illusion plays a double trick on the spectator. The pictorial idea may originally have been inherited from manuscript illustrations of the fifteenth century where recordings of the biblical stories were combined with naturalistic digressions in the margins, often displaying an extraordinary degree of empirical observation. To Ghiberti, a general character of naturalistic imitation was enough; the function of the decorative framework did not include more rigorous demands of illusion of the kind that was soon to be developed by artists such as Antonio Pisanello and Leonardo.