13th century cockatoo images spark rethink on Australia-Europe trade history
The coloured drawings predate by 250 years what was previously believed to be the oldest European depiction of the bird
Drawings of an Australasian cockatoo discovered on the pages of a 13th century European manuscript suggest trade Down Under was flourishing as far back as medieval times, researchers said on Tuesday.
Four images of the white cockatoo feature in the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II of Sicily’s “De Arte Venandi cum Avibus” (The Art of Hunting with Birds), which dates from between 1241 and 1248 and is held in the Vatican library.
The coloured drawings predate by 250 years what was previously believed to be the oldest European depiction of the bird, in Andrea Mantegna’s 1496 altarpiece Madonna della Vittoria.
Heather Dalton, an honorary research fellow at Melbourne University, published an article about the cockatoo in Mantegna’s painting in 2014 which was seen by three scholars at the Finnish Institute in Rome.
They were working on “De Arte Venandi cum Avibus” and realised they had found much older depictions.
A resulting collaboration between Dalton and trio revealed that Frederick’s bird was likely to have been either a female Triton or one of three subspecies of Yellow-crested Cockatoo.