by Tim Birkhead
One of the rooms, presided over by a lively portrait of Aldrovandi himself, contained his books: ten folios of plants and seven of birds, fish and insects painted in vibrant watercolours. Willughby’s eyes must have lit up at the sight of these images, most of which still survive.41 Because Aldrovandi had been able to employ the very best artists in Italy, the paintings are both beautiful and accurate. It was one thing to see the monochrome engravings in Aldrovandi’s published works, as Willughby and Ray had undoubtedly done, but quite another to see the vividly coloured originals on which those black-and-white images were based. The fish are painted better than the birds, but then fish don’t differ as much in their posture between life and death, although the colours of some species fade rapidly after death. Regardless, this must have been the standard to which Willughby and Ray aspired as they thought ahead to the way their own publications would be illustrated.
As great as Aldrovandi was, he was also part of the problem and one of the main – but not sole – reasons that Willughby and Ray decided natural history needed a makeover. As is clear even from Skippon’s short list of specimens, Aldrovandi was an indiscriminate and undiscerning collector. Anything odd from the natural world would do, and Aldrovandi’s was an age of exuberant knowledge: the more connections he could find to a specimen the better. It makes – assuming you can read Latin – for extraordinarily tedious reading. Undoubtedly, in the late 1500s and the early 1600s such voluminous, discursive and wide-ranging accounts masqueraded as great scholarship, and while Aldrovandi must have been absolutely driven to achieve what he did, his was an unenlightening, shotgun approach to understanding the natural world.
Subsequently, a major task for Willughby and Ray was to match the animals and plants included in Aldrovandi’s books with what they had seen for themselves. It wasn’t always easy and it would have been much more straightforward had they had copies of those colour illustrations to refer to. I know what it must have felt like for I have struggled to identify some of the curiously named animals and plants listed in Skippon and Ray’s journals. In many cases it was impossible for Willughby and Ray to unequivocally establish what species of bird or fish Aldrovandi was writing about; sometimes he made mistakes – in part because he was more focused on quantity than quality, and like many other naturalists, often assumed the two sexes, or adult and immatures, to be different species.
Even so, Willughby’s visit to Aldrovandi’s museum must have been among the highlights of the entire continental journey.
From Bologna the four travelled to Milan where they came across a censored version of Gessner’s History of Animals, one of the titles banned by Pope Paul IV in his Index Librorum Prohibitum of 1559. The Index didn’t explain why certain books were banned, but in his Bibliotheca Universalis – the first list of all books since printing began, published between 1545 and 1549 – Gessner had publicised, and by doing so had promoted, Protestant works. This did not endear him to the Catholic Church and his Bibliotheca Universalis also appeared on the list of books banned by the Pope. As Skippon reported, on the title page of Gessner’s History of Animals someone had written ‘Damnati authoris [damned author] &c.’, and he tells us that ‘all those notes which Gessner calls superstitious and magical were blotted out’.42 As the historian Mark Greengrass says, this kind of censorship ‘may have confirmed Willughby’s worst suspicions about the relationship between natural philosophy and the Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic Church’.43 Curiosity about the natural world was dangerous for religion, and examples of such papal ‘censorship’ can be seen on the Internet.44 Part of the motivation for censorship in this case may have been due to the strained relationship between the fervently Catholic Aldrovandi, who quoted extensively from the strictly Protestant Gessner – but without mentioning him by name. Aldrovandi anonymised Gessner, referring to him as ‘ornithologus’ (bird man), presumably because he feared Catholic sanctions. Another explanation is that Aldrovandi felt threatened by Gessner, who wrote to him continuously questioning his natural history writing: Aldrovandi never answered Gessner’s letters.45
From Milan, Willughby’s party travelled to Turin, Genoa, Lucca, Pisa and to Livorno where, on finding a Dutch boat ready to sail for Naples, ‘we put ourselves aboard her’. With the wind being against them, the sea passage took five long days. Luckily, their arrival in Naples coincided with a weekly meeting of the ‘virtuosi or philosophic academy … in the palace of that most civil and obliging, noble and virtuous person, the marquess D’Arena’. This was Andrea Concublet, who had reopened the Academy of Investiganti after it had been closed as a result of the plague (which killed over two-thirds of Naples’s population) in 1656. Willughby and his colleagues admired Concublet’s natural history museum, and, together with an audience of sixty or more, observed a practical demonstration of ‘water ascending above its level in slender tubes’ followed by discussion and the reciting of discourses composed about particular subjects that had been allocated to the participants the week before. Willughby and his party were deeply impressed and commented: ‘A man could scarcely hope to find such a knot of ingenious persons and of that latitude and freedom of judgement in so remote a part of Europe.’ As this suggests, Naples was a city of great cultural vitality and, being in touch with the Royal Society, was one of the main academic centres of Europe. Willughby and his friends found the local virtuosi to be up to date with the works of other European scholars and were ‘very much pleased and satisfied with the conversation and discourse’.46
At Naples the party split up, with John Ray and Philip Skippon continuing south to Sicily and Malta, and eventually back to Venice, while Francis Willughby and Nathaniel Bacon returned north to Rome. Because Ray and Skippon, whose journals still exist, travelled together, we have a detailed account of their journey, but – frustratingly – almost nothing for Willughby and Bacon whose accounts are now lost.
Ray and Skippon botanised as they travelled southwards, finding many new plants, but also, on returning to Rome in September 1664, a new species of bird: the citril finch. Carefully distinguishing it from the similar siskin and serin, Ray tells us how it was known as the verzellino in Rome, and was ‘nurtured in cages for the sake of its singing’. Also in Rome, Ray and Skippon were able to visit the so-called paper museum of the wealthy and politically astute nobleman Cassiano dal Pozzo. His museum was an ambitious attempt to represent the entire natural (and unnatural) world visually, through an enormous and magnificent collection of superb paintings created by the most accomplished artists of the day. The English physician, George Ent, met dal Pozzo during a visit to Rome in 1636 and afterwards corresponded with him. Dal Pozzo later sent Ent examples of petrified wood that were exhibited at the Royal Society in London and helped to fuel the debate about the origin of fossils.
One of dal Pozzo’s other claims to fame was writing and producing one of Italy’s great seventeenth-century bird books, albeit under someone else’s name. At this stage he could only dream of being a member of Italy’s scientific elite, the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of Lynxes), but realised that were he to present them with a definitive work on ornithology, it might grease the wheels. Many years previously, in 1601, Antonio Valli da Todi had published a small, nicely illustrated volume on birds – mainly species that could be kept in cages for their song or appearance. Rather deviously, dal Pozzo recognised that with a few additions Valli da Todi’s work could be updated and passed off as a new book. He persuaded Giovanni Pietro Olina to front it. They pulled one of the original artists, Antonio Tempesta, out of retirement and persuaded him to touch up some of his original images, and they enlisted another brilliant bird artist, Vicenzo Leonardi, to create some new paintings. Dal Pozzo then presented the volume – the ultimate guide to the increasingly popular practice of bird-keeping – to the Academy in 1622, with these words: ‘I send you this bird book produced by one of my affiliates as a tribute of my respect, as evidence that the evidence I gather with limited effort and money can contribute towards this fiel
d [of science].’ The ploy paid off: the combination of the bird book and his remarkable collection of natural history images got him elected to the Accademia dei Lincei.
Olina’s book Uccelliera (The Aviary) was a great success. The images were superb, as Willughby and Ray recognised, and they later made copies of them for their own book. Along with those from Thomas Browne, they are among the best in the Ornithology.
Nightingale (top left), brambling (top right), skylark (bottom left) and francolino (bottom right) from Olina’s (1622) Uccelliera.
Olina’s book also provided some intriguing bird biology. In the English edition of the Ornithology, Ray included this paragraph: ‘It is proper to this bird [the nightingale] at his first coming [arrival from migration in spring] (saith [says] Olina) to occupy or seize upon one place as its freehold, into which it will not admit any other nightingale but its mate.’ This is the first truly explicit statement that birds defend a breeding territory and it also suggests that it was Giovanni Olina who discovered this fact. But it was actually Valli da Todi who said it first, and it was he who – in his own book that dal Pozzo and Olina had so blatantly plagiarised – also pointed out that nightingales accomplish this defence by singing. Territory or ‘freehold’ is one reason why birds sing. Together, these extraordinarily significant discoveries in bird biology were ignored for another three centuries. Valli da Todi’s ornithological insight was based on the fact that he was a bird-catcher with a great deal of first-hand experience of nightingale behaviour (essential, of course, if he was to stay in business). Ray recognised that there was something significant in Olina’s stolen phrase about a ‘freehold’, but, with limited experience of actually watching birds himself, he was unable to make the link with song, nor recognise the general significance of territoriality.
In Rome, Ray and Skippon met up with Sir Thomas Browne’s son Edward, who was on his own continental tour. Edward wrote to tell his father of the encounter, but also to explain how Ray’s collections of ‘plants, fishes, fowls, stones and other rarities’ from Germany and northern Italy had been sent from Sicily back to Britain accompanied by Skippon’s servant, only to be intercepted and stolen by Barbary pirates; the unfortunate servant – like many white Christians intercepted at sea – was now a slave in Tunis.47
The details are vague, but Willughby and Bacon seem to have left Rome in the summer of 1664 and travelled back to northern Italy where Bacon had intended to meet up again with John Ray. But Bacon contracted smallpox and was able to join Ray and Skippon only in March 1665 when they were in Venice. Bacon then returned to England from Genoa on 20 April of that year. Willughby meanwhile must have seperated from Bacon soon after he was taken ill, and made his way westwards into southern France.Ray and Skippon continued north from Rome, arriving in France in July 1664, and via Lyon, Grenoble, Orange and Avignon, reaching Montpellier later that summer. Like Padua in Italy, Montpellier was an intellectual centre, with an outstanding reputation for the study of botany. It was here that Ray, and Willughby who arrived later, met several other English virtuosi, including Sir Thomas Crew (who proved to be a source of some excellent bird illustrations), Nicolaus Stensen (known as Steno, the great Danish anatomist), their friend Francis Jessop from Broomhall in Sheffield, and perhaps most significantly of all, Martin Lister, with whom Ray became good friends.48
The Protestant expatriate community of Montpellier found themselves in a slightly unusual situation. Forbidden by university regulations from attending lectures or matriculating in medicine, they were expected to pay for private tuition if they required specific teaching. The ex-pats therefore rather had to fend for themselves, but that seems to have been more than acceptable.49
It was from Crew in Montpellier that Willughby and Ray acquired a rather beautiful image of a grouse-like bird known only as ‘Le Jangle de Languedoc’. Its identity was something of a mystery and at the top of the painting Ray wrote: ‘A bird of passage: this bird is I suppose the same that is figured and described by Olina under ye title of Francolino though ye colours differ being corrupted by the paintor [sic] to make the bird show beautiful.’ In other words, Ray thought the bird might be an over-coloured rendering of Olina’s francolino: the hazel grouse. Its name ‘angel of Languedoc’, however, provides a clue, as does the comment, presumably from someone local, that it was a bird of passage or migrant. The image is in fact that of a pin-tailed sandgrouse, a species that occurs very locally during the summer months in the stony desert-like area of Le Crau some sixty kilometres east of Montpellier. Indeed, this is the bird’s most easterly outpost on the continent and explains why Willughby’s party never encountered it in the Italian bird markets. As the painting shows, despite its bright colours, the mottled plumage is highly cryptic, making the sandgrouse difficult to see when crouched on a stony substrate. In the air sandgrouse fly fast and high – hence ‘angel’ perhaps – posing an identification challenge even for today’s birdwatchers. Little wonder that neither Ray nor Willughby had seen one alive, let alone a dead one, and they continued to be puzzled by the bird’s identity. So uncertain were they that the pin-tailed sandgrouse is absent from the Ornithology.
Gessner had previously referred to a migratory bird ‘near Montpellier … commonly called an angel’ whose image he had been sent by Guillaume Rondelet. But Gessner made the mistake of assuming the bird to be the same as one known to the Arabs as the ‘alchata’, and he decided it was a pigeon. Pierre Belon, the French naturalist, doesn’t mention the species at all, and Aldrovandi simply plagiarised Gessner, so no progress there. Later, in 1668, Walter Charleton, who knew both Willughby and Ray, published some images of birds, including the ‘alchata’. This bird it turns out was copied from Thomas Crew’s painting of the sandgrouse, and, unlike Ray, Charleton picked up on the connection between alchata and angel, which are onomatopoeic, reflecting what today’s field guide notes is the bird’s nasal, hard-grating rreh-a voice.
The sandgrouse puzzle persisted for a further century until the Comte de Buffon connected all the pieces of the puzzle to make the correct identification.50
On 1 February 1666 an Anglo-French shipping dispute in the English Channel resulted in Louis XIV giving any Englishman in France three months to leave. This brought our naturalists’ genteel wining and dining in Montpellier to an abrupt end, with Ray returning to England by April of that year.
Earlier, after separating from Nathaniel Bacon in northern Italy in August 1664, Willughby had travelled via Montpellier into Spain accompanied only by a servant. Willughby’s account of this lonely journey was subsequently paraphrased and published by Ray as a kind of appendix to his own account of the entire continental expedition.51
Some eighty kilometres west of Montpellier, at Narbonne and unable to ride because of a sore leg, Willughby decided to ‘go forward by sea’. But in the week they waited for a fair wind, his leg healed thanks to a plaster of diapalma (a concoction of oil, hog fat and litharge of gold – gold and red lead). Purchasing two mules for ‘five pistoles apiece’ Willughby and his servant headed off towards Perpignan, crossing the border into Spain near Baynuls-sur-Mer on 31 August 1664, ‘without danger, searching or any trouble at all’.
Willughby must, I suspect, have carried with him Martin Zeiler’s compact Spanish itinerary with its folded map of the Iberian Peninsula. Zeiler pulled no punches saying that there was little worth seeing in Spain other than the royal palace at Madrid and San Lorenzo de El Escorial, some forty-five kilometres to the northwest of that city. Willughby knew Spain would be tough, for another travel guide he had consulted before setting out from England was explicit: prospective travellers would require a ‘good store of Phlegme and patience’.52 It was all true, and Willughby soon began to hate Spain.
He started off as he had when with his companions, recording various things of interest; the coral fishing at Capo de Creux (Cruess), an aqueduct made by the Moors, an amethyst mine, and an account of the manufacture of sugar from cane. But over successive days you can feel his e
nthusiasm draining away. In the market at Valencia, the locals, unused to strangers, shouted and threw fruit peel at him. At the university there, Willughby attended some lectures but, discovering that the new science was unknown, concluded that Spanish academics were a hundred years out of date. There were a few highlights, including the discovery of chocolate inSeville, Signor La Stannosa’s ‘famous museum’ at Xuesca (Huesca) that Willughby was told would require several days to see completely, and ‘a palace of the moors [at Granada – the Alhambra] that well deserves a journey of a dozen leagues’, and in Madrid he saw the Palacio Real, El Pardo and El Escorial.53
Willughby’s journey to and from Spain, 1664.
On 1 November, as Willughby travelled north across the Sierra Morena near Toledo, he left behind the Mediterranean warmth and experienced a ‘hard frost and pretty thick ice’. Travelling was tiring and tedious and he and his servant were forced to travel at night to avoid paying bribes or being searched by the customs agents that seemed to be everywhere. His natural history observations were few, noting only ‘a very good breed of falcon’ – presumably the peregrine, or just possibly Eleonora’s falcon that might then have bred on the Spanish mainland – at Alicante. In the Valencia markets he found an abundance of swallows and sand martins, which the locals referred to as papilion di montagne or mountain butterflies, a lovely name for the sand martin that sits uncomfortably with the idea that they were there to be eaten. It was also in a Valencia market that Willughby unwittingly made an important discovery. Looking over the piles of dead birds for sale, he found and purchased a small and unfamiliar rail. His meticulous method of description that so annoyed John Ray now allows us to identify it as a spotted crake, which may have either been part of the small breeding population in Spain or more likely a bird on migration. However, as Ray was later preparing the Ornithology, he decided that Willughby’s distinctive Valencia crake must, after all, be the same as the Baillon’s crakes they had described previously in Italy: ‘Yet I perswade my self that both these descriptions [that is, Ray’s of Baillon’s crake and Willughby’s of the spotted crake] are of one and the same species of bird, differing either in age or sex.’54 The crake is, I suspect, the first ever description of the spotted crake, a fact that seems to have been overlooked and another feather in Willughby’s cap.