Fabritius and the Goldfinch (Kindle Single)

by Deborah Davis

  The goldfinch’s anthropomorphic virtues and charming physical attributes (in fact, the collective noun for the species is a “charm” of goldfinch) are the foundation of a long and colorful folklore. This storied little bird flies through history, turning up in unexpected locations. In fact, one of the earliest references to the goldfinch places him in Old Jerusalem, at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. According to Christian legend, the empathetic little creature saw Jesus suffering under the weight of his crown of thorns and immediately flew to his head and used his forceful beak to remove the offending barbs. The goldfinch was splashed with a drop of Jesus’ sacred blood, which gave the bird’s face its distinctive red mask and forever linked him to the Passion of Christ.

  A few decades later, in the more secular world of Ancient Rome, the writer and historian Pliny the Elder included the goldfinch in his Naturalis Historia, a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia of everything-anyone-needed-to-know about the “modern” world in the first century A.D. Illustrations of domestic interiors from the period showed that Romans kept cage birds, including goldfinch, as pets. They served as an early home entertainment system, providing pleasant visuals and ambient background music. There were many different kinds of house birds, but Pliny admired the goldfinch in particular, describing him as remarkably clever and dexterous. “It will do what it is bid, not only with its voice but with the feet as well and with the beak, which serves it instead of hands,” he wrote.

  The goldfinch stepped out of his cage and onto center stage in the thirteenth century, when he became a prominent figure in Devotional Art of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. An anonymous Florentine artist painted a panel depicting the Christ Child sitting on his mother’s lap, and in the baby’s little hand was a goldfinch. A few years later, in 1306, the Italian artist Deodato Orlandi also displayed a Madonna and Child with a goldfinch, and a popular theme was thus launched. Subsequently, numerous Italian artists, along with counterparts in France, Spain, Portugal, and even faraway Russia, became obsessed with the distinctive creature, and included it in hundreds of religious works.

  The art historian and bird watcher Herbert Friedmann managed to write an entire book on the subject. His study, The Symbolic Goldfinch, lists 486 paintings depicting Mary, her infant, and a goldfinch. The bird may be small and obscured in some instances, but there is no mistaking its bright crimson face. As is usually the case with early Christian art, most of the works show a strangely wizened Jesus — baby size, but with the face of an old man — clutching the bird as if it were a prized plaything. Raphael’s Madonna del Cardollino, or Madonna of the Goldfinch (1506), is a glorious exception to this progerian approach. Raphael’s Baby Jesus appears wise beyond his years, but pleasantly young and cherubic at the same time.

  Devotional Art existed to teach a lesson, so when a goldfinch was featured prominently in a painting, it was never just a bird. It was, as Friedmann suggests, a symbol, fraught with multiple meanings. He offers a variety of explanations about the metaphoric significance of the goldfinch, beginning with the bird’s early connection to the Passion of Christ. Although the goldfinch appeared in paintings that showed Jesus in his infancy and childhood, the bird was meant to be a reminder of the final chapter in his life, his eventual crucifixion and resurrection.

  The goldfinch’s connection to the Passion was more than enough symbolic baggage for one tiny bird to carry. However, he was also linked to a problem that plagued people who had the misfortune of living during the fourteenth century, namely the Bubonic Plague, or “Black Death,” which claimed an estimated twenty-five million lives in Europe. During these dark times, people were desperate for any form of protection, real or imagined. Because it was believed that the bird had healing powers, the goldfinch became a symbol of hope and second chances.

  In classical mythology, a curative, or savior bird was called a charadrius and, according to legend, its piercing, gold-glinted eye could pull disease from a weakened, disease-ridden body. Leonardo da Vinci, who studied both the science and folklore of birds, maintained: “The gold-finch is a bird of which it is related that, when it is carried into the presence of a sick person, if the sick man is going to die, the bird turns away its head and never looks at him; but if the sick man is to be saved the bird never loses sight of him but is the cause of curing him of all his sickness.” One glance from a goldfinch could be the difference between life and death. Parents of young children kept them around the house, just in case a health crisis presented itself. In the absence of a real bird, a painted goldfinch, especially one featured in a religious grouping with a Madonna and Child, could serve as a charm to ward off illness. As Friedmann points out, “the greatest single production period of these pictures coincides roughly with the time of the Black Death.” 10

  Christian countries, where religious art was important, understood and appreciated the prodigious iconography of the goldfinch. Good Catholics knew the omnipresent bird could signify anything from the soul (which was often described as being “winged”), to sacrifice, death, resurrection, and redemption. However, in parts of the world where there was little to no religious art, such as the Protestant Dutch Republic in the sixteenth century, the goldfinch was celebrated for his real-life talents. “Beauty of plumage, softness of voice, quickness of instinct, remarkable cleverness, proved docility, tender affection, are all united in this delightful little bird,” enthused the Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle. The Dutch agreed. They regarded the goldfinch as a prized pet who could be tamed and taught to perform tricks. Remarkably, the cheerful bird actually seemed eager to learn, and gave the impression he enjoyed mastering these accomplishments.

  The most basic tricks involved teaching the goldfinch to serve itself food and water, a process that required great patience and kindness on the part of the trainer. The author of the manual Warne’s Model Housekeeper outlined the necessary steps. First, he instructed, place bird seed in a hinged box, noting “care should be taken that the lid is not too heavy for the bird to lift easily, and that it should fall at once when not held up.” The lid was left up for one day, then attached to a silk cord and gradually lowered. It did not take the goldfinch long to realize that if he wanted to eat, he had to use his beak to raise — and hold — the lid. A clever goldfinch would remove several seeds at a time to make the next feeding less arduous.

  The self-watering trick was a little more complicated and had to be broken down into several stages. A glass of water was placed in the bottom of the goldfinch’s cage. Above it, on a little shelf, stood a thimble attached to a cord or chain. The thimble was filled with water and left accessible while the bird learned to drink from it. Then, the thimble was lowered in the direction of the glass, until the goldfinch understood that he had to dip it in the water, fill it, raise it, and hold onto the chain with his claw in order to take a sip. The manual made the process seem simple, but the notion of a bird — not a dog — mastering these skills was a marvel. Miraculously, once the goldfinch “got” it, he never forgot how to draw his own water. The Dutch were so impressed by the bird’s virtuoso feat that they nicknamed him Het Puttertje, from the verb putten, which means to draw water from a well.

  The goldfinch was so receptive to training that his repertoire expanded to include other tricks. He could be taught to pull a miniature wheelbarrow of birdseed up a little ramp, and to ring a bell when he was hungry. There were also more elaborate stunts, such as climbing a ladder, or firing a toy cannon and playing dead. But these circus acts were eschewed by real bird lovers because cruelty was required on the part of the trainer to make a bird perform such seemingly impossible tasks on demand.

  The cruelest practice of all was blinding the goldfinch in the mistaken belief that loss of sight would minimize distractions and make him a better singer. Vinkensport, a singing contest started by Flemish merchants in 1596, pitted caged songbirds — normally a common chaffinch, but sometimes a goldfinch — against each other. The bird songs were timed and judged, and competition for
first place was so fierce that some bird owners would do anything to gain a winning edge. This would include keeping the birds in a small, dark box for months to maintain sensory deprivation, or even blinding them.

  In most households, the goldfinch was simply a beloved pet, one so popular that the conventional birdcage was replaced with a special house designed to showcase his extraordinary talents. The new dwelling was open on three sides and outfitted with several perches, or a platform, where the bird could stand, and included a pulley, a miniature water bucket, and a glass well. Some families even had the roof designed to match the elaborate roofline of their own houses. With this open setup, the goldfinch was always on stage, singing and performing tricks for his appreciative audience. Though the birdhouse was usually placed near a window, and the puttertje could fly from one perch to another, drop down to get water or scoop up food, and sing his little heart out, freedom was just an illusion. The goldfinch was a prisoner, held captive by a thin chain that encircled his leg and prevented him from flying away.

  Was the goldfinch happy? Many people seemed to think so, although they probably subscribed to the solipsistic sentiment espoused by the eighteenth-century naturalist Eleazar Albin, who said that birds were “undoubtedly, designed by the great Author of Nature, on purpose to entertain and delight mankind.”11 They existed to please humans and, extending this line of thought, they loved their captors. “The goldfinch trusts to the protection of man,” wrote one expert. 12 “He is a docile and affectionate bird,” observed another. Stories circulated about a goldfinch who was so devoted to his mistress that he would spin with delight whenever she entered the room, and perch on her finger, although he was nasty to anyone else who approached him.

  Emblem Books, which were extremely popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were illustrated texts designed to teach lessons to schoolchildren. These books often depicted the clever goldfinch performing his tricks in his special cage, and extolled the virtues of the obedient and quick-learning bird to their young readers. “Be a good student, like the goldfinch,” urged one Emblem Book. “Necessity makes a good teacher,” said another, adding the epigram:

  From this you learn, always labor wisely,

  And understand what time and place require.

  J. Claire Wood, an English ornithologist who found himself bedridden for several months, decided to use his own time in “captivity” to make a serious study of the goldfinch in captivity. He placed two males in adjacent cages and monitored their behavior. “They spend the most time upon their perches nearest each other, where they frequently sit and sing together,” he concluded. He acknowledged that “There are emotional people who endow a captive bird with all the mental anguish of a human being torn from loved ones and thrown into prison,” but he saw no evidence that the birds were “pining for freedom.” Rather, he pointed out, “a wild bird is menaced with death from all sides from such sources as weather uncertainty, food supply, accidents, mammals, birds, reptiles, etc., while in captivity it is protected from all of this and the attending hardships. …” When released, one of his goldfinch kept returning to the cage, possibly preferring the safety of confinement to the terrible uncertainty of life in the wild.

  The great artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci would have disagreed with Wood and anyone else who endorsed caging. Searching for a way to teach man to fly, Leonardo filled his famous notebooks with detailed sketches of birds in flight, frequently purchasing cage birds to study their anatomy. But when he was finished, he set them free. An early animal rights activist, he believed that wild creatures belonged in the wild.

  In addition to drawing birds, Leonardo wrote about them. Like Aesop, he was a skilled fabulist who saw the “animal” in humans and the “human” in animals. He featured a goldfinch in a poignant moral tale about a mother goldfinch who came home one day to an empty nest. She searched frantically for her lost babies, finally finding them entrapped in a cage. She desperately tried to set them free, but after a while, gave a cry of grief, and flew away. The next day, she returned to the cage and fed a deadly herb to her children through the bars. As Leonardo explained, “If its young are imprisoned, it will carry spurge [a poisonous herb] to them, preferring to see them dead than imprisoned.” “Better death than the loss of liberty,” said the mother goldfinch, teaching lessons about maternal devotion and the importance of freedom,

  Whether the goldfinch was more prized as a songbird or a symbol, he inspired painters, writers, composers, naturalists, pet lovers, and even theologians, to create myths, fables, folktales, music, and hundreds of works of art. And in 1654, this bird-as-muse caught the eye of Fabritius, who had the unusual idea of painting a proper portrait of the popular puttertje.

  Fabritius may have had a pet goldfinch as a child, or during his marriage to Aeltje. Perhaps he kept one in his studio in Delft. But his decision to add a live animal to his expanding repertoire of images was no small undertaking precisely because living creatures — especially birds — rarely stopped moving, making them difficult to observe with any accuracy. In the previous century, artists were known to paint birds without legs or feet because they saw them only in flight and assumed they didn’t have any. Later, the artist Melchior de Hondecoeter, who was famous for his birdscapes, maintained his own aviary so he could get as close as possible to the birds he painted. He even used a special stand to keep dead birds upright so he could pose them in different positions. The goldfinch was a bit easier to study because its chain prevented it from flying away, but it could hardly be taught to “sit” for a portrait.

  One of Fabritius’ motivations for painting the goldfinch was to experiment with the newly fashionable illusionist technique known as trompe l’oeil, which is a French term meaning to fool, or trick, the eye. Artists who incorporated trompe l’oeil in their work tried to make two-dimensional work (i.e. a painting) look three-dimensional. The earliest reference to this kind of art could be found in ancient Greece, when the artist Zeusix painted grapes so realistically that birds flew over and tried to eat them. Not to be outdone, his friend and rival, the artist Parrhasius, invited Zeusix to look at a painting that was behind a curtain. But when Zeusix reached out to open it, he discovered the curtain was the painting. His eye had been tricked!

  Fabritius was engaged in a similar competition with his friend Samuel van Hoogstraten, who was fascinated by trompe l’oeil and had recently completed a painting called Man at a Window, which showed a man’s face leaning out of an open pane. Fabritius wanted his puttertje to trump Van Hoogstraten’s “trompe.” Since the success or failure of the painting rested with how accurately and imaginatively Fabritius portrayed the goldfinch, he began with the bird. It would be life-size, he decided, and he would use an oak panel instead of a canvas for his project. Whenever possible, a clever artist repurposed materials because art supplies were expensive. He took a large panel that had already been painted, possibly for a work he abandoned, marked the exact size he wanted, 13¼ inches by 9 inches (less than a square foot, and sawed off a piece. The panel was thick (a little over half an inch) and had several imperfections, including nail holes, old nails, and an embedded dowel. However, he was planning on using the rough surface to his advantage.

  Fabritius painted the goldfinch standing on the left side of a curved perch affixed to a hinged wooden feeding box. He chose neutral tones for most of the plump, feathery body, dabbing a flash of yellow on the wing and a crimson mask on the face. His strokes were quick, light, and impressionistic. As he was applying the yellow, Fabritius paid homage to Rembrandt by flipping his brush and using its wooden edge to scratch a line in the wet paint, a quick way of adding texture to a smooth surface. Then he painted a finely wrought chain around the bird’s foot and extended it to the opposite side of the perch, where it attached with a metal ring. For his final touch, he placed the bird’s shadow on the wall, reinforcing the idea that the goldfinch was occupying real space and interacting with real light.

  After he completed the bir
d and its box, Fabritius painted the background. To create the illusion of a plaster wall, he mixed lead-white paint with a sprinkling of dark pigment: black, umber, or ochre, something to anchor the lighter tone. He wanted the effect to be extremely pale and cool, so he enhanced the white mixture with a touch of a pigment called smalt. A combination of potassium glass and cobalt, smalt was the substance that gave Delft’s famous blue tiles their signature color.

  Beautiful as it was, smalt was a risky choice for an artist. If the glass were ground too fine, it might lose its brilliant hue, which meant that the particles had to be fairly large to maintain their color. But, with the passage of time, even perfectly ground smalt could degrade into a sallow green or an unattractive grey. One way to avoid the problem was to mix the temperamental pigment with lead-white, as Fabritius had done. In addition to being unstable, smalt was dangerous. Cobalt could be toxic if inhaled or swallowed, so artists had to be very careful handling it. Fabritius mixed the splinters of blue glass into his ground, creating a rich and varied backdrop for his goldfinch.

  At this point, Fabritius made up his mind to frame the panel, so he left a thin black border around the edge, knowing it would be covered. He selected an imitation gilt frame (the gold color would complement the yellow streak on the bird’s wing, he thought) and nailed it to the wood. However, there was something off about the effect. The goldfinch, surrounded by a gleaming edge, was meant to suggest a bird in a gilded cage. But the painting didn’t pop. Instead of tricking the eye into thinking it was seeing a real bird on a real perch, the picture looked conventional: well-executed, but not three-dimensional.