June 25,
2018, University of Melbourne
Images of
an Australasian cockatoo have been discovered in a manuscript dating from 13th
century Sicily, now held in the Vatican library.
This
finding reveals that trade in the waters in and around Australia's north was
flourishing as far back as medieval times, linked into sea and overland routes
to Indonesia, China, Egypt and beyond into Europe.
The 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.
These
coloured drawings pre-date by 250 years what was previously believed to be the
oldest European depiction of a cockatoo, in Andrea Mantegna's 1496 altarpiece
Madonna della Vittoria.
Faculty
of Arts School of Historical and Philosophical Studies Honorary Research Fellow
Heather Dalton in 2014 published an article about the cockatoo in Mantegna's
15th century painting.
This
article captured the attention of three Finnish scholars at the Finnish
Institute in Rome, who were working on De Arte Venandi cum Avibus and who
realised they had found much older depictions.
The
resulting collaboration between Dr. Dalton, Pekka Niemelä (a biologist and
environmental scientist at the University of Turku), Jukka Salo (a zoologist
and Head of the Sino-Finnish research and conservation program on the Giant
Panda) and Simo Örmä (Intendant of the Finnish Institute in Rome) reveals that
Frederick's cockatoo was likely to have been either a female Triton or one of
three sub-species of Yellow-crested Cockatoo (also known as Lesser
Suphur-crested).
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