On this side of the Atlantic, King George III will always be remembered as the English monarch who presided over the loss of the American colonies. But in smaller matters of state, George had a few successes. In 1762, 14 years before the Declaration of Independence, he acquired a large part of the Paper Museum—a stunning assortment of pictures, many about nature, assembled by the Italian scholar and arts patron Cassiano dal Pozzo. The art remains in England today, preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.
Cassiano’s collection, which includes some of the Renaissance’s finest visual studies of birds, is a crown jewel of Britain’s cultural holdings, although few can see it. Pasta for Nightingales, which draws on ornithological writings and pictures commissioned by Cassiano, is an attempt to give his legacy a wider audience.
The book is essentially a clever rebranding of the Uccelliera, or The Aviary, a practical guide to birds ostensibly written by Giovanni Pietro Olina and first published in 1622. Cassiano, who supported the work, also commissioned artist Vincenzo Leonardi to create most of the book’s illustrations, which became part of his collection.
“Modern scholars view Olina, who worked in Cassiano’s household, more as the collator of the Uccelliera than its sole author,” Helen Macdonald—of H Is for Hawk fame—tells readers in a brief foreword. “Some of the book was based on an earlier work by Antonio Valli da Todi, but it is likely that much of it was written by Cassiano himself.”
The new title of Pasta for Nightingales, inspired by a recipe within for a special dish intended to encourage nightingales to sing, is obviously more commercially appealing to modern readers than what, in full, it was first called: The Aviary: Discourse on the Nature and Distinctive Characteristics of Diverse Birds, and in particular of those which sing, together with the way of catching them, recognizing them, raising them and maintaining them.
That long subtitle, unfurling like the prologue to a stage play, underscores the Renaissance grasp of language as theater, a sensibility elaborated by the text. The team of translators is alert to the peculiar charms of its prose, which frequently uses capitalization and italics to dramatize key points in its ornithological descriptions.
The tone here suggests the breathless urgency of gossip—a hint that the vague authorship of the Uccelliera is perhaps ultimately beside the point. Whatever its origin, it seems not so much the product of a single mind than the collective voice of local lore—the bird banter of 17th-century Italy transcribed.
“It feeds upon worms, Ants and caterpillars, and upon grapes in their season, with which it sates itself in such wise, that sometimes it finds itself dazed and half-drunk,” we learn of the hoopoe. “To remedy this, as some have written, it takes in its mouth a frond of the herb Adiantum. . . . Innumerable falsehoods have been written by the Arabs of this bird, such as saying, that by bathing the temples with its blood, one sees in sleeping marvellous things; that the eye carried upon one’s person cures from leprosy; that its skin attached to one’s head takes away the pain from the same, and various other incredible things.”
That remark about Arabs suggests a distinction between those regarded as superstitious and supposedly more enlightened Europeans. In its original form, notes Macdonald, the book was intended, among other things, as “a product of the scientific revolution: a book that rejects many previously unquestioned notions about birds, setting store instead on the ‘exact knowledge of Nature that might be obtained by long observation and contemplation.’ ”
Whatever its pretensions as a scientific treatise, Pasta for Nightingales seems more memorable for its fancy than its facts.
We’re told that the meat of the francolin is good for treating kidney stones, that robins suffer from epilepsy, that feeding nightingales pasta laced with pine nuts, along with saffron in their drinking troughs, will tease them to sing out of season.
The elusiveness of birds, their playful reluctance to surrender all of their secrets to the solemn speculations of man, informs not only the text of Pasta for Nightingales but its illustrations. Macdonald praises Leonardi’s watercolors for their verisimilitude, the way “the astonishing vivacity of the real bird is miraculously recreated.” The pictures in Pasta for Nightingales do suggest a kind of life, though one not entirely of this world. One cannot help but smile at the hoopoe’s vivid headdress and smug expression, his crown grander than anything King George himself might have worn. A blackbird seems almost as stylized as a hieroglyph—its darkness, deep as space, achieved by layering watercolor over black chalk. A kingfisher, vivid blue and gold, stands in resolute profile, its long beak like a drawn sword.
But Leonardi’s images lack the painstaking anatomical exactitude that would define John James Audubon’s work some two centuries later. His pictures, such as those of the citril finch and Eurasian blackcap, have a spectral quality—strikingly present, yet just out of grasp.
The Uccelliera assumed an audience of Romans interested in capturing and cultivating wild birds for pleasure. Yet Leonardi’s pictures—and, to a lesser degree, the accompanying text—convey a subtler, subversive message: Birds can be lured and fed, snared and studied, drawn and painted, but they can never, fully, be ours.
Even so, the prevailing pleasure of Pasta for Nightingales is its pursuit of a cheerful domestic intimacy with its subject, regardless of the obstacles. The approachable scale of this newly conceived adaptation of the Uccelliera helps. Lavishly illustrated bird books tend to be coffee-table editions as wide, heavy, and solemn as tombstones. Pasta for Nightingales, by contrast, is hardly bigger than a bestselling novel, a format that forces a few compromises. The pictures aren’t reproduced at their actual size, nor are the original dimensions indicated. Readers interested in that level of detail—or those who want to get some flavor of the book—can consult the Royal Collection’s website.
To simulate the material’s antiquarian origins, Pasta for Nightingales is printed on heavy paper the color of parchment. It’s a beautiful touch, though the brownish tint makes the text harder to read. One occasionally squints a little at the passages, reminded that revisiting the distant past takes some effort.
They initially seem like quaint period oddities, these long-gone Italians feeding pasta to nightingales. But merchandise offered to today’s backyard birders—peanut-butter treats for woodpeckers, designer fruit and nut mixes for songbirds, suet savory enough for humans to eat —is at least as extravagant, if not more so.
We are, centuries later, still pretty much searching for what Cassiano dal Pozzo was after—a little music, a bit of beauty, the chance to witness the ineffable before it takes flight.
