From peacocks to penguins, a winged menagerie of surprise.
By Maria Popova
“How can the fowl that’s born for pleasure sit in a cage and sing?” wrote William Blake, who lived within the golden age of the cage as leisure. Zoos had been new and thrilling, and other people readily ignored their cruelty to slake their curiosity about creatures from faraway lands. Besides, zoos held solely a tiny fraction of the dazzling variousness of the animal kingdom — within the age earlier than images, earlier than straightforward international journey, the typical particular person encountered the wondrous strangeness of animals not within the cage however on the web page.
Within the 1820s, a French pure historical past encyclopedia titled La Galerie de Oiseaux got down to convey to European eyes essentially the most beautiful birds of North America, lots of them now endangered, some extinct. Radiating from the consummate illustrations is the quiet dignity of those brilliant emissaries of our planet’s evolutionary historical past — feathered inheritors of the dinosaurs, winged with a kaleidoscope of pleasure.