Bird Books
Here’s a Beautiful Evidence leftover, François Nicolas Martinet’s drawing of a cockatoo admiring a picture on the wall of himself and his true love. This was one of the first images planned for Beautiful Evidence and we carefully cleaned up and rebuilt the engraving and hand coloring. Unfortunately there was not much to say about the image, other than the pleasant joke about representation: “This is not a cockatoo” in the primary image and “those are really not cockatoos” in the secondary image. Imagine the recursive verbal gymnastics possible with Martinet’s triple cockatoo compared to Magritte’s “This is not a pipe.”
Eventually another Martinet cockatoo made it into Beautiful Evidence because the image contained a built-in scale and was part of a 6 volume work that unfortunately segregated bird descriptions from bird images.
Source title pages below:
Below, the Beautiful Evidence double-page spread with the David Hockney painting and the Martinet cockatoo (source shown in the BE sidenote):
Thank you for showing these wonderful images. I have had many birds (parrots, etc.), but my
favorite was Loki, a moluccan cockatoo, as shown on the first image. They are also known as
salmon-crested cockatoos, depending on whether they originated from Indonesia or
Australia.