In 1594, the engraver Jacques de Fornazeris created a striking flight of nine bird portraits. The series marries technical flair with theatrical charm: the specimens are rendered in rich detail and possess a noticeable vitality. A fierce civetta (little owl), barbagianni (barn owl), gallo (rooster), pavone (peacock), pernice (partridge), aquila de corona (crowned eagle), anatra saluatica (duck), fagiano (pheasant), and a pelican-like bird described as a sacco marino all feature here. Each poses, glaring beneath its label, accompanied by contextual vegetation and the occasional familiar — frogs, crabs, butterflies, caterpillars, or smaller birds — in frame. Fornazeris collaborated with the prolific Flemish engraver-publisher Nicolaus van Aelst, who normally specialized in religious and allegorical scenes, to print and distribute the plates.

Bird studies experienced a boom in the late sixteenth century. As MET curator Femke Speelberg writes, “the growing demand for empirical evidence and widespread collecting interests by scholars and wealthy patrons alike encouraged a greater number of artists to specialize in this practice.” Yet while natural historical images of avian life by sixteenth-century artists like Jacques Le Moyne sought to document tonal and physical accuracy, the prints by Fornazeris have a slightly more playful quality. Often staring directly at the viewer, or interacting somewhat comically with their familiars, Fornazeris’ birds perform for their audience. This is not nature overseen; the animals seem always already part of a cultural world.

Little is known about Fornazeris himself, but he appears to have been multitalented, working as a draughtsman, printmaker, and publisher. Possibly born in Piedmont, he honed his craft at the Savoy court in Turin before settling in Lyon around 1600, where he remained until his death circa 1619. As art historian Henriette Pommier writes, Fornazeris was “conversant with the refined flemish burin technique, which was not yet widespread in single-sheet engraving, but whose delicate nuances in contrast to the more schematic, elementary treatment of the woodcut, must have certainly impressed potential clients.” He was best known for his frontispieces and engravings of popes and nobles, including two plates of Marie de’ Medici, and collaborated from 1601 until his death in 1619 with the bookseller Horace Cardon. However, he had previously produced a collection of twelve or more smaller landscape bird engravings in a similar style between 1580 and 1590, and potentially a few mammals, such as a lynx — though this is a speculative attribution.