Visitors to an art museum would not expect to see a specimen from a natural history museum. here is usually no place in the Harvard Art Museums for any of the approximately twenty-one million things in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Artworks and natural history specimens do not mix. Westerners regard them as fundamentally different in kind. Not only are the latter things in nature, ostensibly originating and existing independently of human volition and action, but Westerners regard what they designate as artworks as the most thoughtfully contrived and effectively invested of human creations. To draw attention to at least some of the ambiguities inherent in the fundamental Western distinction between things in nature and things in culture, we chose a thing from the collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology that itself exemplifies the natural world but that has clearly been subjected to human intervention. hat thing is the skull of a bird called the helmeted hornbill.76 It retains its natural appearance as a bird skull, with some colorful feathers attached, but its unusually prominent upper bill has been elaborately carved.
All natural history specimens are in some sense human artifacts in that each has been selected, prepared, and exists as it does solely in consequence of human intervention. A taxidermy mount may be derived from
122. An alcove off a painting gallery at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum displayed a large eighteenth-century album of bird sketches and a nineteenth-century skull of a helmeted hornbill as part of Tangible hings in 2011. he album is the work ofJean-Baptiste Oudry and his assistants who rendered ninety-six bird studies in black ink and watercolor.
It belongs to the Fogg Museum, which, like the Sackler, is part of the Harvard Art Museums. he helmeted hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil) is an ornithology specimen of the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
123. Art and nature are combined on the carved skull of this helmeted hornbill. he Rhinoplax vigil specimen was collected in Sumatra, Borneo, or the Malay Peninsula and then traded to China, where an artist intricately carved the upper beak and forehead of the thick skull. Museum of Comparative Zoology.
A once-living creature, treated to preserve its external appearance, so that it seems to be a living thing momentarily arrested. But in spite of using parts of the actual body of the creature it represents, it is no less contrived than a waxwork. Insofar as it is derived directly from a creature, a mount is natural; insofar as it is the result of human contrivance, it is an artifact. Similarly, though not identically, the helmeted hornbill skull from the Museum of Comparative Zoology is a thing in nature and a natural history specimen insofar as it retains its identity as a preserved bird body part, and an artifact—indeed an artwork—insofar as it embodies human creativity manifested through carving.
He helmeted hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil) is native to the rainforests of Southeast Asia, from southern Myanmar and southern hailand through the Malay Peninsula to the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. For more than 150 years, Western scholars appear to have known only the head and bill of a bird that remained mysterious. In 1599, the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi described and illustrated a specimen then in the collection of the grand duke of Tuscany in Florence in the first volume of his great work on ornithology.77 He thought that it had come from India via Damascus and Venice with the name Semenda. In 1758, the naturalist and librarian to the Royal College of Physicians, George Edwards, published an illustrated description, again known to him only from a skull, in the first supplementary volume to his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds (1758). Evidently, he was not acquainted with Aldrovandi’s account:
C is the Beak of a Bird unknown to us: it was lent to me by the obliging Mr. Furzer, of New-Inn, London, who told me it was brought from the island of Sumatra, in the East Indies, where it is called the
124. he eye is painted wood. It is glued to the bird skull along with white feathers painted red and greenish yellow. Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Friendly Wood-bird, as its Indian name imports; and that it defends
Men from danger when they sleep in the woods____I take this Bill to
Be very rare, as I have not seen a second of it; and I believe this to be the first figure of it that was ever published.78
In 1780, the Comte de Buffon included the helmeted hornbill in his monumental study of natural history as the ninth species of the Calao, or rhinoceros birds. He cites Edwards’s description and notes: “We have nothing of this bird but the bill.”79 A year later, professor of natural history and mineralogy at the University of Halle and celebrated as the naturalist on James Cook’s second voyage of circumnavigation between 1772 and 1775, also based his description in his Indische Zoologie on that of Edwards.80
He use of the term casque (helmet) to describe the upper part of the bill is due to Buffon. he birds, which can be up to five feet in length, use their solid and weighty casques to break up rotting wood and dislodge bark in search of edible insects. Long-distance trade between Southeast Asian maritime regions and China was established by the thirteenth century, Borneo being the major source of helmeted hornbill casques for the Chinese trade.81 hough softer than ivory, the keratin casque is solid. Chinese connoisseurs came to value this unusual material even more highly than ivory or jade.82 Most likely emulating indigenous Borneo artists, Chinese artists skilled in the carving of this exotic imported material produced miniature figurative relief sculptures. he casque of the Harvard skull is carved with a celebrated scene from China’s partly mythological and partly historical past: King Wen’s discovery of the retired statesman Jiang Ziya while fishing. Born Ji Chang, King Wen of Zhou ruled between 1099 and 1050 bce. With Jiang’s advice, King Wen helped to overthrow the Shang dynasty and is honored
125. he carving depicts a well-known Chinese story: King Wen of the Zhou dynasty discovers the long-retired statesman Jiang Ziya fishing without a hook. Jiang Ziya had earlier served King Zhou, the last ruler of the Shang dynasty, but after coming to hate the tyrant, he retreated into seclusion, hoping that he might someday help to overthrow him. He waited a long time with the philosophy that the fish would come to him of its own volition when it was ready. Curious about this improbable method of fishing, King Wen begins a conversation with the old man and realizes that he is the advisor he has long sought. Jiang Ziya becomes his minister and later helps his son, King Wu, conquer the Shang dynasty. Museum of Comparative Zoology.
As the founder of the Zhou dynasty.83 Often—as in the present case—the artist embellished the upper mandible with decorative motifs. Another use in China was to cut casques into sheets that could be colored with the secretion of the bird’s preen gland, giving them a red sheen, that were then carved to form high-status ornamental belt buckles.84 he nineteenth century was the peak in this trade and art form. hereafter, the dwindling population of helmeted hornbills owing to relentless hunting led to a decline.
As a thing out of place, we installed our particular helmeted horn-bill skull from the Ornithology Department of the Museum of Comparative Zoology beside an album of watercolor drawings of birds in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of the Harvard Art Museums. he parchment-covered album consists of eighty-three leaves of off-white antique laid paper onto which some of the ninety-six drawings have been
126. Are you looking at me?
A watercolor drawing of a bird in Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s avian album. Harvard Art Museums/
Fogg Museum.
127. A bird with attitude marches across the page of an avian album of watercolor drawings by French artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry, from the first half of the eighteenth century. Harvard Art Museums/
Fogg Museum.
Pasted, while others have been drawn directly on the leaves. hey are by the French eighteenth-century artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry and his associates.85 Oudry was employed by King Louis XV of France to paint animals and birds associated with the royal hunt, and by the duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin to paint rare birds and animals in his menagerie.
Rather than relying on the direct observation of actual birds, Oudry and his associates derived most of the drawings in the album from images by earlier artists and from decorations on imported Chinese porcelains. Unlike the illustrations in natural history publications, such as those of Edwards, Buffon, and Forster, these representations were not attempts at a methodical, comprehensive identification and categorization of bird species. Rather, they served as models for further artworks, notably for prints used by other artists as patterns for decorations on ceramics, textiles, and furniture. All these endeavors, however—those of the Chinese sculptors no less than the European naturalists and artists—served to domesticate the exotic. Just as helmeted hornbill skulls were rarities from distant foreign lands for the Chinese, so were the Chinese ceramics from which
Oudry and his associates derived their drawings of birds. he exoticism of distance and difference outweighs a distinction between art and nature.
We further embedded the helmeted hornbill skull from the Museum of Comparative Zoology within the display of European and American art in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum by placing the case containing the skull and the album in a niche flanked by two other objects from the Harvard Art Museums chosen to reinforce the context of mideighteenth-century French artistic practice. On the right, we hung an etching after a portrait of Jean-Baptiste Oudry by Nicolas de Largilliere. Elaborated with additional framing elements, it was executed by Oudry’s wife, Marie-Marguerite Froisse.86 On the left, we placed a trompe l’oeil still-life painting of woodcock and quail carcasses hanging against a plain wall by Oudry and Froisse’s son, Jacques-Charles Oudry, who had been taught by his father.87 Specializing in painting animals, the hunt, and its trophies, the younger Oudry spent much of his career at the Habsburg court in Brussels in the Austrian Netherlands.
He juxtaposition enhanced the apparent exoticism of the Southeast Asian helmeted hornbill skull, embellished by a Chinese sculptor for a Chinese market—no European recipient was intended or expected—by appearing culturally out of place. Further, its undisguised animal appear-ance—its transformation had not superseded or concealed its natural origin as the head of a bird—contrasted with the total transformation of all other natural materials used by artists to create their paintings, prints, and drawings in the immediate, as well as the general, proximity. he helmeted horn-bill skull allowed viewers to consider the ambiguity of distinctions: between the domestic and the exotic, whether between the European world and Asia or within different parts of Asia itself; between a thing in nature collected and classiied in a zoology museum, and things clearly human-made as artworks within an art museum. Are these distinctions quite as clear-cut as the characters of the institutions that usually house them would suggest?
I. G.
World History
