Pasta For Nightingales: A 17th-century handbook of bird-care and folklore - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1909741493 ISBN 13: 9781909741492

Publisher: Royal Collection Trust, 2018

Synopsis

Cassiano dal Pozzo, (1588-1657) now celebrated as one of the most important art patrons in Italy of the seven - teenth century, commissioned a number of exquisite studies of birds as part of his famous ‘Paper Museum’. In 1622 the lawyer and ornithologist Giovanni Pietro Olina used these drawings which are now kept in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, as the basis for the illustrations in his Uccelliera .

Pasta for Nightingales combines Cassiano’s original artwork with selections from the first English translation of Olina’s text. It includes such enchanting insights as the idea that robins were epileptic, or suffered from dizziness, and that the hoopoe overindulged in grapes until it became ‘dazed and half-drunk.’ However it also includes much fascinating early natural history and ornithological observation - as well as the secret recipe for pasta to keep your nightingale happy and encourage it to sing.

A unique celebration of the beginnings of ornithology, designed in sympathy with the character of the 17th- century original.

About this title

Review:

"A superlative intersection of original artwork, translative skill, and book history that brings seventeenth-century European ornithology and natural history into sharp and elegant focus."--Daniel Lewis, Chief Curator of Manuscripts, The Huntington Library

About the Author:

Cassiano dal Pozzo was a Roman art patron, and his seventeenth-century Museo Cartaceo housed hundreds of scientific drawings. Pietro Olina was an amateur naturalist and author of one of the earliest ornithology books. Translator Kate Clayton graduated from Oxford and studied for a postgraduate diploma in translation at Westminster University. She lives in London. Helen Macdonald is a writer and naturalist and author of H Is for Hawk.

About this edition

• Publisher: Royal Collection Trust
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1909741493
• ISBN 13: 9781909741492
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144