The Parrot in Art? Unraise your eyebrows: parrots have featured in Western European art for 500 years, depicted by Dürer, van Eyck and Mantegna; Rubens and Rembrandt; Tiepolo, Reynolds and Goya; Delacroix and Courbet; Matisse and Frieda Kahlo. It is hardly surprising. Ever since they were imported into Europe from India in the 4th century BC, parrots have been a source of marvel: their exotic plumage, their near-human mimetic voice, squawking, talking. They have intrigued Aristotle and Pliny, Aesop and Ovid.
Now Richard Verdi, the director of the Barber and for many years a lover of parrots, has given them their first exhibition that charts the ways in which artists have seen them: as symbols of the Fall in the Garden of Eden and of the Virgin Birth of Christ, as decoration, as surrogate humans, as symbols of luxury and sexual abandon.
In ‘The Fall of Man’, Dürer contrasts the wise parrot, held aloft by Adam, with the serpent tempting Eve.
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