Journal of the History of Collections Advance Access originally published online on September 12, 2006
Journal of the History of Collections 2006 18(2):169-185; doi:10.1093/jhc/fhl020
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
A dragon tree in the Garden of Eden
A case study of the mobility of objects and their images in early modern Europe
The first part of this contribution reviews the ways in which individual objects and collections of objects could pass both in and out of a religious context. Likewise, interpretations of their iconography could take on pagan or Christian connotations. Set against this background, the second part examines the role played by the dragon tree and its entry into texts and images of both a religious and a secular nature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The concluding remarks call into question the disenchantment of the world.
1 M. A. Cabrera Pérez, Native Flora of the Canary Islands (León, 1999), pp. 104–5.
2 E. Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (Paris, 1971), vol. II, pp. 265–79.
3 S. A. Bedini, The Pope's Elephant (Manchester, 1997); E. Bassani, ‘Raphael at the Tropics?’, Journal of the History of Collections 10 (1998), pp. 1–8. As Bedini points out (p. 177), although an elephant and an obelisk coexist – if not collide – in Bernini's design for the sculpture of an elephant supporting a small obelisk on its back in the piazza facing the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the model for this pachyderm was apparently not the pope's elephant, but a woodcut; see F. Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. J. Godwin (New York, 1999), p. 38.
4 E. Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, vol. I. The Obelisks of Rome (Copenhagen, 1968).
5 The same is true of the obelisk best known today as Cleopatra's Needle, which now stands on the Thames Embankment in London: it bore inscriptions by both Thutmose III and Ramses II before receiving an inscription in Greek and Latin after the incorporation of Egypt into the Roman Empire. See C. Fox, ‘Kleopatras Nadel in London’, in G. Sievernich and H. Budde (eds), Europa und der Orient 800–1900, exh. cat., Berliner Festspiele (Berlin, 1989), pp. 72–83.
6 For the long history of the obelisk see G. Alföldy, Der Obelisk auf dem Petersplatz in Rom. Ein historische Monument der Antike (Heidelberg, 1990). For the transfer of the obelisk to the centre of the Piazza di San Pietro in 1586 see, for instance, C. Hibbert, Rome. The Biography of a City (Harmondsworth, 1987), pp. 175–8.
7 J. von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sammelwesens (1908, 2nd edn., Braunschweig, 1978).
8 S. Settis, ‘Des ruines au musée: la destinée de la sculpture classique’, Annales ESC 48, no. 6 (1993), pp. 1347–80.
9 K. Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: xvie-xviiie siècle (Paris, 1987), pp. 26–7. The Bolognese cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, who had close connections with Ulisse Aldrovandi, planned to write a chapter in a work which remained unfinished on the hanging of crocodiles and other exotic objects in churches, see A. Lugli, Naturalia et Mirabilia. Les cabinets de curiosités en Europe, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1998), p. 53, n. 24.
10 Von Schlosser, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 13–18.
11 Ibid., pp. 19–23. In the sixteenth century a crocodile was hung over the confessional of the chapel in the Château d'Oiron (near Poitiers); see J.-H. Martin, J. Guillaume and F. Didier, Le château d'Oiron et son cabinet de curiosités (Paris, 2000), pp. 8 and 127. For the crocodile suspended from the sanctuary of S. Maria delle Grazie, Curtatone (Mantua) in the same century, see C. Prandi, ‘Attilio Zanca e il coccodrillo’, in G. Olmi and G. Papagno (eds), La natura e il corpo. Studi in memoria di Attilio Zanca (Florence, 2006), pp. 35–47.
12 ‘The impious strikes fear into the impious. A crocodile is suspended from the vault of a church to terrify and drive away the other ferocious monsters.’ Cited in J. M. Morán and F. Checa, El coleccionismo en España. De la cámara de maravillas a la galería de pinturas (Madrid, 1985), p. 25, n.15; cf. Lugli, op. cit. (note 9), p. 126.
13 D. Syndram, Die Schatzkammer Augusts des Starken: von der Pretiosensammlung zum Grünen Gewölbe (Leipzig, 1999), p. 32.
14 See M. Kemp, ‘"Wrought by no artist's hand": the natural, the artificial, the exotic, and the scientific in some artifacts from the Renaissance’, in C. Farago (ed.), Reframing the Renaissance. Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450-1650 (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 177–96, esp. pp. 183–4.
15 A. Schnapper, Le géant, la licorne, la tulipe. Collections françaises au xviie siècle (Paris, 1988), p. 9.
16 Zo wijd de wereld strekt, exh. cat., Mauritshuis (The Hague, 1979), no. 166; Aufbruch in Neue Welten. Johann Moritz von Nassau Siegen, der Brasilianer (1604–1679), exh. cat., Siegerlandmuseum and Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Siegen, 2004), no. 279, with colour photograph facing title page. On images and objects on the move, see P. Mason, The Lives of Images (London, 2001), esp. pp. 9–18.
17 La Ilusión de la Belleza, exh. cat., Museo Arqueológico Nacional (Madrid, 2001), pp. 132–3 and 154–5. On the properties attributed to unicorn horns in the court of Philip II, see J. Puerto, La Leyenda Verde. Naturaleza, Sanidad e Ciencia en la Corte de Felipe II (1527-1598) (Castille and León, 2003), pp. 283–6. The unicorn in Raphael's portrait of a lady with a unicorn (Villa Borghese, 1504–5) was originally a dog – a symbol of chastity within marriage; see Raffaello da Firenze a Roma, exh. cat., Villa Borghese (Milan, 2006), pp. 44, 125.
18 Une Renaissance singulière. La cour des Este à Ferrare, exh. cat., Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels, 2003), pp. 97, 125.
19 ‘La prima donna del mondo’. Isabelle d'Este, Fürstin und Mäzenatin der Renaissance, S. Ferino-Pagden (ed.), exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna, 1994), p. 372.
20 M. Scalini, ‘Formation du trésor au xve siècle. Dispersion et retour à Florence des bijoux des Médicis’, in C. Acidini Lichinat (ed.), Trésors des Médicis (Paris, 1997), pp. 44–5.
21 Lugli, op. cit. (note 9), p. 54. See B. Gundestrup, Det kongelige danske Kunstkammer 1737 (Copenhagen, 1991), vol. II, pp. 179, 184, 318ff.
22 D. Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst, Wirken durch Kunst. Sammelwesen und Hofkunst unter Margarete von Österreich, Regentin der Niederlande (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 234ff. The private chapel, on the other hand, was the place where the sumptuous tapestries that Margaret commissioned to be made of the missing scenes (the Passion) were hung (on which see A la manera de Flandes. Tapices ricos de la corona de España, exh. cat., Palacio Real (Madrid, 2001), pp. 92–9).
23 Eichberger, op. cit. (note 22), p. 264.
24 D. Eichberger, ‘Dürer's nature drawings and early collecting’, in D. Eichberger and C. Zika (eds.), Dürer and his Culture (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 21–3.
25 The Limbourg Brothers. Nijmegen Masters at the French Court 1400–1416, P. Roelofs and R. Dückers (eds.), exh. cat., Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen (Ghent, 2005), p. 169.
26 T. DaCosta Kaufmann, ‘Perspective on Prague: Rudolfine stylistics reviewed’, in E. Fu
íková et al. (eds.), Rudolf II and Prague, exh. cat., Prague Castle (Prague, London and Milan, 1997), p. 98. On Rudolf's collecting practices see esp. I. Baldriga, ‘The role of correspondence in the transmission of collecting patterns in seventeenth-century Europe: models, media and main characters’, in F. Bethencourt and F. Egmond (eds.), Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, in press).
27 Lugli, op. cit. (note 9), p. 55. In the 1737 inventory of the Danish royal collection it is described as ‘A large Crystal with a Cross. A fragment of the Mantle of Christ is generally believed to be among the Objects in the Crystal’. It was presented to Ole Worm by one of his patients, a Swedish officer, who claimed to have acquired the reliquary amongst the spoils of war in Germany. See Gundestrup, op. cit. (note 21), p. 181.
28 The exceptional nature of this Camerino is stressed in A. Sarchi, ‘Antonio tra i letterati e gli artisti del suo tempo’, in M. Ceriana (ed.), Il Camerino di alabastro. Antonio Lombardo e la scultura all’antica, exh. cat. Castello di Ferrara (Milan, 2004), pp. 35–47. By 1517, when Francesco Gonzaga visited the palace, the Camerino with the marble reliefs also contained small vases and sculptures in both metal and marble. It was adjacent to the more famous Camerino which housed paintings by Bellini, Titian and Dosso Dossi; on the latter see, e.g., Titian, exh. cat., National Gallery (London, 2003), pp. 100–11.
29 On this function of the label, see P. Mason, Infelicities. Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London, 1998), pp. 131–46.
30 L. Laurencich-Minelli, ‘Bologna und Amerika vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert’, in K.-H. Kohl (ed.), Mythen der Neuen Welt. Zur Entdeckungsgeschichte Lateinamerikas, exh. cat., Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin, 1982), p. 133; cf. L. Laurencich-Minelli (ed.), Bologna e il Mondo Nuovo, exh. cat. (Bologna, 1992), pp. 144–5.
31 C. F. Feest, ‘ZEMES IDOLUM DIABOLICUM. Surprise and success in ethnographic Kunstkammer research’, Archiv für Völkerkunde 40 (1986), pp. 181–98. Four views of a very similar figure from the collection of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc conclude Lorenzo Pignoria's presentation of the gods of Japan and Mexico that was published as an appendix to Vincenzo Cartari's Le imagini colla sposizione degli dei degli antichi in 1615.
32 C. F. Feest, ‘The collecting of American Indian artifacts in Europe, 1493–1750’, in K. Ortdahl Kupperman (ed.), America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill and London, 1995), p. 338.
33 A. E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa. Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 27.
34 The former is currently regarded as ‘perhaps Byzantine’ dating from the fifth century AD, or even as a tenth-century imitation of the antique; see G. Lorenzoni, ‘Byzantine "continuity" and western Romanesque’, in G. Romanelli (ed.), Venice. Art and Architecture (Cologne, 1997), p. 106.
35 E. Panofsky, ‘Iconography and iconology: an introduction to the study of Renaissance art’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 68. This chapter draws on an article co-written with F. Saxl, ‘Classical mythology in medieval art’, Metropolitan Museum Studies 4, no. 2 (1933), pp. 228–80. Another classic text on the transformation of pagan mythology into Christian allegory is J. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods. The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (Princeton, 1972).
36 This explains the otherwise perplexing presence of Hercules and Alcestis in Pierro della Francesca's frescoes of the Legend of the True Cross in Arezzo; see A. M. Maetzke, ‘Il ciclo affrescato in San Francesco ad Arezzo’, in A. M. Maetzke (ed.), Piero della Francesca. La leggenda della vera Croce in San Francesco ad Arezzo (Milan, 2000), pp. 23–4.
37 P. Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity (New Haven and London, 1996), p. 22.
38 Panofsky, op. cit. (note 35), p. 68. The Phaedra sarcophagus itself, which is attributed to the second century AD, was reused in the Pisan Campo Santo as a tomb for the burial of the countess Beatrice di Toscana, who died in 1076; see F. Donati, ‘Il reimpiego dei sarcofagi. Profilo di una collezione’, in C. Baracchini and E. Castelnuovo (eds.), Il Camposanto di Pisa (Turin, 1996), p. 72.
39 L. Barkan, Unearthing the Past. Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven and London, 1999), p. 127. Vasari's identification of the figure on the right of the sarcophagus as Meleager is understandable: the presence of a wild boar and other details are in full conformity with such an identification. It is only when the female figure on the left is taken into account too that an identification of the male figure as Hippolytus becomes inevitable. Moreover, the very artists of the Roman sarcophagi themselves were quite capable at times of juxtaposing isolated figural types drawn from different contexts; see F. G. J. M. Müller, Iconological Studies in Roman Art, vol. III: The Aldobrandini Wedding (Amsterdam, 1994), p. 177.
40 Une Renaissance singulière, op. cit. (note 18), p. 256.
41 M. Morán Turina and J. Portús Pérez, El arte de mirar. La pintura y su público en la España de Velázquez (Madrid, 1997), p. 246.
42 Barkan, op. cit. (note 39), p. 52.
43 F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven and London, 1981), p. 308.
45 Barkan, op. cit. (note 39), p. 53.
46 Elsewhere I have argued for the latter approach; see, for instance, P. Mason, ‘Half a cow’, Semiotica 85, no. 1/2 (1991), pp. 1–39; P. Mason, ‘The song of the sloth’, in J. Fisher (ed.), Re-verberations. Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency in Trans/cultural Practices (Maastricht, 2000), pp. 20–31.
47 In fact, the dragon tree is not a tree but a shrub because the trunk is hollow – a fact which renders the dating of exemplars of the dragon tree all the more difficult.
48 For an extensive recent bibliography on the dragon tree and its images, see the monograph by the botanist S. J. Casper, Die Geschichte des Kanarischen Drachenbaumes in Wissenschaft und Kunst. Vom Arbor Gadensis des POSIDONIUS zur Dracaena draco (L.) L., Haussknechtia Beiheft 10 (Jena, 2000).
49 C. Perdomo Ledesma, El Escudo de la Villa de La Orotava, antecedentes históricos (La Orotava, 2005).
50 ‘943. Pablo Martín. Un asiento de colmenas en Ycode atrás de un drago grande hacia Dabte en una fuente que está ahí, como es costumbre’; E. Serra Ráfols, Las datas de Tenerife (Libros i a iv de datas originales) (La Laguna, 1978), p. 188. The Libros de Datas (documents bearing on donations of land, water, etc.) are in the Archivo Municipal de La Laguna, Tenerife; the text in question is in the second book of the original datas.
51 Hieronymus Münster claimed to have seen a large drago in the grounds of the monastery of the Holy Trinity in the same city of Lisbon in November 1494; there was an enormous crocodile suspended from the choir of the monastery. See M. de Paz-Sánchez, ‘Un drago en El Jardín de las Delicias’, in M. de Paz-Sánchez (ed.), Flandes y Canarias. Nuestros orígenes nórdicos, vol. I (Tenerife and Gran Canaria, 2004), pp. 13–109, here p. 16. Since Münster's manuscript was first published in full in the twentieth century, Clusius can be excused for not referring to it.
52 L. Ramón-Laca, ‘The Spanish and American plants in Clusius’ correspondence’, in Z. Mirek and A. Zemanek (eds.), Studies in Renaissance Botany, Polish Botanical Studies Guidebook Series no. 20 (Cracow, 1998), p. 138.
53 The woodblock (Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp, cat. no. HB 5225) is reproduced in De Botanica in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (einde 15de eeuw - ca. 1650), ed. F. de Nave and D. Imhof (Ghent, 1993), p. 133. The drawing (Libri Picturati A.23, f. 28, Biblioteca Jagiellonska, Krakow) is reproduced in Rámon-Laca, op. cit. (note 52), p. 139. It was already reproduced in 1936 in H. Wegener, ‘Das grosse Bilderwerk des Carolus Clusius in der Preussischen Staatsbibliothek’, Forschungen und Fortschritte 12 (1936), p. 374, where the author drew attention to the fact that about one-third of the images in the manuscript correspond to the engravings that appeared in the printed works of Carolus Clusius (see further F. Egmond, ‘Clusius, Cluyt, Saint Omer. The origins of the sixteenth-century botanical and zoological watercolours in Libri Picturati A. 16–30’, Nuncius. Journal of the History of Science 20:1 (2005), pp. 11–67). For a recent annotated Spanish translation of the Rariorum see Charles de l’Écluse de Arras, Descripción de algunas plantas raras encontradas en España y Portugal, ed. Luis Ramón-Laca Menéndez de Luarca and Ramón Morales Valverde (Castille and León, 2005).
54 P. Mason, Deconstructing America. Representations of the Other (London and New York, 1990); idem, ‘Escritura fragmentaria: aproximaciones al otro’, in De Palabra y Obra en el Nuevo Mundo, vol. III, La formación del otro, G. H. Gossen, J. J. Klor de Alva, M. Gutiérrez Estévez and M. León-Portilla (eds.) (Madrid, 1993), pp. 395–430.
55 L. J. Vandewiele, ‘Wat groeide er in de tuin van Pieter van Coudenberghe’, in De Botanica in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, op. cit. (note 53), p. 30.
56 In his Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597), John Gerard combined the Clusian image with a woodcut of the fruits of the dragon tree taken from Nicolás Monardes, Primera y segunda y tercera partes de la Historia medicinal, de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales... (Seville, 1580), pp. 64–5, where the seed inside the fruit has the appearance of a little dragon.
57 L. Tongiorgi Tomasi and P. Tongiorgi, ‘Persistenze e "migrazione" dell’immagine naturalistica’, in Immagine e Natura. L’immagine naturalistica nei codici e libri a stampa della Biblioteche Estense e Universitaria. Secoli xv-xvii, exh. cat. Biblioteche Estense e Universitaria (Modena, 1984), pp. 175–6.
58 J. L. Barona and X. Gómez Font, La correspondencia de Carolus Clusius con los científicos españoles (Valencia, 1998), p. 69; the English translation is taken, with slight modifications, from Ramón-Laca, op. cit. (note 52), p. 144.
59 J. Fragoso, Discurso de las cosas aromáticas, árboles y frutales y de otras muchas medicinas simples que se traen de la India Oriental y que sirven al uso de la medicina (Madrid, 1572), pp. 89–90.
60 A proposal for a new coat of arms for La Orotava made in 1857 included, among other elements, the silhouette of the peak of Mount Teide and the dragon tree of Franchi. See Perdomo Ledesma, op. cit. (note 49), p. v.
61 See C. Teixidor Cadenas, La fotografía en Canarias y Madeira. La época del daguerrotipo, el colodión y la albúmina 1839–1900 (Madrid, 1999), pp. 32–9.
62 His photograph of ‘Young Dragon trees, near Oratava, Teneriffe’, appeared as plate vi to his article ‘On the manner of growth of Dracaena draco in its natural habitat, as illustrating some disputed points in vegetable physiology’, Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh 6 (1859), pp. 250–61.
63 In ancient Rome a red sap, known as dragon's blood, was used as a dye and medicinally. However, various trees supplied such a sap, so that it is impossible to connect it directly with the Macaronesian dragon tree. For its continuing use in the seventeenth century, see, for example, A. MacGregor, M. Mendonça and J. White, Ashmolean Museum Oxford. Manuscript Catalogues of the Early Museum Collections 1683–1886 (Part i), British Archaeological Reports, International Series 907 (Oxford, 2000), p. 162.
64 Hesiod, Works and Days 170–4, Theogony 215.
65 M. Martínez, ‘Un nuevo libro sobre las Islas Afortunadas’, in his Las Islas Canarias de la Antigüedad al Renacimiento. Nuevos aspectos (Tenerife, 1996), pp. 257–63.
66 H. Schedel, Chronicle of the World. The Complete and Annotated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, with an introduction and appendix by S. Füssel (Cologne etc., 2001), p. 7. On Schedel's own graphic collection see B. Hernad, Die Graphiksammlung des Humanisten Hartmann Schedel, exh. cat., Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich, 1990).
67 D. Landau and P. Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470–1550 (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 39.
68 Several authors have tried to decipher the symbolism of the dragon tree in the composition by Bosch; on the various interpretations see R. H. Marijnissen and P. Ruyffelaere, Hieronymus Bosch. The Complete Works (Antwerp, 1987), p. 88, and de Paz-Sánchez, op. cit. (note 51), pp. 68ff.
69 R. A. Koch, ‘Martin Schongauer's dragon tree’, Print Review 5 (1976), pp. 114–19.
70 There was a Camera Papagalli in the medieval papal palace. For a detailed study of the mobility of parrots and their images, concentrating on those from the Americas, see R. Pieper, Die Vermittlung einer Neuen Welt. Amerika im Nachrichtennetz des Habsburgischen Imperiums 1493–1598 (Mainz, 2000), pp. 245–71.
71 The Schongauer print served as the iconographic source for a representation of the theme of the Flight into Egypt painted on the reverse of the left wing of the Flemish triptych of the miracles of Christ, dated around 1492, that is now in the National Gallery of Victoria; see M. Conway, ‘A Flemish triptych for Melbourne’, Burlington Magazine 40 (1922), pp. 163–71, and U. Hoff, Catalogue of European Paintings before Eighteen Hundred, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, 1961).
72 Flight into Egypt, 88.7 x 78 cm, Lee Bequest, Courtauld Institute, London, P. 1947. LF.68. The falling idol on top of a column in the right-hand background refers to another incident in the same apocryphal Gospel of Mary's Birth: when the Holy Family entered a pagan temple in Egypt, the idols fell from their altars. It was illustrated, for example, by the Limbourg Brothers for Les Belles Heures de Jean de Berry (fol. 63r) in the first decade of the fifteenth century.
73 G. Bartrum, German Renaissance Prints 1490–1550 (London, 1995), p. 35; Dürers Dinge, Druckgraphik aus dem Besitz der George-August-Universität Göttingen, G. Unverfehrt (ed.) (Göttingen etc., 1997), no. 89.
74 E. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, 1971), p. 100. The reliefs that decorate the façade of the Duomo in Orvieto, probably dating from the second decade of the fourteenth century, include a representation of the Flight into Egypt in which both a date-palm and a dragon appear, the latter lurking menacingly close to the hooves of the Virgin's donkey.
75 Bedini, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 198–9.
76 See W. S. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting (Princeton, 1989).
77 The image of the bison appears to have been influenced by the woodcut of a ‘taureau sauvage’ in chapter 74 of Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique by André Thevet (Paris, 1557) and reproduced in Le Brésil d’André Thevet, F. Lestringant (ed.) (Paris, 1997), p. 276. For the presence of American fauna in Renaissance tapestries, compare the American turkey in the Wawel tapestries; see J. Szablowski, A. Misiag-Bochenska, M. Hennel-Bernasikowa and M. Piwocka, Flemish Arrases of the Royal Castle in Cracow (Warsaw, 1994), p. 263.
78 The tapestry is in the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh, and is reproduced in National Museums of Scotland Annual Report 1992–1993, p. 26.
79 For analysis of the plants in these tapestries, see A. Kostuch and A. Zemanek, ‘Plants in the 16th century Flemish tapestries from Wawel Castle (Cracow, Poland)’, in Z. Mirek and A. Zemanek (eds.), Studies in Renaissance Botany, Polish Botanic Studies Guidebook Series no. 20 (Cracow, 1998), pp. 205–30, esp. p. 225.
80 H. Honour, ‘Wissenschaft und Exotismus. Die europäischen Künstler und die aussereuropäische Welt’, in Mythen der Neuen Welt, op. cit. (note 30), p. 36; Casper, op. cit. (note 48), p. 65.
81 Mason, op. cit. (note 29), chapter 2.
82 An instance of the opposite process, by which the dragon tree is not functional but geographic, can be illustrated by a painting in oils on canvas that appeared at Sotheby's in 2001 as A View of an Italianate Coastline. It has now been identified as a work by William Hodges, artist on board Captain Cook's second voyage, dating from 1777 and representing, albeit in a topographically inaccurate way, the island of Madeira. This identification rests on the inclusion of a dragon tree in the painting. The painting is now in the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby. See C. Greig, ‘Hodges and attribution’, in William Hodges 1744–1797. The Art of Exploration, G. Quilley and J. Bonehill (eds.), exh. cat., National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (New Haven and London, 2004), p. 18.
83 Catalogue entry by F. Korenyi in J. A. Levenson (ed.), Circa 1492. Art in the Age of Exploration, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington (New Haven and London, 1991), no. 202, p. 297; the date is confirmed by the watermark of the paper on which the study is executed. See too the remarks on connoisseurship and ‘hard’ evidence by C. Ginzburg, ‘Vetoes and compatibilities’, Art Bulletin 77, no. 4 (1995), pp. 534–6.
84 F. Korenyi, Albrecht Dürer and the Animal and Plant Studies of the Renaissance (Munich, 1985), pp. 210–11.
Address for correspondence Peter Mason, Via di San Martino ai Monti 55, 00184 Rome. monti55{at}fastwebnet.it