Eleven Birds from Four Continents: The Ornithology Plates of the Diccionario Enciclopédico Salvat
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In the years after the Second World War, as Spain was rebuilding its cultural institutions and its publishing industry was finding its footing again, the house of Salvat produced one of the great encyclopedic achievements of mid-century Spanish publishing: the Diccionario Enciclopédico Salvat. It was a work that found its way into homes and libraries across the Spanish-speaking world — in Spain, in Mexico, in Argentina, in Colombia — and it was celebrated above all for the exceptional quality of its scientific illustrations.
The ornithology plates were among the finest.
The Last Generation of the Hand-Crafted Bird Portrait
The 1950s were the last decade in which the great encyclopedias of the Spanish-speaking world relied on hand-crafted illustration rather than colour photography for their scientific plates. The illustrators who produced these images worked in a tradition that stretched back to the great natural history atlases of the 18th and 19th centuries — to Audubon and Gould, to Lampert and Naumann — and they brought to their work the same combination of scientific precision and artistic sensibility that had made those earlier works so enduring.
The Salvat ornithology plate that appears on this journal is a masterpiece of that tradition. Eleven species from four continents, assembled on a single plate with the beige and green background that was the house style of Salvat’s scientific illustrations — a background that has become, for anyone who grew up with these encyclopedias, as evocative as the smell of old paper.
Eleven Birds, Four Continents
The plate is a global survey of avian chromatic splendour. From the Indian subcontinent comes the Pitta brachyura — the Indian Pitta, known in Hindi as the navranga or “nine-coloured bird,” though Salvat’s illustrator counted seven. From Africa comes the Tauraco livingstonii — Livingstone’s Turaco, with its extraordinary crimson wing feathers that contain a copper-based pigment found nowhere else in the animal kingdom. From Europe comes the Carduelis carduelis — the European Goldfinch, whose red face and yellow wing-bars have made it one of the most painted birds in the history of Western art.
And from the Americas come the most spectacular of all: the Cardinalis cardinalis — the Northern Cardinal, the male in his full scarlet plumage; the Archilochus colubris — the Ruby-throated Hummingbird, the only hummingbird that breeds in eastern North America; and the Passerina cyanea — the Indigo Bunting, a bird so brilliantly blue that it seems to carry a piece of the summer sky in its feathers.
Together, they are a reminder that the natural world has always been the finest illustrator — and that the encyclopedists of the 1950s, working in the last years of the hand-crafted scientific plate, understood this better than anyone.