Exotica on the Move:
Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland
Claudia Swan
Detail from Jan Lievens,
Man in Oriental Costume,
c. 1628 (plate 3).
DOI:
10.1111/1467-8365.12171
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790
38 | 4 | September 2015 | pages
620-635
© Association of Art Historians 2015
This essay grew out of a sense of wonder evinced by the trajectory of one kind of
foreign, highly valued, aesthetically esteemed, politically charged object – birds of
paradise or, rather, carcasses and plumage of birds of paradise. These spectacular
natural specimens were prized in the early modern era for their lavish form, splendid
colouring, rarity, and associations with power. Birds of paradise remain even now
wondrous creatures of distant origin. Current ornithology accounts for over forty
species of the family Paradisaeidae, of sixteen genera, while sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century records of the precious few that were brought to Europe refer primarily to
two genera, the Lesser and the Greater bird of paradise (Paradisaeidae minor and Paradisaea
apoda).1 Ravishing specimens were imported from the Maluku Islands in the Indonesian
archipelago by traders and were cherished by rulers, studied by naturalists, depicted
by artists, collected across Europe, and sold for staggering sums by merchants
starting in the 1520s. In the seventeenth century birds of paradise were traded largely
if not exclusively by Dutch merchants – at a time when the northern provinces of
the Netherlands secured independence from Spanish dominion and a stronghold
on global trade.2 In 1612, the States General of the Netherlands sent an emissary to
Constantinople to obtain trading privileges in the Ottoman Empire. A vast state gift
sent to seal the deal included, in addition to all manner of valuable goods, no fewer
than eight birds of paradise, purchased in Amsterdam in October 1612.3 The question
out of which this essay emerged is, why did the Dutch present exotic, non-Dutch
wares to the Ottoman sultan, whose lands were the source of comparable exotica?
What sorts of values adhered to these wondrous specimens as they travelled the globe?
When the Dutch took up trade in the East Indies in the final years of the sixteenth
century, they followed on and competed with the Portuguese and Spanish, who
had controlled it for a century. The first specimens of birds of paradise that arrived
in Europe were shipped to Spain in the 1520s as gifts for royalty transported by
merchant voyagers; from the outset they were prized as marvellous natural objects
of extraordinary rarity and beauty. In 1523–24, one bird of paradise was recorded
in the inventory of goods belonging to Margaret of Austria, Hapsburg Regent of
the Netherlands, in her residence in Mechelen. This bird, described as ‘a dead bird,
called bird of paradise, wrapped in taffeta, placed in a small wooden box’, was
the most highly valued item in her private studiolo.4 This and several other items,
including ‘Accessories made of feathers from the Indies’ were gifts to Margaret from
her nephew, King Charles V of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, who had received
them as tribute.5 Plumage of the birds of paradise brought to Europe by way of trade
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1 Anonymous Nuremberg
artist, Bird of Paradise (two
views), c. 1550. Watercolour
and gouache on paper,
37.5 × 59.8 cm. Erlangen:
Erlangen University Library.

voyages was sometimes considered talismanic, and cherished by local rulers no less
at their point of entry into the trade network in the Indonesian archipelago than at
courts across Europe. It would likely have been via Habsburg connections as well that
the unknown Nuremberg artist who painted a remarkable colour study of two views
of a bird of paradise now in Erlangen gained access to a specimen (plate 1). Among

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Claudia Swan
2 Balthasar van der Ast,
Fruit Still Life with Shells
and a Tulip, c. 1620. Oil on
panel, 46 × 64.5 cm. The
Hague: Royal Picture Gallery
Mauritshuis.
© Association of Art Historians 2015
many other things, the early modern history of the bird exemplifies the complex
relationship between trade, politics, knowledge, and the arts.6 For these and other
reasons, birds of paradise comprise a key instance of exotica on the move across
cultural boundaries, impelled by trade and political forces.
Exotica and the Dutch Marketplace
The Dutch Republic played an especially significant role on the global stage in the
seventeenth century, and foreign, exotic objects figure widely in early modern Dutch
material and artistic culture. Painted and printed images, domestic inventories, and
verbal accounts attest to widespread interest in Turkish and Persian headgear, arms,
and clothing; Brazilian featherwork; and natural objects such as tulips, shells, bezoar
stones, and coconuts (plate 2 and plate 3). In the course of the seventeenth century, the
Dutch Republic established its pre-eminence as a hub of international commerce,
and Amsterdam was soon hailed as a global entrepôt in terms adapted from the prior
renown of Lisbon and Antwerp. The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische
Compagnie, VOC) founded in 1602, and the West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie,
WIC) founded in 1621, secured trade routes formerly controlled by the Portuguese
and the Spanish, enabling the rise of the Dutch as global merchants, and the capital of
the Dutch Republic, Amsterdam, as European port of entry for so many spectacular
new commodities.7 Praising the many liberties he experienced in Amsterdam in the
1630s, René Descartes marvelled at: ‘the ships coming in to port here, bringing all
the produce of the Indies and everything rare in Europe … What place on earth could
one choose where all the commodities and curiosities one could wish for were as
easy to find as in this city?’8
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Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland

The dynamics of transactions featuring exotic goods figure in an elaborate

portrait of the city of Amsterdam, a vast print issued in 1611 (plate 4).9 This
monumental print combines a profile view of the city and its harbour with a lengthy
explanatory text and individual woodcut vignettes of trade-related landmarks of the
city (markets; the Exchange). The anonymous text is among the earliest paeans to the
city as a global trade hub. Foregoing any of the usual historical gestures of the genre,
the text declares, it focuses solely on current trade. The city is described as a new
Antwerp and as the ‘sun and soul’ of all of Europe. People from all over the world
feel compelled, the text states, to ‘send or present in person their priceless wares to
Amsterdam, as if to a world-renowned empress’. At the centre of the print itself, the
personification of the global entrepôt is depicted receiving gifts from all parts of the
world. The maid of Amsterdam holds a ship in one hand and the crest of the city in
the other, and is surrounded by delegations of ‘all the principle peoples of the world’.
The litany of goods from the East Indies includes ‘the flood of silk, precious gems,

3 Jan Lievens, Man in Oriental

Costume, c. 1628. Oil on
canvas, 135 × 100.5 cm.
Potsdam: Stiftung
Preussische Schlösser und
Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg,
Bildergalerie, Postdam-
Sanssouci (Inv. no. GK 1884).

© Association of Art Historians 2015 624

Claudia Swan
4 Claes Janszn Visscher
and Pieter Bast, Profi le
View of Amsterdam, 1611.
Engraving and etching and
letterpress, sixteen sheets,
256 × 142 cm. Amsterdam:
Rijksprentenkabinet,
Rijksmuseum.
© Association of Art Historians 2015
pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cassia, nutmeg, and other spices along with countless
herbs and roots that is sent from Java to Amsterdam’, which is ‘so great that one can
hardly articulate it or describe it credibly’. This verbal cornucopia extends to imports
from regions near and far, all over the known world: it is as replete with data as the
image it qualifies, where a wide variety of figures enact the trade described. Already
in 1611, Amsterdam was depicted as a city made of goods, many of them exotic.
Notably, trade is represented as a direct function of the desire of the various peoples
and nations assembled to present their goods and wares: the maid of Amsterdam sits
among the various goods like an idol among remains of devotional rites. The text
concludes, ‘In sum, everything that is necessary for the maintenance of the body
and for the amusement of the spirit is here so abundant that you could say that God’s
merciful blessing, the very cornucopia or horn of plenty, is being poured down
on us.’ No wonder Descartes had so little trouble finding ‘all the commodities and
curiosities one could wish for’.
The opening in 1611 of the Amsterdam Exchange (Beurs), modelled on London’s
Royal Exchange and Antwerp’s Bourse, fortified the city’s role as a hub of trade
connected to all parts of the globe, principally by water.10 The Exchange itself,
designed by the City Architect Hendrick de Keyser (1565–1621), was situated on the
dam for which the city is named, with direct access to the water by which so many
goods were conveyed to it for sale and purchase. Images of the Exchange, prints
published to celebrate its opening and later paintings alike, depict teeming crowds of
men in the interior courtyard, where trade was conducted (plate 5 and plate 6). Though
rarely noted, these images regularly feature men in turbans and Levantine clothing
mingling with merchants dressed in familiar Dutch garb. Whether these Eastern
merchants represent actual agents of trade or stand in for the practice of trade with
the East is not clear. Emanuel de Witte’s well-known painting of the Exchange painted
in 1653, for example (plate 6), includes a virtually unremarked transaction between
three men in the left foreground: a turbaned gentleman, in Ottoman or Persian dress,
approaches from the central square of the Exchange as if to have a closer look at the
transaction between the (Armenian?) man in a tunic and loose trousers at the left and
the elderly gentleman in Dutch or northern European clothing in the centre. The man
in the tunic appears to be showing the potential Dutch buyer a jewel or other exotic
item small enough to fit in his hand. Presumably this represents a regular exchange
by way of practices institutionalized by the VOC and WIC and at and around the
Amsterdam Exchange, seventeenth-century Holland abounded in exotica.11 The
exchange of valuable exotica, access to which was one of the distinguishing features
of the Dutch Republic and of Amsterdam in particular, was consistently emphasized
in representations such as these.
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Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland
5 Boëtius Adamszn Bolswert,
Amsterdam Exchange
(Beurs), 1609. Engraving
published by Michael Colijn,
43.2 × 60.1 cm. Amsterdam:
Rijksprentenkabinet,
Rijksmuseum.
© Association of Art Historians 2015
Definitions of the Exotic
The early modern era saw the introduction to Western Europe of an array of foreign
goods in greater quantities and variety than ever before.12 Spices, botanical and
zoological specimens, coffee and tea, textiles, porcelain, ethnographic goods, and
myriad other novel, exotic goods were transported over vast distances and eagerly
exchanged and acquired by merchants, consumers, scholars, nobility, and artists
alike. What made an object or artefact exotic? Like the Latin term ‘exoticus’, the
seventeenth-century Dutch vernacular terms used to describe rare goods from distant
lands vreemd and uytheemsch denote, simply, ‘foreignness’. These terms and the objects
they described likewise registered and evinced wonder, and were highly valued.
As Anne Goldgar has shown in her excellent study of tulipmania, the strangeness
to early modern eyes of tulips, prized exotica the Dutch imported from Central
Asia, is difficult to reconcile with their seemingly intrinsic Dutchness. In the early
seventeenth century the tulips were called, for example, ‘a strange and outlandish
plant’, ‘foreign to us & a stranger’, ‘strangers unto us … Out-landish flowers’.13 In
1605, natural historian and Director of the Leiden University garden Carolus Clusius
(1526–1609) wrote extensively about tulips in his study of exotica, the Exoticorvm libri
decem (the full title translates, ‘Ten books of exotica: the history and uses of animals,
plants, aromatics and other natural products from distant lands’).14 Clusius took
pains to distinguish the Exoticorvm from his earlier publication, the Rariorvm Plantarvm
Historia of 1601, which recorded noteworthy, mostly European flora. In a preface to
his Exoticorvm, Clusius explained that he had examined and collected specimens that
feature in the Rariorvm in the course of his travels as a youth and adult. ‘Now, in my
626
Claudia Swan

old age [he was 79 in 1605], when due to my bodily weakness I can scarcely walk . . .
I have applied my mind to the observation of those exotic plants and other things
that are brought from foreign parts.’15 Clusius uses the terms ‘exoticus’ and ‘peregrinus’ to
describe the sorts of things catalogued in the Exoticorvm; both amount to declarations
of distant origin.16 Just as the lengthy title contains no mention of places of origin –
instead, it lists classes of objects – the text itself omits most places of origin,
reverting to the generic descriptors of origin ‘Indian’ and ‘Chinese’, which populate
many other contemporary sources as well.17 In general, the category of the exotic
encompassed foreign, novel things; and knowing that an object or plant, for example,
hailed from distant parts sufficed to guarantee its interest.
Interest in exotica tended, in the Netherlands, to correlate with market value.18
In 1602, in a letter to surgeons and pharmacists travelling with the VOC, Clusius set
out guidelines for the collection of specimens to be brought back for study and use.
Nutmeg, black pepper, white pepper, and Jakarta cotton were among the varieties
specifically requested – items that were also the most marketable items brought
back from the East Indies.19 Man-made exotica were also keenly acquired; in several
key instances, they were even looted from the Portuguese and the Spanish in vast
quantities. The 50,000 pieces of porcelain, countless silks, and Chinese books that
were brought to Amsterdam in 1604 by the captain and national maritime hero Jacob
van Heemskerck were taken from aboard a Portuguese vessel, the Santa Catarina: flags
of trade masked acts of war and the accumulation of wealth inspired both practices.20

6 Emanuel de Witte,
Courtyard of the Amsterdam
Exchange, 1653. Oil on panel,
48 × 47.5 cm. Rotterdam:
Museum Boymans-van
Beuningen.

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Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland

One way to understand Dutch mercantile endeavours in the seventeenth century is

in relation to the effort to establish the place of the nascent republic within Europe,
and vis-à-vis Spain and Portugal in particular. Descartes declared in the same letter
quoted earlier that, ‘There is no one here other than me who does not engage in
commerce …’21 The bulk of that commerce, for which the Dutch strove to be known,
was in exotic objects that were moved from afar – objects whose trajectories the
Dutch set in motion, controlled, and redirected, and objects with clear market value.

Exotica on the Move

A single, paradigmatic instance of exotic objects the Dutch mobilized in the early
modern era is the bird of paradise. We now know that the Paradisaea minor and the
Paradisaea apoda are native to New Guinea and neighbouring islands, but in the early
modern era no foreigner ever saw one alive. Like the myriad natural objects that
circulated at the time, birds of paradise were transported far and wide – from
their native habitat in the Pacific to the courts of Europe and of the Levant – and
depended for their movement on forces external to their dead selves.22 These
exotic creatures appealed greatly to naturalists, nobles, and artists alike, to whom
the exquisite plumage came via trade and in very limited numbers. The fi rst bird
of paradise skins brought to Europe arrived in 1523, as part of a gift from local
Maluku rulers to Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V, who had
backed Magellan’s voyage to the East. According to one account of the voyage –
a letter from Maximilianus Transylvanus (1490–c. 1538), Secretary to Charles
V, to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Salzburg, that was published in 1523 – when
the Spanish ships were loaded at Tidore with cloves for the return to Spain, the
Maluku rulers also presented letters and gifts for the emperor. ‘The gifts were
Indian swords, etc. The most remarkable curiosities were some of the birds called
Mamuco Diata, that is, the Bird of God, with which [the kings] think themselves safe
and invincible in battle. Five of these were sent, one of which I procured from
the captain of the ship and now send it to your reverence.’23 Transylvanus also
sent, he writes, ‘some cinnamon, nutmegs, and cloves, that you may see that our
spices are not inferior to those imported by the Venetians and Portuguese, but of
superior quality because they are fresher’.24 While the spices recommended the
Spanish exploration of the Moluccas vis-à-vis its market competition, the birds
represented the Moluccan rulers by way of an association with their power. The
birds were gifts, not commodities; above and beyond the merchandise supplied to
the Europeans, they were integrally associated with and at the same time distinct
from wares.
Transylvanus’s account is fascinating in a number of respects, and especially
remarkable with regard to birds of paradise. He describes birds of paradise in two
places in his text, and in both he refers to their apotropaic powers. When he tells
the Cardinal that he is sending him one, he specifies further that ‘I send [it] to your
reverence, not that your reverence may think yourself safe from treachery and the
sword by means of it, as they profess to do, but that you may be pleased by its rareness
and beauty.’25 One is reminded here of Albrecht Dürer’s response, in the very same
years, to the Aztec works presented by Hernan Cortes to Charles V.26 The marvellous,
the rare, the wondrous, and the beautiful: the aesthetics of exotica tend to locate
value in exceptionalism. Exotic objects that entered the European aesthetic economy
in the early decades of the sixteenth century were often explicitly associated with
power; they represented the power of their owners and could endow those who bore
them with power. The terms in which they were described and praised smacked

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Claudia Swan

often of wonder. Like many other novel exotic natural specimens that arrived in
Europe in the early modern period, birds of paradise were as often the objects of
aesthetic appreciation as of ethnographic or natural historical scrutiny. As Christian
Freigang has postulated, ‘Art as a knowledge system first enabled the taxonomical
appropriation of the exotic.’27
The very first time the birds appear in Transylvanus’s text is in a general
description of the Maluku Islands, then called ‘the Spice Islands’, where they
are described as objects of trade between Muslim traders and locals, and as the
inspiration for the Moluccan kings’ conversion to Islam. This remarkable passage,
which describes the birds as legless and motile (by way of trade) objects capable of
inspiring changes in the local belief system, demonstrates that the terms according to
which the birds first entered the European economy would remain consistent for at
least a century. Of the Spice Islands, Transylvanus writes:

One produces cloves, another nutmegs, and another cinnamon. All are near
to each other, but small and rather narrow. The kings began to believe that
souls were immortal a few years ago, induced by no other argument than
that they saw that a certain most beautiful small bird never rested upon the
ground nor upon anything that grew upon it; but they sometimes saw it fall
dead upon the ground from the sky. And as the Mahometans, who travelled
to those parts for commercial purposes, told them that this bird was born in
Paradise, and that Paradise was the abode of the souls of those who had died,
these kings embraced the sect of Mahomet, because it promised wonderful
things concerning this abode of souls. They call the bird Mamuco Diata, and
they hold it in such reverence and religious esteem, that they believe that by it
their kings are safe in war, even though they, according to custom, are placed
in the front lines of battle.28

Notwithstanding the fact that contemporary published accounts, Antonio Pigafetta’s

among them, specified that the bird of paradise does have feet, well into the
seventeenth century authors maintained that the bird remained in perpetual flight,
in endless ascent toward the sun or heavens.29 To the best of my knowledge, the idea
that the birds never perched or landed, however, never inspired conversion in the
West; instead, the birds came to symbolize, as Jean Michel Massing has shown, extant
(Christian/humanist) beliefs.30
Throughout the early modern era, the bird of paradise was a much sought after
exotic specimen and the hallmark of a fine collection. In the Netherlands, it figured
frequently in written accounts, as well as in collections and in images. In 1592, on his
return from the East, the Dutch traveller Jan Huigen van Linschoten presented to his
friend and colleague the widely renowned collector Bernardus Paludanus two birds
of paradise. In his 1596 account of his travels, van Linschoten described these birds
in terms consistent with what Transylvanus wrote, omitting, however, any reference
to conversion. Van Linschoten’s description of the Moluccas includes (in the 1598
English translation) the following passage:

In these Ilands onlie is found the bird, which the Portingales call passaros de Sol,
that is Fowle of the Sunne, the Italians call it Manu codiates, and the Latinists,
Paradiseas, and by us called Paradice birdes [paradijsvogels], for ye beauty of
their feathers which passe al other birds: these birds are never séene alive,
but being dead they are found upon the Iland: they flie, as it is said alwaies

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Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland
7 Anonymous artist, Paradisus
avis, in Carolus Clusius,
Auctarium ad Exoticorum
libros, Exoticorum libri decem,
Leiden, 1605, page 360. Photo:
Author.
© Association of Art Historians 2015
into the Sunne, and kéepe themselves continually in the ayre, without
lighting on the earth, for they have neither féet nor wings, but onely head
and body, and the most part tayle, as appeareth by the birdes that are brought
from thence into India, and some from thence hether, but not many, for they
are costlie. I brought two of them with me, for Doctor Paludanus, which
were male and female, which I gave unto him, for his chamber.31
Van Linschoten would have purchased his birds in Goa, the hub of Portuguese trade
in the East, as he travelled no further east. Typically, the birds were sold at a remove
from their place of origin; they were always already in circulation, on the move. As in
so many other cases, the birds were presented as gifts and described as being footless.
The rarity and splendour of these natural specimens contributed to their quasi-
mythological status, which had at least as much to do with the fact that the specimens
were preserved without feet and legs, which were removed in order to better protect
the plumage. Clusius published an illustration of footless birds of paradise in his 1605
Exoticorvm, the text mentioned earlier, although he knew that they had feet (plate 7 and
plate 8).32 A prominent member of the academic community and a widely known
and respected naturalist, Clusius was nonetheless thwarted in his attempt to secure
a specimen – by an agent for the Emperor Rudolf II, whose collection contained
several birds in various states, footed and not.33 In 1609, just before his death that year,
Clusius inherited two birds from his friend and neighbour in Leiden, Justus Scaliger.34
They proved as elusive on the market as knowledge about them appeared to be.
Rembrandt van Rijn famously owned at least one; he represented two in one drawing
and, on another sheet, a smaller footed specimen in the company of a man wearing
a turban (plate 9).35 In various respects, Rembrandt’s birds of paradise are emblematic
of seventeenth-century Dutch exoticism, which was distinctly less committed to
taxonomic comprehension of the items it encompassed than to appreciation from afar,
even unto the melancholic demeanour of the turbaned fellow Rembrandt depicted.36
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Claudia Swan
8 Anonymous artist, Rex
avium paradisearum, in
Carolus Clusius, Auctarium ad
Exoticorum libros, Exoticorum
libri decem, Leiden, 1605,
page 362. Photo: Author.
© Association of Art Historians 2015
Numerous early modern accounts of the bird of paradise confirm its status as a
quasi-fantastic natural specimen, prized for its distant origins and its associations
with power (the power of the kings fortified by carrying it in to battle; the power
of the European kings to whom it was bequeathed or by whom it was acquired)
or even the divine (in so far as it was associated with celestial realms).37 Although
it is recorded in classical sources, Clusius counted the bird of paradise among the
naturalia unknown to the ancients, stressing an important feature of the exotic, its
unfamiliarity and novelty.38 This is also borne out by gifts of the exotic. Indeed,
it seems that foreign, exotic objects were all the more presentable on account of
their lack of fixity within the strata of natural history and/or the market. One of the
primary characteristics of the early modern bird of paradise was its outlandishness –
literally, its foreignness. Even in the East Indies, they were foreign: the earliest
European accounts record their presence on the islands of what is now the Indonesian
archipelago, whence they came from New Guinea. Perversely, the Dutch, like the
Portuguese before them, claimed such exotic wares as their own – such as when they
presented eight birds of paradise to the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I.
‘Rare or unusual or curious objects from these lands’ (‘rariteyten van dese landen’):
this phrase, borrowed from Dutch state documents dated 1612, aptly describes the
vast array of costly, elaborate, exceptional, and locally produced objects and items
presented by the first ambassador of the emerging Dutch Republic to the Ottoman
court.39 In March 1612 the Dutch diplomat Cornelis Haga arrived in Constantinople
and secured permission from the Sultan to trade in Ottoman territories. In the
spring of 1613, the Dutch gift arrived. This shipload of objects was an expression
of gratitude to a ‘friend’, while the lavish gift also complied with the expectations
of the Ottoman court; and it represented the emergent Dutch republic by way of
material culture and goods as masters of trade. Published accounts of the gift list
a staggering number of valuable and extraordinary goods. In addition to Dutch
textiles and cheese, the Dutch gave Asian lacquerware accessories and furniture,
hundreds of pieces of porcelain, featherwork boxes, incised and gilded swords,
chairs made of ebony, mother-of-pearl vessels with gilt silver feet, ivory lathework,
hundreds of tulip bulbs – and birds of paradise. The Dutch gift was vast, though
judging by accounts of Islamic courtly gift practices, and Safavid–Ottoman
exchanges, for example, perhaps not exceptionally so. The contents of the gift
spanned the gamut from naturalia (such as the birds of paradise) to artificialia and
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Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland
9 Rembrandt van Rijn, Head
of a Man Wearing a Turban
with a Bird of Paradise, c.
1642. Pen and brown ink,
brown wash, white highlights,
17.9 × 16.9 cm. Paris: Musée du
Louvre, Fonds des dessins et
miniatures Petit format (RF
4688, Recto). Photo: © RMN-
Grand Palais/Art Resource,
NY.
© Association of Art Historians 2015
from indigenous to exogenous products in much the same way that early modern
collections especially of the sort identified as Wunderkammern did. The ‘rarieteyten van dese
landen’ presented to Ahmed I oscillate in kind and nature echoing the categories of
objects in collections of wonders and curiosities.
Why did the Dutch give so many things – and so many exotic things – to the ruler
of an empire whence so many exotica came? One contemporary account suggests
that the non-fungibility of such objects was key to their value: ‘These presents were
extraordinarily welcome and greatly appreciated and were considered much more
valuable than if they had just been so many vessels and beakers of gold and silver.
Because silver and gold beakers and cups that the Turks receive, they bring straight to
the Mint and make money of them.’ 40 While staggering in its proportions and scope,
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Claudia Swan

the Dutch gift makes sense in the context of diplomatic gifts.41 One key consideration
is display. In collections north and south of the Alps, display was associated with
autoptic experience as much as prestige, so too in the case of diplomatic gifts, sensory
experience exemplified by the category of wonder and display was also crucial.
According to the Dutch chronicler Willem Baudartius, Haga ‘honoured the Turkish
Emperor with some lovely presents all of which were exhibited publicly and for
all the world to see, under a long gallery, and they were all individually carried by
attendants, from the smallest to the largest of them, according to the custom of these
lands in order to amplify the display …’42
The 1612 gift is characterized by two primary qualities: the goods presented
by the Dutch were mercantile goods, objects they mobilized on a market they were
coming to dominate. They were market goods off the market, though. The other key
quality has to do with display, and spectacle. The matter of value and the crucial role
display played for all parties to the Dutch gift are embodied by the birds of paradise,
which also exemplify exotic objects on the move – and they were certainly not
fungible. Eight specimens were sold by Amsterdam merchants of Chinese porcelain
to the purchasing agent for the States General, shipped off, and in turn presented
to the Sultan in Constantinople. Although the birds transported to Constantinople
did not fly there, they did ascend in value. The invoice of the Amsterdam merchants
who sold birds to the purchasing agent for the States General shows that they
cost thirty-one guilders each.43 Baudartius’s account of the gifts describes ‘three
birds of paradise, valued at two thousand daalders, which the Sultan regarded with
amazement’.44 As we know that three such birds actually cost just under a hundred
guilders, the Sultan’s amazement seems to have increased the value exponentially –
to thirty-five times the current market value. It is worth noting that the arc of the
projection follows the pattern of actual profits rendered, in these very years, in
Amsterdam, on such goods as pepper and cloves.45

Conclusion
This paper has invoked mercantile, aesthetic, and political responses to the bird of
paradise in the seventeenth century in the context of the formation of the Dutch
Republic, in order to explore the interpretive potential of a single, paradigmatic
instance of exotica on the move, across cultural boundaries, impelled by trade
and political forces. Among many other things, the early modern history of the
bird embodies the complex relationship between trade, politics, epistemology,
and the arts. Yet for all of the descriptive efforts on the part of early modern
naturalists such as Clusius, the birds remained radically unknown. The exotic – also
signalled in Dutch by the nouns sonderling-heden and rariteyten – or items described
as exotic (uytheemsche; uwtlandsche; vreemd) occupied a limbo or no man’s land
between knowledge and ignorance, between local and remote, between nature
and economy. The facts of early modern global trade by which Amsterdam and
the Netherlands rose to ascendancy in the early seventeenth century are familiar;
less familiar, perhaps, are the instances of exchange of exotica across cultural
and national boundaries – represented here by birds of paradise presented to the
Ottoman sultan by the States General or turbaned merchants in the bustle of the
Amsterdam Exchange. In early modern Holland, the exotic depended for its value
on the coordinates of the market, and at the same time exercised a power beyond
market control, a power entwined with the political needs and desires of the
emergent Republic.

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Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland

Notes respectively. Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the
I thank Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin, who organized Dutch Golden Age, Chicago, IL, 2007, 38.
an excellent conference, where this paper was first presented, at 14 Exoticorum libri decem, quibus animalium, plantarum, aromatum, aliorumque
the Getty Museum, and the participants and respondents Joanne peregrinorum fructuum historiae describuntur. The volume includes
Pilsbury and Steven Nelson for invaluable feedback. Jessica descriptions and woodcuts of plants, animals, resins, and other
Keating and Daniel Margócsy kindly read and commented on a objects from the New World, Asia, India, and Africa, as well as
draft of this text, and I am grateful for their thoughtful comments Clusius’ Latin translations of Da Orta, Acosta, and Monardes. See
and ongoing support, on the move. Kaspar van Ommen, The Exotic World of Carolus Clusius 1526–1609, exh.
cat., Leiden, 2009.
15 Clusius, Exoticorum 2r.–v.; see Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, 257.
1 See David Attenborough and Errol Fuller, Drawn from Paradise: The Natural
16 Florike Egmond, ‘The exotic world of Carolus Clusius’, in van
History, Art and Discovery of the Bird of Paradise, New York, 2012.
Ommen, Exotic World of Clusius, 7–14.
2 On birds of paradise and their circulation in the early modern
17 Jessica Keating and Lia Markey, ‘“Indian” objects in Medici and
world, see Erwin Stresemann, ‘Die Entdeckungsgeschichte der
Austrian-Habsburg inventories’, in Jessica Keating and Lia Markey,
Paradiesvögel’, Journal of Ornithology, 95: 3, 1954, 263–91; Donald F.
eds, Captured objects: Inventories of early modern collections, special issue of
Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 1970, Chicago, IL, vol. 2, 181–3;
Journal of the History of Collections, 23: 2, 2011, 283–300; David Woodward,
Pamela Swadling, Plumes from Paradise: Trade Cycles in Outer Southeast Asia
‘Discoveries: Mapping the world’, in Jackson and Jaffer, Encounters,
and their Impact on New Guinea and Nearby Islands until 1920, Boroko, New
14–31.
Guinea, 1996; Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in
18 Cf. Florike Egmond, The World of Carolus Clusius: Natural History in the
Renaissance Europe, Chicago, IL, 2006, 248–52; Jean Michel Massing,
Making, 1550–1610, London, 2010, who argues that it is not possible
‘Paradisaea Apoda: The symbolism of the bird of paradise in the
‘to generalize about exotic naturalia and the market economy beyond
sixteenth century’, in Jay A. Levenson, ed., Encompassing the Globe:
the fact that access to such naturalia was predicated on world trade
Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries, 3 vols, Washington, DC,
and shipping’, 155. I am inclined to take a more generous view of
2007, vol. 3, 29–37; Christian Freigang, ‘Margaretes Paradiesvogel.
the matter.
Vereinnahmungen des Fremden und Wunderbaren aus der Neuen
19 Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch
Welt im frühneuzeitlichen Kunstdiskurs’, in Ludger Grenzmann
Golden Age, New Haven, CT, 2007.
et al., eds, Wechselseitige Wahrnehmung der Religionen im Spätmittelalter und in der
20 Peter Borschberg, ‘The Seizure of the Santa Catarina revisited: The
Frühen Neuzeit, New York and Berlin, 2009, 73–99; Attenborough and
Portuguese empire in Asia, VOC politics and the origins of the Dutch-
Fuller, Drawn from Paradise; and José Ramón Marcaida, ‘Rubens and the
Johor alliance (c. 1602–1616)’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 33: 1, 2002,
bird of paradise: Painting natural knowledge in the early seventeenth
31–62.
century’, Renaissance Studies, 28: 1, 2013, 112–27. For a deliriously
21 See above, note 6.
theoretical analysis of the early modern bird of paradise as gift, see
22 See, for example, Peter Borschberg, ‘The European musk trade with
Arun Saldanha, ‘Two birds of paradise in North Holland, 1592: The
Asia in the early modern period’, The Heritage Journal, 1: 1, 2004, 1–12;
gift in the exotic’, Parallax, 16: 1, 2010, 68–79.
Carla Nappi, ‘Surface tension: Objectifying ginseng in Chinese early
3 Claudia Swan, ‘Birds of paradise for the sultan: Early seventeenth-
modernity’, in Findlen, Early Modern Things, 31–52.
century Dutch–Turkish encounters and the uses of wonder’, De
23 Maximiliano Transylvanus, De Moluccis insulis, itemque aliis pluribus mirandis
Zeventiende Eeuw, 29: 1, 2013, 49–63.
quae nouissima Castellanorum nauigatio, Cologne, 1523, fol. B6v.; see also
4 Fernando Cremades, ed., Los inventarios de Carlos V y la familia imperial,
the first English translation in H. E. J. Stanley, The First Voyage Round the
Madrid, 2010, 3 vols, 3, 2456.
World, by Magellan, London, 1874, 129. Transylvanus’s account was twice
5 ‘Accoustremens de plumes venuz des Jndes, presentee de part l’empereur a madame…
printed in the 1520s and was also known by way of Giovanni Battista
le xxe jour d’aoust xbc xxiij’ are listed in Cremades, Los inventarios, 2445. See
Ramusio, Primo Volume delle Navigationi et Viaggi, Venice, 1550, 374r–379v.
Paul Vandenbroeck, ‘Amerindian art and ornamental objects in royal
24 Transylvanus, De Moluccis insulis, fol. B6v; Stanley, The First Voyage, 129.
collections: Brussels, Mechelen, Duurstede’, in Paul Vandenbroeck et al.,
25 Transylvanus, De Moluccis insulis, fol. B6v; Stanley, The First Voyage, 129.
America: Bride of the Sun, Antwerp, 1992, 99–119; and Deanna MacDonald,
26 Christian Feest, ‘Dürer et les premières évaluations européennes de
‘Collecting a New World: The ethnographic collections of Margaret of
l’art mexicain’, in Joëlle Rostkowski and Sylvie Devers, eds, Destins
Austria’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 33: 3, 2002, 649–63, esp. 658.
croisés. Cinq siècles de rencontres avec les Amérindiens, Paris, 1992, 107–19. See
6 Stresemann, ‘Die Entdeckungsgeschichte der Paradiesvogel’, 267.
also Freigang, ‘Margaretes Paradiesvogel’; Alessandra Russo, ‘Cortés’s
7 See Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800, London,
objects and the idea of New Spain: Inventories as spatial narratives’,
1965; Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740, Oxford
Journal of the History of Collections, 23: 2, 2011, 229–52.
and New York, 1989.
27 ‘Kunst als Wissensystem erst ermöglichte die klassifizierende Aneignung des Fremden’.
8 Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, eds, Oeuvres de Descartes, Paris, 1897, 11
Freigang, ‘Margaretes Paradiesvogel’, 73.
vols, vol. 4 Correspondance, nr. 33, 202–4, 15 May 1631.
28 Transylvanus, De Moluccis insulis, fol. B5r; Stanley, The First Voyage, 126–7.
9 Boudewijn Bakker et al., Het aanzien van Amsterdam: Panorama’s, plattegronden en
29 See principally Ogilvie, Science of Describing, chapter four.
profielen uit de Gouden Eeuw, Amsterdam, 2007, cat. no. 60, 259.
30 Massing, ‘Paradisaea Apoda’.
10 See Pieter Scheltema, De beurs van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1846;
31 See Roelof van Gelder, ‘Paradisjvogels in Enkhuizen. De relatie tussen
Lodewijk Petram, De bakermat van de beurs: Hoe in zeventiende-eeuws Amsterdam
van Linschoten en Bernardus Paludanus’, in Roelof van Gelder et al.,
de moderne aandelenhandel ontstond, Amsterdam, 2011.
eds, Souffrir pour parvenir. De wereld van Jan Huigen van Linschoten, Haarlem,
11 Joost Jonker and Keetie Sluyterman, At Home on the World Markets: Dutch
1998, 30–50; Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Itinerario, voyage ofte schipvaert…
International Trading Companies from the Sixteenth Century until the Present, The
near Oost ofte Portugaels Indien…, Amsterdam, 1596, 27; Iohn Huighen van
Hague, 2000, esp. chapter one, ‘The unfolding of a commercial world
Linschoten. his discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies, London, 1598, 35.
empire, 1550–1650’, 14–71; Ellinoor Bergvelt and Renée Kistenmaker,
32 Jan van Wely letter to Clusius 13 June 1605, Leiden UBL VUL 101; see
eds, De wereld binnen handbereik. Nederlandse kunst- en rariteitenverzamelingen,
Clusius, Exoticorvm, 361–2. My thanks to Anne Goldgar for bringing
1585–1735, 2 vols, Amsterdam, 1992.
van Wely’s letter to my attention, and to Esther van Gelder for
12 The literature is vast. In addition to sources already cited in n. 1, see
granting me access to the Huygens Institute digital annotations of the
Hermann Pollig, Exotische Welten. Europäische Phantasien, Stuttgart-Bad
Clusius correspondence.
Cannstatt, 1987; Gereon Sievernich and Hendrik Budde, eds, Europa
33 Herbert Haupt and Rotraud Bauer, ‘Das Kunstkammerinventar Kaiser
und der Orient 800–1900, Gütersloh/München, 1989; and Wilfried
Rudolfs II., 1607–1611’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien,
Seipel, ed., Exotica. Portugals Entdeckungen im Spiegel fürstlicher Kunst- und
72, 1976, 10, item nos 136–41 and 143–5.
Wunderkammern der Renaissance, Milan, 2000.
34 van Ommen, Exotic World of Clusius, 95.
13 The Flemish doctor and botanist Rembert Dodoens, the French
35 See Bob van den Boogert et al., Rembrandt’s Treasures, exh. cat., Zwolle,
botanical author Jean Franeau, and the English author John Parkinson,
1999, 79.

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Claudia Swan

36 Claudia Swan, ‘Lost in translation: Exoticism in early modern

Holland’, in Axel Langer, ed., Art in Iran and Europe in the 17th Century:
Exchange and Reception, Zürich, 2013, 100–16.
37 Queen Elizabeth I had a plumage in her collection, which was
recorded by Thomas Platter. See Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, book 1,
vol. 2, 181, n. 356.
38 Eric Jorink, Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715,
trans. Peter Mason, Leiden, 2010, 73 and 274 ff.
39 See Swan, ‘Birds of paradise for the sultan’.
40 Willem Baudartius, Memoryen ofte Cort verhael der gedenck-weerdichste so
kercklicke als werltlicke gheschiedenissen van Nederlandt…, second ed., Arnhem,
1624–25, 189.
41 Anthony Cutler, ‘Significant gifts: Patterns of exchange in late antique,
Byzantine, and early Islamic diplomacy’, Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies, 38: 1, 2008, 79–101.
42 Baudartius, Memorien, 188.
43 The receipts are preserved in the ‘Secrete Kas Turkije’, N.A. 12593.9;
see also N. de Roever, ‘Een Vorstelijk Geschenk. Een blik op de
vaderlandsche nijverheid in den aanvang der zeventiende eeuw’, in
Oud Holland 1, 1883, 169–88; Swan, ‘Birds of paradise for the sultan’.
44 Willem Baudartius, Memorien, ofte Kort verhael der gedenckuveerdighste
geschiedenissen van Nederlandt ende Vranckrijck principalijk, Arnhem, 1620, 13r.
In this first edition, the list opens with: ‘Voor eerst drie Paradys voghels,
die-men schatte op tvvee duysent Daelders, die de Keyser met groote vervvonderinghe
aenghesien heeft’.
45 See Douglas A. Irwin, ‘Mercantilism as strategic trade policy: The
Anglo-Dutch rivalry for the East India trade’, Journal of Political Economy,
99: 6, 1991, 1296–314.

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