Four Birds: An Eagle, A Swan, a Stork, and a Rooster

From the Getty Museum record

Divided into four framed compartments, four species of birds are set against different solid or patterned backgrounds. The illumination would have once opened section twelve of *On the Properties of Things*, an encyclopedic text first written in Latin but found here in French translation. The book on birds appropriately comes after a section on the element of air and is then followed by texts on fish, the regions of the earth, metals, plants, animals, and the five senses. Although some copies of *On the Properties of Things* feature a more fantastical display of the creatures covered in the book on birds, like griffins, this copy keeps to more mundane species: an eagle, a swan, a stork, and a rooster. Each of these birds carried religious, cultural, and/or medicinal associations within the medieval period; for example, eagles were frequently associated with Saint John the Evangelist while storks were considered to be harbingers of spring. Ingredients derived from roosters and swans, meanwhile, could be used to counter snake venom or fight against congestion, respectively. This kind of holistic view of the natural world, its symbolic meanings, and practical uses is a hallmark of works like *On the Properties of Things*, which were frequently copied and read in university settings and in luxurious illuminated versions, by members of the nobility.