Raffaels Papageienzimmer: Ritual, Raumfunktion und Dekoration im Vatikanpalast der Renaissance (review)

Now that Nikki Moustaki's Parrots for Dummies (2005) has answered innumerable questions concerning the present-day care and welfare of that astounding bird, an even more exhaustive publication deals with its role in the art and literature of the High Renaissance and in later periods, focused upon Raphael's Sala dei Pappagalli. Though destined for students of art, architecture, and church history, this fine German monograph will be of use also to humanists in many other fields as well as scholars of early zoology.

Weddigen addresses himself to a host of issues pertinent to the startlingly significant role of the parrot in Europe, beginning with the importation of that exotic creature around 1500 from both the New World and from the Far East. Suitably, the book opens with a sensitive poem by Gregory Warren Wilson, "The Room of the Parrots." Unlike most publications, this one delivers far more than it promises.

Awesomely erudite, the author explores Raphael's Sala dei Pappagalli, its genesis, role in Vatican ceremony, liturgy, sociology, furnishing, and tapestry. These serve as a point of departure for his exhaustive, entertaining, and illuminating study. Written with appropriate wit, drive, and poetic enthu-siasm, Weddigen's book is encyclopedic, extending his subject right through the nineteenth century.

Miraculously garrulous, the parrot became no less than the Virgin's Ave Maria and the pope's very own Papagallo, that intelligent avian epitomizing the ways in which divine creation anticipated those of holy and unholy worlds. More than grist for many a merely theological mill, parrots, along with monkeys, symbolized the mimetic aspect of art.

Though the book boasts a strikingly parrot emerald green, raw silk-like cover, most of the illustrations within, excepting six two-page spreads dealing with the Sala's reconstruction, are sadly so uniformly small and so often muddily printed, that they often verge upon invisibility. Let's hope that a flying wedge of parrot lovers succeeds in winning a second edition of this splendid work, in which one can follow all the author's invaluable studies in image as well as word, appreciating the ways nature's most remarkable avian contributed to the genesis of works of art imitating its many-feathered, eloquent endowments.