Schama is for the birds

Simon Schama is a British historian known for his high brow television commentary in the tradition of Kenneth Clark. (His passionate appreciation for Bernini’s sculpture is practically operatic.) He has curated an exhibit in den Haag at the Mauritshuis called BIRDS that explores how humans have always had an emotionally conflicted relationship with birds. We see them as symbols of beauty, freedom, and spirituality, and yet we also cage them, hunt them, and eat them. Schama’s purpose seems to want us to think about our broader relationship with nature and biodiversity.

Apparently Schama got interested in birds during the COVID lockdown when he was sequestered in his home in the Hudson Valley. Having better connections than the rest of us, he got enough funding to put together an exhibition that illustrated his avian fascination.  As an historian, he’s not going to ignore ancient Egyptian bird objects.

Nor is going to overlook da Vinci puzzling out flight in his sketchbooks, Rembrandt’s harshly realistic brace of dead birds…

or even the feathers decorating his portrait.

Most interesting for me was the “Domino sparrow,” the bird accidentally involved in the Dutch Domino Day controversy. How come I never heard about this? It’s a totally bizarre incident. Apparently in 2005 a sparrow flew into a hall in Leeuwarden where 3.5 million dominos had been set up for a record attempt at World Domino Day. The sparrow knocked over 23,000 tiles  before being shot by a sniper. You can imagine the uproar that followed.  Lawsuits, threats against the individuals involved, general outrage on the part of the bird-loving public which one would think outnumbers the domino obsessed public by a considerable margin.

(I wondered how Kit Carson would have handled the incident. The tiny sparrow wasn’t worth eating, and its feathers weren’t worth decorating a hat, but on the other hand, the opportunity to show off one’s marksmanship…)

With a scholarly flourish that avoids being too pedantic, Schama has us consider confinement and pure flight by comparing two masterpieces, Carel Fabritius’s chained goldfinch and Brâncusi’s abstract soaring sculpture “Bird in Space.”