ANIMAL LIFE IN ITALIAN PAINTING 



the other's movement. Of another group of three, all 

 alert so that you feel that the slightest sound would 

 send them scuttling to their burrows, one sits up and 

 cuffs another with quickly thrust-out paw.^ Two tiny 

 storks or egrets, in either case quite out of proportion to 

 the human figures, stand in the river, and an eagle 

 perches in a tree. Sir E. T. Cook- calls this bird a 

 cormorant, to which it has some resemblance, but I be- 

 lieve that it is an eagle. The beak and feet particularly 

 should be noticed. It is the same bird as the one which 

 sits on the tree in Basaiti's Madonna of the Meadow. 



It might be thought that a web-footed bird like the 

 cormorant would not be a percher, and that this would 

 alone decide the question, but it appears to be a fact 

 that it does settle and sometimes even nest in a tree : 

 this was noticed as its habit as far back as Pliny.^ 



Two rabbits come out of their burrows in the 

 Parnassus (Louvre), and there is a squirrel which seems 



^ The rabbit is very frequently painted, and was a common feature 

 of Italian country life. Annibale Caro, advising Torquato Conti as to the 

 building of the Villa Catena near Poli in 1563, speaks of a deer park, 

 dovecots, and rabbit-warrens as the first necessities of a country house. — 

 See Rudolfo Lanciani, Wanderings in the Roman Campagna, 1909, p. 212. 



^ Handbook to the National Gallery, vol. i. p. 642. 



^ " Cormorants not uncommonly breed on inland lakes and swamps, 

 especially in the proximity of trees. Cormorants perch with ease on rocks, 

 posts, and limbs of trees . . . and not infrequently they roost in trees with 

 the head drawn back upon the shoulders.'' — A. H. Evans in Catnbridge 

 Natural History (Birds), vol. ix. p. 78. 



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