12 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I49 



choir of the church of Santa Maria in Organo, in Verona, said by 

 Bergstrom to date from 1499, somewhat later than our painting. It 

 also recalls the early German portrait of a man with a caged bird, 

 practically synchronous with the Bermejo, in the fine arts museum of 

 Strasbourg. This picture, discussed at some length by Naumann 

 (1934) and by Bergstrom (1957), has a caged bird, not a goldfinch 

 but apparently a thrush, above and behind the man's head, and has the 

 words "Ora pro me" (pray for me) in conspicuous letters placed near 

 the mouth of the sitter, certainly an indication of hopefulness. 



It is significant that a "healing" bird, or a "savior" bird in time of 

 plague, should be the kind used by Bermejo, as there is other evi- 

 dence that the saint reproduced was a person who, in addition to being 

 a great scholar, was obviously much interested in the natural sciences, 

 as indicated by the compass on his desk, and especially in medicine, 

 as suggested by the activities of his underlings in the background — 

 one monk apparently concocting some kind of herbal medicine over 

 a fire and the other sorting plants brought in from the garden. 



The floor of the arched opening at the back of the room leading to 

 the outdoors is raised. There are letters on it forming incomplete 

 words which are quite undecipherable, although one word, interrupted 

 by the stand of the bishop's lectern, might be completed to read "medi- 

 cus." If this is the case, it complements the ideas suggested by the 

 presence of the healing bird and by the activities of the two monks. 

 The combined implications of a scholarly, literary bishop, interested in 

 natural science, particularly those aspects of it that relate to medicine, 

 all suggest that the man portrayed is Saint Isidore of Seville, the au- 

 thor of one of the earliest and greatest of the medieval encyclopedias, 

 the Etymologiae. Some years ago, when I first became interested in 

 this possible identification, Dr. Erwin Panofsky reminded me (in 

 lift.) that the medically pertinent sections of the Etymologiae were 

 known and separately copied as liber Isidori episcopi dc medicina, as, 

 for example, in the Durham Ms. Hunter 100. 



In identifying the saint as Isidore the following thoughts are worth 

 mentioning. In Medieval and early Renaissance culture a certain 

 degree of interest and significance was attached to some words hav- 

 ing more than one meaning. What today would be dismissed as a 

 play on words or a pun was then looked upon by some as meaning- 

 ful, as a common denominator, as it were, between otherwise diver- 

 gent concepts. I have already noted that the porphyrio was known 

 both as calamon and as porphyrio. both names referring to its purplish 

 color. It so happens that in his Etymologiae, Isidore makes frequent 

 reference to some of the writings of the noted Latin author Por- 



