Domesticating the wild: sources and representations of animalia from the New World in the European arts of the Modern Age. The case of parrots and armadillos

Abstract

Summary: With the arrival in America, dozens of animals were brought to Europe as food, but especially as exotic pets. Their presence in gardens and Wunderkammern soon aroused the curiosity of scientists and artists, who included these new species in their books and paintings. In the case of artists, their representation was strongly conditioned by the previous presence or not of species of the same family. To show the differences according to the case and the network of meanings and uses given in art to the different American species, we will take the parrots as an example of a family known since Antiquity by Europeans and the armadillos as a sample of a family unknown in the Old Continent.