(How to plan a walking tour of the best museums in D.C.)
So delicate are the images in the four books, the museum almost never has them on display. In the course of the exhibition—May through November 2—the pages will be turned just three times.
Perhaps the most glorious art work in the exhibition is the epic “Noah’s Family Assembling the Animals Before the Ark,” painted around 1660 by the Flemish artist Jan van Kessell the Elder. The Noahs—dressed in their Flemish finest—herd a zoofull of animals across a distinctively Northern European landscape toward a distant, barely-visible boat. Camels, turtles, monkeys, ostriches—even North American turkeys—ramble across the frame. But it’s the sky that commands our attention: A riot of birds, two-by-two, winging their way to safety.
“It was such a joy to work with the Natural History Museum managers as they identified all the birds in this painting,” says Libby. “They studied it to see what the artist got right, and why they might have gotten some things wrong.”
For example, at the painting’s extreme upper right, a pair of Paradisaea apoda—Greater Birds of Paradise, from New Guinea—streak into the image like plumed missiles. Besides their glorious color, their most distinctive feature is the fact that they have no legs.
