Urban pigeons, also known as ‘rats of the air’, are often seen as a nuisance today, but these crafty birds are in fact wild descendants of prized birds. domesticated ancestors. Documented in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform script, pigeons have historically been valued as food, sacred symbols, pets and – thanks to a remarkable ability to travel home – as messengers.
Bird enthusiast Emil Schachtzabel (1850-1941) was particularly fascinated by the wide variety of hybrid types that breeders, also called enthusiasts, created over time. He drew on 18th century European interest in beautiful pigeonswhich were and still are bred for unique characteristics such as size, behavior, feather appearance or color.
In his groundbreaking work Illustriertes Prachtwerk resembles Taubenrassen (1906), often referred to simply as Beautiful work—a ‘masterpiece’ of pigeon breeds – Schachtzabel described diverse and chimeric varieties. He introduces the ‘fantail’, the ‘nun’, the ‘frillback’ and the ‘cropper’, the last of which can puff out its chest to the size of a grapefruit.
The lithographs included in Beautiful work were based on watercolor stencils from Anton Schonerand the imaginative illustrations fuse Schachtzabel’s interest in both artistry and the evolution of feathered creatures.
“Schachtzabel combined two knowledge traditions that did not always overlap: the practical wisdom of pigeon fanciers and the taxonomic theories of naturalists,” says The Public Domain Reviewfollow-up:
As described in the Beautiful workIn the foreword, Schöner placed his lithographic pigeons at carefully chosen angles to give the enthusiast a better sense of golden proportions to which his or her own breeds might aspire.
Beautiful work is held in the collection of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which has digitized the original book.
