Roelant Savery

Much of what people picture when they imagine a dodo, plump and almost comically round, comes from Roelant Savery. He was among the first artists to paint the flightless bird, and he seems to have worked from a stuffed, overfed specimen, which is why his dodos look heavier than the living animal probably was.

Savery painted it because he had access to one of the strangest collections in Europe. Born in Flanders, he became a court painter to Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in Prague around 1604, and Rudolf kept a menagerie of rare animals beside his cabinet of wonders. Savery filled his canvases with them, crowding paradise scenes and stories of Orpheus, the mythical musician who charmed beasts, with creatures drawn from life.

He was also a pioneer of the flower still life, arranging dozens of species, as many as 60 in a single picture, that could never have bloomed in the same season. He settled in Utrecht in 1619 and died there in 1639. Other artists went on copying his dodos for generations, long after the last living bird was gone.