Still Life with Birds

When the paintings in the Roman studio of the painter known as the Cavalier d'Arpino were listed after their seizure in 1607, this canvas was entry 38, with no artist's name attached. It was simply "a picture with various dead birds, without frames". A payment of 1619 is recorded for three frames, one of them for the picture "where there are various dead birds". Along the top, a long row hangs by the feet from a wooden rod, including a goldfinch, woodpeckers and a turtle dove. Below lie a mallard, a jay, a pheasant, a curlew and a barn owl. Only one creature is alive, a little owl on the left, staring straight out. As late as 1959, the gallery's own catalogue still gave the canvas to an anonymous Flemish master of the late 1500s.