Amazilia castaneiventris
栗腹蜂鸟
Amazilia castaneiventris
Chestnut-bellied Amazili
Ten ways of seeing
- upright 1.34 : 1
First Look
夫象物必在于形似，形似须全其骨气。
—— 唐·张彦远《历代名画记》
Likeness is the threshold; bone-and-breath is the point.
The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles on the bird. Take the posture before the plumage. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there.
Name and Thing
The binomial is Amazilia castaneiventris: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. The Chinese name 栗腹蜂鸟 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
The smallest of birds: a needle-fine bill, a forked tubular tongue, wings beating so fast the bird hovers and even flies backwards. Its colour is not pigment but structure — light bent by feather barbules, changing with the angle.No colour group is recorded. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.
Composition
Tall and narrow, the bird perched mid-branch with generous margins above and below. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. Blank paper is not unfinished work: it is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
In the later nineteenth century chromolithography took over: colour printed rather than painted, line demoted. Take a loupe to three places: petal edge, leaf vein, caption. An unbroken line means engraving; colour crossing the outline means a hand. If you mean to copy it: block in the broad shapes and colours first, detail last; lithographic softness comes from thin washes — two or three pale layers will get you close.
Poetic Resonance
夫列子御风而行，泠然善也，旬有五日而后反。
—— 《庄子·逍遥游》
Liezi rode the wind and came back after fifteen days, so light was his going.
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the bird itself becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
For the Aztecs the hummingbird was warrior and sun; for Victorian Europe it was the ultimate ornament, millions killed for breast jewellery. China has no tradition here — and that blank is itself a history of exchange. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
Season and Place
temperate hummingbirds follow the bloom north and back, thousands of kilometres a year. the name arrives with late-Qing travel writing. The year 1861 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Much of what that generation knew of such birds came from specimens and cages; read locality and season both as hearsay.
The Book and the Hand
“Gould's Hummingbirds” carries only John Gould's name. A plate is collective work: drawer, engraver and colourist were different hands, and the unnamed ones decided how good it looks.
What to Take Away
Carry three rules away: whole before detail; line before colour; picture before book. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1861 gave a whole day to a single flower.
About this plate
New Granada
This unique bird has been in my collection for a long time; it was sent to me, with a number of other Humming-Birds, by Mr. Mark, Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul at Bogota, without any information as to where it was collected.
It has so many distinctive characters that it cannot be confounded with any other species, As I have nothing to add to the brief remark respecting it published in the ‘Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London,’ I cannot do better than repeat them here.
This species differs from A. cerviniventris in the much greater depth of the chestnut colouring of the abdomen, under tail-coverts and tail; in size it is considerably less than that species, being even smaller than A. beryllina, to which it offers an alliance in the colouring of its wings, but from which it is distinguished by the chestnut red of its abdomen; the white feathers of the thighs are much developed and very conspicuous.
Crown of the head, upper part of the back, and shoulders reddish bronze; rump and upper tail-coverts reddish with a bronzy lustre; wings purplish brown, with the exception of the basal portions of the primaries and secondaries, which are rufous; tail dark chestnut, tipped with a bronzy lustre, which is most conspicuous on the centre feathers; throat, fore part of the neck, breast, and upper part of the abdomen shining golden green; under surface of the shoulders, lower part of the abdomen, and under tail-coverts fine chestnut red; thighs white; upper mandible brownish black; under mandible fleshy yellow, except at the tip, which is brownish black.
The figures are of the size of life. The plant is the Pitcairnia echinata.
References
- Amazilius castaneiventris, Gould in Proc. of Zool. Soc., part xxiv. p. 150.
