Jean Hansell

Jean Hansell was a doctor who wrote this book after several other ones about pigeons and pigeon cotes as well as articles about egg-toppers, eye-baths,and cormorant fishing. I long to know what egg-toppers are but at any rate I'm guessing those articles are about birds.

Here she treats the iconography of the dove over millennia, from ancient Egypt to modern times. (The bird is apparently called a dove when it is imbued with religious or other sympolic meaning and a pigeon, otherwise.) The dove is more pervasive and present for far longer in art than I would have guessed, and the book is, if not rivetting, interesting and throughout it Hansell gives solid information and is open to various interpretations of the bird's significance and portrayal in different contexts. It's full of illustrations too, most all of them works I'd never seen. There are line-drawings by a friend of Hansell', copies of the original works, that are pretty clumsy and the illustration captions fail to give dimensions and media, but never mind--this is an art-book but Hansell's motive in writing this was I'm guessing to spread the love of pigeons and only secondarily if even that to write a conventional art book.

This is hardly essential reading but if you too spot it going for a song in a remainders shop it's certainly worth buying;… (mehr)