A Darkness More Than Night - Michael Connelly [32]
“Uh, it’s brown mostly. Like on the back and the wings.”
As he spoke he took a couple of folded pages of notebook paper and a pen out of his pockets. He shoved his half-eaten chili dog out of the way and got ready to take notes.
“Okay, modern iconography is what you’d expect. The owl is the symbol of wisdom and truth, denotes knowledge, the view of the greater picture as opposed to the small detail. The owl sees in the night. In other words, seeing through the darkness is seeing the truth. It is learning the truth, therefore, knowledge. And from knowledge comes wisdom. Okay?”
McCaleb didn’t need to take notes. What Doran had said was obvious. But just to keep his head in it he wrote down a line.
Seeing in the dark = Wisdom
He then underlined the last word.
“Okay, fine. What else?”
“That’s basically what I have as far as contemporary application. But when I go backward it gets pretty interesting. Our friend the owl has totally rejuvenated his reputation. He used to be a bad guy.”
“Tell me, Brass.”
“Get your pencil out. The owl is seen repeatedly in art and religious iconography from early medieval through late Renaissance periods. It is found often depicted in religious allegorical displays — paintings, church panels and stations of the cross. The owl was —”
“Okay, Brass, but what did it mean?”
“I’m getting to that. Its meaning could be different from depiction to depiction and according to species depicted. But essentially its depiction was the symbol of evil.”
McCaleb wrote the word down.
“Evil. Okay.”
“I thought you’d be more excited.”
“You can’t see me. I’m standing on my hands here. What else you have?”
“Let me run down the list of hits. These are taken from the extracts, the critical literature of the art of the period. References to depictions of owls come up as the symbol of — and I quote — doom, the enemy of innocence, the Devil himself, heresy, folly, death and misfortune, the bird of darkness, and finally, the torment of the human soul in its inevitable journey to eternal damnation. Nice, huh? I like that last one. I guess they didn’t sell too many bags of potato chips with owls on them back in the fourteen hundreds.”
McCaleb didn’t answer. He was busy scribbling down the descriptions she had read to him.
“Read that last one again.”
She did and he wrote it down verbatim.
“Now, there is more,” Doran said. “There is also some interpretation of the owl as being the symbol of wrath as well as the punishment of evil. So it obviously was something that meant different things at different times and to different people.”
“The punishment of evil,” McCaleb said as he wrote it down.
He looked at the list he had written.
“Anything else?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Probably. Was there anything about books showing some of this stuff or the names of artists or writers who used the so-called ‘bird of darkness’ in their work?”
McCaleb heard some pages turning over the phone and Doran was silent for a few moments.
“I don’t have a lot here. No books but I can give you the name of some of the artists mentioned and you could probably get something over the Internet or maybe the library at UCLA.”
“All right.”
“I have to do this quickly. We’re about to go here.”
“Give it to me.”
“All right, I have an artist named Bruegel who painted a huge face as the gateway to hell. A brown owl was nesting in the nostril of the face.”
She started laughing.
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “I’m just giving you what I found.”
“Fine,” McCaleb said, writing the description down. “Go on.”
“Okay, two others noted for using the owl as the symbol of evil were Van Oostanen and Dürer. I don’t have specific paintings.”
He heard more pages turning. He asked for spellings of the artists’ names and wrote them down.
“Okay, here it is. This last guy’s work is supposedly replete with owls all over the place. I can’t pronounce his first name. It’s spelled H-I-E-R-O-N-Y-M-U-S. He was Netherlandish, part of the northern Renaissance. I guess owls were big up there.”
McCaleb looked at the paper in front of him. The name she had just spelled seemed