Book excerpt: The first volume of Great Bird Paintings includes pictures painted in oils or water-colours before 1699. For centuries, Western art was tied to the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church. Symbolic birds appeared in many renaissance religious paintings. Delicate preparatory water-colour sketches were made for these. Artists who wished to paint birds, shrewdly chose scenes of the animals entering Noah's Ark and the Garden of Eden, which gave them the legitimate excuse to introduce birds. By the end of the sixteenth century, the artists had altered the balance and relegated the biblical scene to the background, with the birds claiming full attention in the foreground. In the mid-seventeenth century they were free of clerical demands and in the Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish painting they produced hundreds of very fine canvases full of delightful birds. At long last, they could fully indulge their delight in painting the beauty of colour and form of the birds that gave them so much pleasure.