Landscape with the Flight into Egypt by Savery, Roelandt

In 1624, the Flemish painter Roelandt Savery completed what looks like a busy biblical landscape. The title is Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, and the holy family is in there if you look carefully, Joseph leading a donkey, Mary holding the infant Jesus, but they are deliberately small, almost swallowed by the forest around them.

What Savery really wanted you to see was the animals. Deer, sheep, cattle, and a dense canopy of birds fill every corner of the panel. The man who commissioned the work, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, gave Savery access to his private imperial menagerie in Prague, a collection that included the first live dodo ever brought to Europe.

Savery painted the dodo from life more than once, and those studies now carry an extraordinary weight. When the last dodo died less than a century later, his careful, observed birds became the most accurate visual record of a living dodo that exists, the basis for centuries of scientific reconstruction. A biblical miniature tucked inside a painting that turned out to preserve something no text could save.

Look closely into the crowd of animals around the archway. One of them is a visitor from a lost world.