#3: One Chicken Cage – or Two? - [Reception stories. The Antiquitatum Thesaurus blog]

This article traces the genesis of two illustrations in Bernard de Montfaucon's ‘L'Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures’ (1719), which show two different versions of a chicken cage in which the chickens required for a Roman divination ritual were kept. The analysis shows that only a single antique work can be considered as the model for both illustrations, but that it was reproduced in such different ways in early modern drawings and prints that Montfaucon could not have been aware of the original identity of his two models.