Detail from Christ is Born as Man’s Redeemer (Episode from The Story of the Redemption of Man), 1500–1520
South Netherlandish
Wool warp; wool and silk wefts
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1938 (38.28)
The bird with black-and-white plumage perched in the leafless tree above the scene in which Man is shackled to the earth is the common Eurasian magpie. The bird was repaired in the restoration of the tapestry, but Timothy Husband, the curator who oversaw the restoration, and a competent ornithologist, says that the enough of the original remained to be quite certain that it was a magpie.
This video documents the restoration of the tapestry undertaken by Museum conservators:
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