This came as a surprise! I’m used to seeing phallus-birds in other media — especially in the late medieval lead badges recovered from various European rivers, the Seine, the Thames and the drowned villages of the Scheldt estuary in the Netherlands — which, as I have suggested elsewhere, probably derive from the discovery of Roman examples in the northern Empire — and on Italian ceramics, etc. [see below], but had never thought to spot one in an album amicorum !

The lady’s action seems unambiguous, but what of the young man? Is he hiding behind that tree? Is he looking to us for assistance? The album has pages dated Venice 1583 and 1584, and as recent work has shown, the phallus-bird was popular in Italy …. [e.g. Allen Grieco, “From Roosters to Cocks: Renaissance Dietary Theory and Sexuality”, in Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, S. F. Matthews-Grieco ed., (Aldershot 2010), pp. 89-140.]

The albarello painting (below) is not unlike our album image, in that here too, the woman exposes her sex to the phallus-bird (that she has just released from its cage)

The bells around the neck of the phallus — as in the images above and below — are certainly derived from Roman tintinnabula [suspended apotropaic bronze ornaments with bells].

Of course the phallus-bird was known outside Italy — as I note in my The Secret Middle Ages (new ed. 2025! Hurry while stocks last!), in 1551 Rabelais tells us that Lent daydreams about penises flying and creeping up walls, not such an entirely arbitrary piece of grotesquerie as might at first have been thought, for Brantome, recalling the same period, attests the real existence of such wall-paintings in Spain, but I repeat here the French print of c.1600 reproduced as a pornographic variant of the motif illustrated here:

https://albumamicorumear-e4qvahs764.live-website.com/fowling-for-men-or-fools/

medieval antecedents

The extraordinary, bizarre late medieval lead badges found in the Netherlands and from riverine deposits throughout Northern Europe include many such phallus- birds of c.1400 — in this manuscript of the Decretals illuminated in 1392 a deft huntress shoots one down!

Note how both the marginal miniature and the badge have the bell round the neck of the phallus-bird.

A few other such badges, mostly via the Kunera web-site devoted to the badges.