Paris

Paris occupies a crucial place in the black bird’s history as Casper Gutman tells it: it is where the object spent decades disguised as a modest statuette, where Charilaos Konstantinides identified it, and where Gutman’s long pursuit began. In Gutman’s account, the city is not merely a stop on a route across Europe; it is a market in which the bird’s apparent worth and its actual history diverged.

A refuge for a disguised object

Gutman places the bird in Paris after its earlier association with the family of Don José Monino y Redondo, Count of Floridablanca. He says it appeared there around the time the city received Carlists who had left Spain after the Carlist War. One of them may have brought it, but Gutman stresses that the carrier probably did not know its real value. The bird had been painted or enameled to resemble an interesting but otherwise unremarkable black statuette, a concealment Gutman connects with the troubles in Spain.

That disguise allowed the object to circulate without being recognized. Gutman describes it as passing among private owners and dealers in Paris for about seventy years, where it was treated as an ordinary object rather than a historically consequential one. The city becomes a setting for prolonged misrecognition: the bird is physically present, but its significance remains hidden beneath its surface.

Charilaos Konstantinides identifies the bird

Gutman dates the turning point to 1911, when the Greek dealer Charilaos Konstantinides found the statuette in an obscure Paris shop. Konstantinides recognized what lay beneath the enamel and acquired it. Gutman credits him with tracing much of the bird’s history and identifying its true nature; Gutman says that he later extracted much of that history from the dealer and added further details himself.

The discovery changes the meaning of the bird’s Parisian circulation. What had seemed like a long sequence of low-value transfers becomes, in retrospect, a period during which an extraordinary object remained hidden in plain sight. Its concealment had not erased its history, but it had prevented that history from translating into a price or a claim of authenticity.

Research, value, and theft

Konstantinides, Gutman says, did not hurry to sell. The bird’s intrinsic value was already considerable, but a far higher price might be obtained once its authenticity was established beyond doubt. Gutman speculates that Konstantinides may have intended to deal with one of the wealthy modern orders descended from the old Order of St. John of Jerusalem, including English, Prussian, Italian, or German branches. In this account, Paris is both a place of discovery and a base for research that could transform the bird from a concealed collectible into an authenticated historical prize.

Gutman says that, a year to the day after Konstantinides acquired the bird, he read in London that the dealer’s establishment had been burgled and Konstantinides murdered. Gutman went to Paris the next day. The bird had disappeared among a large quantity of stolen property. He reasoned that its thief had probably taken it without recognizing what it was: a thief who understood its importance, he argues, would not have burdened himself with lesser loot. The theft therefore repeats the earlier pattern of concealment, turning the bird’s apparent insignificance into a possible explanation for its disappearance.

Paris in Gutman’s pursuit

Gutman’s relationship to Paris is chiefly that of a pursuer arriving after a decisive loss. He had learned enough from Konstantinides to grasp the bird’s importance, but the Paris burglary deprived him of the object before he could secure it. He describes his subsequent search as lasting seventeen years, eventually tracing the bird to a Russian general’s household near Constantinople. Paris thus marks the point from which a local discovery becomes a prolonged international pursuit.

The city’s narrative significance lies in the contrast between what the bird is and what people believe it to be. First, a coating lets it pass for a black statuette; then its rediscovery raises questions of historical proof and enormous value; finally, its theft obscures its whereabouts once more. Gutman’s account makes Paris the hinge between concealment and recognition, and between the bird’s long, quiet circulation and the conflict that follows its renewed pursuit.