Lumerpa, shining bird

"The Lumerpa. Fame.
This is born in Asia Magna and shines so brightly that it absorbs its shadows. And in dying it does not lose this light, and the feathers never fall out. And the feather which is detached ceases to shine."
- from "The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci" chapter XLIII, A Bestiary, page 1080

(I was using an out-of-print English-translation publication of this, but you can find it online as well- although it's still in Italian there, you can Babelfish it and find the entry to which I refer. http://www.museoscienza.org/leonardo/animali/bestiario.htm )

That is the only place I can find in which the Lumerpa is mentioned. I wonder where Leonardo got that story from, since all the other entries in his bestiary are standard. He did not provide an illustration for us, so I based its shape on its cousin firebirds.

Asia Magna, by the way, is a fictitious land bridge connecting Asia to North America. Much larger than the real Bering land bridge ever was, it eliminated most of the Pacific Ocean. It was theorized to exist by cartographers in Leonardo's time, since it was all Terra Incognita out there anyway. A fantasy land for a fantasy bird... very appropriate.

For this image, I referred to a starchart. These are the constellations you would see in late Winter, in the Northern Hemisphere, looking North. The trees are... hemlock, I think they're called. If there really was an Asia Magna, and if there really were lumerpae living in it, this is how it would look.