PELICAN. - A bird of the order Steganopodes, family Pelecanidae, which lives on the shores of warm inland lakes; its white plumage tends toward a yellowish hue; its strong, long beak is equipped with a dilatable membrane forming a pouch that serves as a reservoir for fish intended for its young. When feeding them, it presses the pouch against its neck in such a way that it appears as though its breast is opening with the tip of its beak, whence the origin of the legends that will be cited. In Holy Scripture, it is an unclean bird (Lev. 11:18 in the Hebrew text = *onocrotalus* in the Vulgate; cf. also *pellicanus* in Ps. 101:7), but its identification with our pelican is uncertain.
Under the influence of the *Physiologus* (q.v.), the *Clavis Scripturae* of the Pseudo-Melito (Carolingian), and the Bestiaries (q.v.), the pelican has been proposed as a symbol of the preacher, penance, charity, the Eucharist, etc. But the pelican is above all the symbol of Christ the Redeemer; indeed, the Christian compiler of the *Physiologus* (Greek recension, ed. F. Sbordone, Milan 1936, pp. 16-19; Latin version B, ed. F. J. Carmody, Paris 1939, p. 17), after recounting that the pelican kills its young and raises them again after three days by sprinkling them with its own blood, which flows from a wound in its breast, sees in this vivifying blood of the pelican a figure of the redeeming blood of Christ. St. Augustine, drawing on this, exclaims: «Habet ergo haec avis, si vere ita est, magnam similitudinem carnis Christi, cuius sanguine vivificati sumus» (Enarr. in Ps., 101, § 8: PL 37, 1299). The pelican is a symbol of the Redeemer for St. Thomas in the *Adoro te devote*, for Dante in the *Paradiso* (XXV, V. 113), and for artists who placed it in a roundel above the cornice or sometimes (though more rarely) at the foot of the cross. Giotto’s pupils appear to have been the first to use this iconographic motif, as in the master’s crucifix in the church of S. Felice in Florence or Baronzio’s panel in the Vatican Pinacoteca. Other notable examples are by Masolino da Panicale (first half of the 15th century, Vatican Pinacoteca), Andrea della Robbia (late 15th century, La Verna), and Perugino (early 16th century, Siena, S. Agostino). It was also taken up by miniaturists such as, for example, Niccolò da Bologna. From the late Middle Ages onward, the pelican was also pointed out and depicted as a symbol of the Eucharist, with the spread of the legend—unrecorded in the *Physiologus*—that the pelican nourishes its young with its own blood (cf. above, col. 769, the medal of Pius II). Among the oldest representations of the pelican as an Eucharistic symbol is a Limoges enamel in the pyx preserved in the Musée de St-Jean d’Angers. In the Baroque and modern periods, it is sometimes depicted on pyxes, chalices, humeral veils, and tabernacle doors. Rare are representations of the pelican alone; the oldest seems to be that in the Duomo of Modena (early 12th century). The pelican sometimes appears alongside other symbolic animals or birds such as the phoenix, the lion, and the unicorn. — See pl. LXXVII.