Maria Sibylla Merian: Beautiful Bugs

Repost of an long read arguing how artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) used the tools of an artist to change how we classify and perceive insects

Although scholars often cite Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) for her work on insect metamorphosis in Surinam, her vellum watercolors of insects for her Dutch caterpillar books align more closely with the work of her scientific contemporaries, like Johannes Goedaert. The comparisons invited by a closer examination of Merian’s caterpillar book illustrations illuminate the role of her art training in adapting her artistic methods to balance family business with thoughtful, naturalistic detail, as filtered through Merian’s unique visually clarifying compositions. While modifying her process to better replicate and reflect nature, Merian remains willing to defy scientific convention to depict connections between the natural world. Through an artistic approach to the natural sciences, Merian affirms the validity and beauty of insects, despite their enlightenment delegation to memento mori status in Northern still life painting.

Scholars writing about German-born artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian deal with a problem the artist spent her entire life quietly observing -- the growth and decay of organic matter. Writers like Ella Reitsma and Sharon Valiant, to name a few, focus on the importance of three surviving high-quality collections of Merian prints. Premium reproductions from the collection of Hans Sloane live at the British museum[1], one collection belongs to Windsor Castle’s royal collection[2], and finally Merian’s study book, where she painted her original works, which she later turned into counterproofs, survives at the Library of the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. I think it’s worth acknowledging at the outset of an endeavor attempting to situate Merian in her art historical context that, as Reistma states in the intro to her Getty catalogue, “Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has for the most part been women who have rediscovered Maria Sibylla Merian”[3]. Reitsma goes on to name J. Stuhl-Dreher-Nienhuis, Elisabeth Rücker, and Natalie Zemon Davis as instrumental Merian scholars. Rücker’s rediscovery of Merian’s letters, some of our only evidence of Merian’s correspondence, and her work on the facsimile edition of the Windsor Merian drawings brought previously decaying primary source documents to the public eye.

Literature and reviews on Merian tend to concentrate around a handful of themes. Many authors focus on the role of her father and stepfather’s entrepreneurial artistic careers in the development of her skills[4][5]. Most contemporary work on Merian, aside from Reitsma’s Merian and Daughters and Schrader’s Naturalism Under the Microscope, which attempt visual analyses of Merian’s artwork, in addition to discussing her scientific contributions, tend to situate Merian in the world of biology and the natural sciences. I hope to explain how Merian’s contributions to the scientific community are a direct result of artistic inquiry, which allowed her to take an approach opposite to most of the methods available within the scientific community at the time.

Various authors, particularly Ingrid Rowland in “Flowering Genius” make note of Merian’s Calvinism, often tying her austere religion to the philosophy guiding her caterpillar pursuits. Rowland concludes by asserting Merian’s art is an “ultimately tragic art suffused with a Calvinist sense of dire predestination rather than angelic metamorphosis”[6]. While it’s true that in the language of Northern European 17th century still life, insect depictions often symbolize death’s inevitability, Merian tells us through her words and artwork that insects have even more to teach us about living.

Rowland does break from other sources to bring in more direct comparisons to Merian’s work and Caravaggio’s still lifes or Albrecht Durer’s prints. David Freedberg is one working art historian who attempts to treat Merian seriously in the context of 17th century art. Freedberg suggests that the golden age of Dutch painting extends from painting into printed books during a time that sees popularization of the replicable image and increased global trade, particularly for Dutch colonial missions[7]. Elizabeth Honig echoes Freedberg’s efforts to fit Merian’s accomplishments into the canonized history of the baroque period. Honig suggests the “Merian and Daughters” exhibition at the Getty “brings out another side to baroque culture”[8] Honig comments that in Merian’s miniature art lies a grand story about study and discovery. I agree but seek to ground this notion more firmly with material analysis as well. In Chrysalis, Kim Todd makes clear the role of the microscope in Merian’s practice and in heightening a 17th century interest in biology’s unexplored smallness[9].

Merian’s business sold her family reproductions on a scale of detail, ranging from cheap uncolored prints, to Sloane’s album of watercolor on vellum[10]. This meant Merian could market to popular interest and to obsessive naturalists and collectors. Records indicate she was popular in her time and known as a competent naturalist among her contemporaries. Linnaeus relies on several of her illustrations in his classification structure[11]. Over time many of Merian’s surviving prints decayed physically or were corrupted with faulty colors added by printers and inaccurate illustrations added by publishers[12]. By the 18th century, critics, working only with inaccurate prints began to disparage her reputation for accurate observation. Throughout the 20th century and the work of scholars mentioned above, as covered in Valiant’s “Recovering an 18th century legend”, more details emerge to correct faulty perceptions of the first person to paint insects on the plants which they feed. Valiant underlines the urgent importance of working from fine color reproductions of Merian’s images in analysis[13].

While the prints collected in Reitsma’s Merian and Daughters can’t replace working with archival material, they suffice for me to observe in close comparison with a well-known contemporary insect illustrator, Johannes Goedaert, who Merian eventually dwarfed in competence with her innovative composition and meticulous technique. Comparing a work by each artist, selected from what’s generally understood as a high point in their careers will illustrate the stand-alone brilliance of Merian’s art and how her pragmatic approach to representation through art helped create more intuitive, informational compositions than species-centric scientific classification systems of the time, which encouraged organization by shape, size, and species. Merian’s artistic lens allowed her to see animals in terms of their larger environment and context.

Merian consciously viewed her painting, prints, and illustrations as art. Merian begins her first Caterpillar book with the (translated) words “Dear esteemed art-loving reader…”[15]. Reitsma also tells us that in the preface to her caterpillar book, Merian tells us she wrote her book as a means of worshipping God . Furthermore, Merian was conscious of the give and take relationship between visual arts and science, and between mimesis and nature. In Nues Blumenbuch she says, “Art and nature shall always be wrestling until they eventually conquer one another so that the victory is the same stroke and line: that which is conquered, conquers at the same time”[16]. Here Merian acknowledges the surface conflict that belies a reciprocity where humans use art to understand the natural world and then the information gleaned from nature to better the precision and visual appeal of the art we produce. Additionally, this quotation encapsulates how Merian’s study of science informs her art and vice versa.

Working through the 1660s, artist Johannes Goedaert’s book Metamorphasis Naturalis garnered him the reputation as the “sole torchbearer when it came to metamorphosis,” working with the advantage of Latin, English and French translations. Merian’s works were not translated from her native German until after her death[17], which coincides with a sudden surge in her works popularity from 1720-1730[18]. Goedaert and Merian were two of the first naturalists to draw from lived observation[19]. Both trained as artists and never received secondary education in the sciences. Reitsma says of their kinship, “like him, she was convinced that insects were not defective creations of god but were complete and perfect.”[20]Artists like Merian who, as with mixing pigments and grinding paints “would learn to paint by copying”[21] deeply understand the merit in learning through observation and mimesis. While Merian is one painter in a tradition of 17th century Dutch artists depicting the natural world, her ordering of it deviates from her predecessors’ decontextualization of objects like shells from their environments into decorative patterns. Despite the similarities in method, religious propensity, and passion for metamorphosis, Merian’s illustrations “bear no resemblance to her predecessor”[22]. The heightened precision and wider depiction of relevant details in Merian’s work not only look clearer and more lifelike, but they assure almost all her illustrations can be identified by biologists. Reitsma:

One can learn far more about the development process of the caterpillar and the pupa from her prints than Goedaert’s. She drew the shed skins of the caterpillars, heads, and droppings. She showed the ‘safety belts’ that some pupae have around their ‘waists’, she pictured cocoons cut open to reveal the pupa within. She also drew parasitism in countless manifestations[23]

To his credit, Goedaert also thinks about illustrating connections between caterpillar life stages and innovating artistic technique in service of detail. Plate 43 of Metamorphasis Naturalis, accessible through the Biodiversity Heritage library, scanned from an original publishing of his book is a well-preserved example of some of Goedaert’s best work[24] (figure 1).

figure 1

A vertical stack orders the composition from top to bottom, so the eye starts observing the caterpillar, moving down to chrysalis, and finally moth. Shifting from a tradition of naturalists trained as physicians like Francesco Redi and William Harvey, Goedaert switches his medium of reproduction from blockier woodcuts to a finer approach of etching needle and burin[25]. The smaller details captured in etched engraving offer Goedaert cleaner lines and heightened visibility, but as an effect of etching small objects, his forms remain dominated by graphic lines. Although Goedaert doesn’t always choose to show plants in his illustrations, here we see a caterpillar perched on a leaf with a bite mark implying a food source. The image relies on thick linework, with slight shading along the chrysalis and the upper butterfly wings. Goedaert relates the caterpillar to its plant but it looks stiff and pasted on. Following convention, the moth is drawn from an overhead view. Contrasted against Merian’s bugs, it looks flattened and lifeless. Although revolutionary in connecting the stages of metamorphosis and remaining easy to read, Goedaert misses the color, movement, and individuality that animates Merian’s insects in Rose Lying on the Ground with Various Metamorphoses (c 1691-1699) (figure 2).

figure 2

Rose Lying , from the Sloane album, depicts a variety of metamorphoses including Cnaemidophorus rhododactyla, the v-moth and the large ranuculus moth, which she showed in her German caterpillar books I (1679) and II (1683). Reitsma reflects, “Merian has progressed since those publications: there is more vitality, more ‘suppleness,’”[26] Merian situates insects in an ecosystem. We see what the chrysalis looks like in its environment, fixed to the rose where Goedaert’s depictions remove environment. Merians bugs appear to be on the precipice of motion. A minuscule green caterpillar arches itself at the corner of the composition. The moth landing on the rose’s wings are pulled back as if catching air to parachute the bug’s landing. Details like these imbue her illustrations with behavioral anecdotes on her subjects. Although Merian’s rose is shrunken slightly to fit the confines of the page, her insects in this album are actual size, and despite this she illustrates life down to the hair on caterpillar skins, and color gradients, and parasites. Merian’s insects aren’t defined by their outlines the way Goedaert’s are. This relates to Schrader’s assertion that Merian’s proof counterproof system of reproduction, an innovation rooted in artistic process and business acumen, allowed Merian to access a level of detail and color most like the watercolor of her day journal proofs[27].

Merian and Goedaert both consider composition, but to entirely different ends. Todd shows us how Merian’s interests, which necessarily shape her approach, differed from natural scientists of her time, like Rumphius and Sloane: “In the short term, natural scientists would be less interested in Merian’s concerns – what a given caterpillar ate and what it might eat, the relationship of an organism to its environment – than they were with marking each species off from the others”[28]. If Merian was interested in finding and showing a proto-ecosystem view of the natural world as a web of connections, her augmentations to her art process created the structure for her to show her explorations. Merian’s thinking about the world in terms of connections resurfaces centuries later in Arthur Tansley’s 1935 ecosystem model, which grounds 21st century ecology.[29] Unlike isolated scientific drawings, her compositional style takes both aesthetic and scientific inputs, showing how parts make up a whole. She grounds all of her metamorphosis compositions with a flower. She considers scale in terms of what will convey the important information about the bugs. At the same time, her shrinking the flower is an artistic choice. With every illustration she takes a flower the insects feed on as a focal point, but she clips it. The artist decides which aspects of the environment are essential and which ones cloud our understanding of the image. Merian gives her insects lifelike, naturalistic space to live in, and in turn gives us a clarified image of environment, to the smallest detail. Merian’s aesthetic consideration of a balanced composition meets with her care to show environment.

This hybridizing composition gives breathing room for her miniaturist details to stand out, mirroring the way her innovation towards counter-proofing provided the tools for her to depict and reproduce exquisite minutiae. Goedaert’s engraved drawings rely on a thickness of line that, in a game of millimeters, obfuscate insect anatomy and weigh down the delicate subject. Merian’s finer gradients and vivid colors, themselves a result of her artistic upbringing, shine only through her system of reproducing works, which she first began in 1679, where she laid fresh wet prints down on another piece of paper, and ran the prints through the press again. This prevented the prints from showing up as mirrored images and allowed her to hand tweak certain aspects of line thickness.[30]As a result, the outlines and hatched shading on counterproofs soften. Because the hatching gives the illustrator a guide for paint shading, finer hatching means Merian could use less opaque paint and not have the black hatching bleed through. Merian’s pragmatic, hands on approach to the artmaking also gave her access to better pigments than other scientists illustrating insects. Multiple scholars make note of her rich scarlet carmine, which she learned to grind from cochineal insects when she worked in her stepfathers’ painting studio[31].

Rowland’s assertion that Merian’s art is “ultimately tragic and filled with dire predestination” seems to falter in light of all of the previously discussed challenges Merian pragmatically thought around in order to depict her insects as brighter, more alive, and more active. When Merian discovered a nest of ants and engraved their different life stages, she wrote “I have consequently recorded them here so that like Salomon, I can investigate their virtues”[32]. She alludes to the proverb of Salomon where he asks the audience to observe the humble ant, “consider its ways and be wise”. This anecdote grounds her philosophy in a reading of insects as creatures of god and carriers of wisdom. Concluding Chrysalis, Todd comments, “From the time she was thirteen she examined not just one insect, but one biological process within that class.” Comparatively, Merian’s “religious zeal waxed and waned”[33]. Todd’s reading of Merian’s outlook echoes with Valiant’s assertion that “Nature, she demonstrated, was not chaos, but a continuous, self-renewing cycle”[34]. Merian spotlights insects, showing personality through vibrant, supple forms, which praise rebirth and careful observation. Rather than forecasting death’s inevitability, Merian’s illustrations highlight earth’s hidden vitality. Merian’s bugs grow from eggs, not spontaneously from rotting fruit.

Merian’s use of artistic processes, (reproduction, pigmentation, painting technique, etc.) underlie her scientific discoveries. Her artistic training and keen eye form the basis of her still-legible translations of the natural world. Merian’s artistic approach prioritizes images that feel compositionally whole, which provide the ideal structure to convey a science of relationships rather than a science of individuals. In the framework of Merian’s “continual wrestling between art and nature”, art takes the upper hand, in service of nature.

Works Cited

Freedberg, David, and Jan De Vries. Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-century Dutch Culture. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991. 384-386

Honig, Elizabeth Alice. "Merian. Los Angeles." The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1265 (2008): http://www.jstor.org/stable/40479861.

Reitsma, Ella, and Sandrine A. Ulenberg. Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters: Women of Art and Science. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, Rembrandt House Museum, 2008.

Rowland, Ingrid D. "The Flowering Genius of Maria Sibylla Merian." The New York Review of Books. Accessed April 07, 2019. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/04/09/the-flowering-genius-of-maria-sibylla-merian/. Web page.

Valiant, Sharon Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 April 1993, Vol.26(3), pp.467-479Todd, Kim.

Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and Secrets of Metamorphosis. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007.

[1] Reitsma, Ella, and Sandrine A. Ulenberg. Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters: Women of Art and Science. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, Rembrandt House Museum, 2008. 14

[2] Valiant, Sharon Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 April 1993, Vol.26(3), pp.467-479, 479.

[3] Reitsma, 12.

[4] Todd, Kim. Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and Secrets of Metamorphosis. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007., 32-38

[5] Valiant, 468.

[6] Rowland, Ingrid D. "The Flowering Genius of Maria Sibylla Merian." The New York Review of Books. Accessed April 07, 2019. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/04/09/the-flowering-genius-of-maria-sibylla-merian/. Web page.

[7] Freedberg, David, and Jan De Vries. Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-century Dutch Culture. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991. 384-386

[8] Honig, Elizabeth Alice. "Merian. Los Angeles." The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1265 (2008): http://www.jstor.org/stable/40479861. 579.

[9] Todd, 8-9, 49, 52, 136-38.

[10] Reitsma, 158-167.

[11] Valiant, 467.

[12] Valiant, 474.

[13] Valiant, 478.

[14] Todd, 44-47

[15] Reitsma, 11.

[16] Honig, 574

[17] Reitsma, 69.

[18] Reitsma, 239.

[19] Todd, 47.

[20] Reitsma, 68.

[21] Todd, 33.

[22] Reitsma, 69

[23] Reitsma, 69

[24] Goedaert, Johannes. Metamorphosis Naturalis, Ofte Historische Beschryvinghe Van Den Oirspronk, Aerd, Eygenschappen En De Vreemde Veranderinghem Der Wormen, Rupsen, Maeden, Vliegen, Witjens, Byen Motten En De Dierghelijcke Dierkens Meer; Niet Uyteenighe Boecken, Maer Aileenelijck Door Eygen Ervarentheyd Uytgevonden, Beschreven, En Na Da Konst Afgeteyckent. Globe: Jaques Fierens, 1669.

[25] Reitsma, 68.

[26] Reitsma 108-109

[27] Schrader, 5.

[28] Todd, 200

[29] Willis, A.J. (1997). "The Ecosystem: An Evolving Concept Viewed Historically". Functional Ecology. 11 (2): 268–271. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2435.1997.00081.x. 7.

[30] Reitsma, 165

[31] Todd, 32

[32] Todd, 30

[33] Todd, 278

[34] Valiant, 470