More than three centuries after she made a perilous transatlantic journey to study butterflies, a rare copy of the hand-colored masterpiece by the great naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian returns to Amsterdam.
The Rijksmuseum, which holds more than half a million books on art and history, announced last week that it was buying a rare first edition of Metamorphosis of the Insects from Suriname (Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium), described as a peak of 18th-century book production when the Dutch Republic was “the bookstore of the world”.
Over half a meter tall and illustrated with 60 richly colored plates, Metamorphosis revealed to a larger public the transformation of tropical insects from egg to adult.
Merian and her daughters produced around 200 copies from 1705, but today only an estimated 67 remain, and few with color illustrations.
“This is one of the most fascinating books in natural history that we know,” Alex Alsemgeest, curator of library collections at the Rijksmuseum, told the Observer. Also “quite exceptional”, he said, was that Merian “took the whole book production process into her own hands”, from the trip to Suriname to the commercialization of the work, which was sold to traders and scientists all over. Europe.
With its beautiful, sometimes disturbing images, rendered with exacting precision, Metamorphosis is a work of art and scientific science, from a time when there was no rigid division between disciplines. It is also part of the story of Dutch colonialism. Merian recorded the local names of plants and insects she studied. Unlike other European naturalists, she credited local people with helping her discover the colony’s wildlife, although she did not name individuals.
Finally, there is the fascinating life of Merian herself. A 52-year-old divorcee, she undertook a self-financed trip to Suriname in 1699, driven by relentless curiosity about the lives of insects.
Born in Frankfurt, Merian learned to paint in her artist stepfather’s workshop, and became fascinated by silkworms, moths and butterflies. She married one of her stepfather’s apprentices and had two daughters. Settling into a comfortable life in Nuremberg, she bred and sketched caterpillars and published celebrated books about the plants and insects around her.
At this time, many people still believed that insects were spontaneously generated in the soil. While Merian was not the first to show the transformation from egg, through larva and pupa, to adult insect, “her artistic talents helped bring this message to a wider audience,” Alsemgeest said.
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Described by the late historian Natalie Zemon Davis as “curious, willful” and “a harder person to pin down” than other notable contemporaries, Merian left her husband to join a strict Protestant sect in Friesland, before eventually setting up a business in Amsterdam .
It was in the Dutch city that she discovered in cabinets the vivid butterflies of Suriname, a Dutch colony until 1975, on the northern coast of South America. After moving there with her younger daughter, Dorothea, she criticized Dutch settlers who only cared about sugar and ignored the fertile potential of the land for other crops.
While she wrote little about human behavior, Merian noted the cruelty meted out to enslaved women. In a passage about a plant that caused abortions, she described being told that abortions would mean that their children could be born freely in their own country.
Her book depicted the beauty and cruelty of the natural world, as well as some cringe-worthy realism. The first image shows cockroaches crawling over an unripe pineapple, a fruit that was then celebrated as a status symbol in Europe. In another illustration, a tarantula attacks a hummingbird. Merian is credited with giving the creature its Dutch name, spidermeaning “bird spider”.
Her image would be dismissed as a fantasy. Alsemgeest said: “In the 18th century people responded: ‘this is what you get when you send a woman to tropical places. She must have made it up’”. But scientists later confirmed her findings, he added.
The spider plate, he said, was a very good example of how Merian worked. “She was a very good observer.”
