Maria Sibylla Merian, title page of ‘Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung’ (1679) (courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Frankfurt)Books
A 17th-Century Woman Artist’s Butterfly Journey
by Allison Meier on September 9, 2015
Maria Sibylla Merian, Plate 49 from ‘Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium’ (1705) (courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Frankfurt)
In June of 1699, a 52-year-old Maria Sibylla Merian departed on a cargo ship for South America’s Suriname with only her 22-year-old daughter Dorothea Maria for company. It was a hundred years ahead of Alexander von Humboldt‘s more famed travels, and not an era in which many German women worked outside the home, let alone took solo natural history expeditions. Merian was interested in one thing: butterflies. Not just their beauty, but their whole life cycle, from caterpillar to chrysalis to winged insect.
A Butterfly Journey: Maria Sibylla Merian. Artist and Scientist by Boris Friedewald, out now from Prestel, is a compact biography on Merian’s natural history contributions, accompanied by her meticulous and colorful illustrations. Unlike many of her predecessors, she didn’t depict the caterpillars and butterflies separately. Instead, each was a scene of life, with the foraging plant alongside the butterfly in its different life stages.
Butterflies might seem like an innocuous research subject for a woman, although in the 17th century universities were still exclusively male. However, aside from the silkworm (Merian’s first focus) which was revered for its contributions to luxury cloth, the butterflies and creeping caterpillars were seen as lowly beings, or worse, demonic. “For some people, these creatures were the work of the Devil, and those who interested in them were surely up to no good — why, they might even be witches, who must be put to death,” Friedewald writes in A Butterfly Journey. He notes that according “to popular belief, witches possessed the power to change themselves into butterflies in order to curdle cream and butter.” Thus the name “buttervögel” in German and “butterfly” in English.
Portrait of Maria Sibylla Merian (via Leipzig University Library/Flickr) (click to enlarge)
Friedewald doesn’t go too in-depth into the trials of working as a woman in science in the 17th century, or her influence on women naturalists who followed. However, the book does show how she personally progressed from a young girl curious about the natural world, to one of the first researchers to examine butterflies in such detail. At the time, spontaneous generation was still considered by many to be the butterfly’s mode of reproduction.
