Maria Sibylla Merian

(b Frankfurt am Main, 2 April 1647; d Amsterdam, 13 Jan 1717). Daughter of (1) Matth?us Merian (i). After her father's death, her mother married in 1651 the flower still-life painter Jacob Marell, who became Maria Sibylla's teacher. On 16 May 1665 she married Johann Andreas Graff, another pupil of her stepfather. She thenceforth specialized in illustrations of flowers, fruit and, especially, grubs, flies, gnats and spiders. In 1670 the family moved to Nuremberg. In 1675 Sandrart referred to her in the Teutsche Academie, reporting that she painted on cloth (i.e. silk, satin). With Graff, she produced a book of flowers, the first part appearing in 1675; a second edition, enlarged by parts 2 and 3 ,came out in 1680, entitled Florum fasciculi tres. It included 36 engravings intended to serve as patterns for embroidery. Only five copies of this book have survived, including a single first edition in the Stadt- und Universit?tsbibliothek, Berne (others, Dresden, S?chs. Landesbib., and Inst. Dkmlpf.; Mainz, Stadt-& Ubib.; London, V&A). This was followed by Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung (i, Nuremburg, 1679; ii, Frankfurt, 1683), 'in which, by a new invention, the origins, food and metamorphoses of caterpillars, grubs, butterflies, moths, flies and other such creatures ...are diligently examined, briefly described and painted from life, engraved in copper and published by the author'. The work went into five editions, including those of 1713 and 1714 in Dutch; a third volume was posthumously published (with vols 1 and 2), c. 1718, by her daughter Dorothea. Each of its 50 engravings is minutely rendered by Maria Sibylla from her own observations.

Part of the Merian family

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The work of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), particularly the illustrations from her devoted study of insects, remain the standard by which contemporary artists and naturalists are judged.

Maria Sibylla Merian was born in Frankfurt, Germany on April 2, 1647. She belonged to a very talented family of engravers and painters. Her Swiss father, Matthew Merian, was a draughtsman, printmaker, and publisher. Her older brother, also Matthew, was a successful painter. Merian's father died in 1650, when she was just three years old. Her stepfather, James Morell, was an accomplished Dutch painter, engraver, and art dealer who took on the responsibility for her education. He spent hours teaching Merian the art of flower painting. Merian developed a fascination with insects and began studying them obsessively. To her mother's displeasure, Morell encouraged this passion, which was considered to be an inappropriate subject for proper young ladies of the 17th century.

By the time she was 14, Merian left for Nuremberg to study with two famous artists, Abraham Mignon and Johann Graff. Both were former students and friends of Morell. Four years later, in 1868, Merian married Graff. They had two daughters, Johanna Helena and Dorothea Maria. Disturbed by her husband's repeated infidelity, she separated from Graff in 1685. Taking her daughters to the Netherlands, she joined her half-brother, Caspar Merian, in a communal religious sect (the Labadist community) that rejected worldly goods. By 1691, Merian obtained a divorce from Graff, rejected the Labadists, and took her daughters to Amsterdam. Merian supported her family by painting flowers, birds, and insects, teaching young women, and turning her paintings into embroidery patterns. She was even able to save enough money for a trip to the Dutch colony of Surinam in order to study insect specimens. Merian set sail in June 1699 with her daughter, Dorothea Maria. She was admired for her boldness in undertaking a dangerous three-month journey at the age of 52. The tropical paradise became her studio and laboratory. Merian and her daughter studied local customs and tried to find an economic use for their plants. She survived a bout with malaria during her time in Surinam. Frail health eventually forced an end to her two-year stay. Merian returned to Amsterdam in September 1701. Her daughter remained in Surinam for five more years to continue her mother's work.

Back in Amsterdam, Merian set about her monumental task of putting together her book on the metamorphoses of the exotic Surinam insects. In his entry on Merian, Ludwig said that, "she employed professional engravers for the large-sized plates done after her paintings." Ludwig went on to note that, "She wrote the descriptions herself, but the director of the Amsterdam botanical garden, Caspar Commelin, determined the species of the plants. The appearance of the Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium, in 1705 caused a sensation. The beautiful, life-size plates showed the exotic insects in previously unpublished states and in their natural surroundings. The 62 plates and the careful descriptions kindled the imagination of natural history collectors, who knew the species only from dried specimen." Merian was the first to record such observations on insect metamorphosis. According to Haley and Steele in 1843, nearly 150 years following the book's publication, Jardine wrote in The Naturalists Library, that Merian's pictures "have not been surpassed by any works of art of a similar description, by the moderns, to whom her method of arranging and combining her figures may serve as a lesson. Her manner of introducing the insects in their various stages of metamorphosis, in connection with the plants upon which they feed, is, in our opinion, not only very instructive but extremely elegant, and her skill in composition has almost invariably led her to do this in an artist-like pleasing way." Merian did not simply paint her subjects. Her interest in the work led her to collect and breed her own collection in order to study and paint them.

The last years of Merian's life had been devoted to her work, The Wonderful Transformation of Caterpillars and their Singular Plant Nourishment, in a two-volume Dutch edition. Merian died of a stroke in Amsterdam on January 13, 1717. Her daughter Dorothea Maria sold all of her mother's work to Johannes Oosterwijk, a publisher in Amsterdam. In 1717, Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, bought 300 of her paintings and opened the first art museum in Russia in order to display them. At the time of her death, Merian had been working on 12 drawings for publication, which were added to her work on the insects of Surinam, and published by her daughter in 1719. A second edition, with text in Latin, French, and Dutch, followed in 1726.

Scientific Notoriety

When Merian published her major work, Wonderful Transformation and Singular Flower-Food of Caterpillars, in 1679, the scientific community began to take serious notice of her work. She had already published a two-volume book called Florum Fasciculi tres, and was considered to be an accomplished artist. Yet Wonderful Transformation was the book that "revolutionized zoology and botany," according to a profile from the National Museum of Women in the Arts. With 50 copperplate engravings in each of the two volumes, the book "catalogued 186 European moths, butterflies, and other insects showing on a single page each insect in all stages of metamorphosis, on or near the single plant upon which it fed and laid its eggs." According to Heidrun Ludwig, in Dictionary of Women Artists, her accomplishments were recognized for their scientific importance in her lifetime and throughout the 18th century. However, by the 19th and early 20th centuries, Merian was regarded with an "image of a harmless and gentle flower painter, adsorbed in the meditation of butterflies and flowers." Her merits as a natural historian were concealed. By the end of the 20th century that view had undergone a further transformation and her work was judged in a broader context. Today, Merian's works are on display around the world, from London to St. Petersburg, as well as in museums throughout the United States. Her careful attention to detail and keen observation help to explain why her paintings continue to received this acclaim.

Further Reading

Davis, Natalie Zemon. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives. Harvard University Press, 1995.

Dictionary of Women Artists, edited by Delia Gaze, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997.

Natural History, December 1992.

Center for Global Environmental Education, Hamline University, St. Paul, MN. "Maria Sibylla Merian," 1999. Available at: www.morning-earth.org

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The Columbia Encyclopedia, Edition 5, 1993. Available at: http://web2.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw.

Haley and Steele. "Maria Sibylla Merian." Available at: http://www.haleysteele.com/exhibition/wbi/merian.html. National Museum of Women in the Arts. "Maria Sibylla Merian."Available at: http://www.nmwa.org/legacy/bios.

Merian, Maria Sibylla (1647–1717), German artist and naturalist. Maria Sibylla Merian was born in Frankfurt into a family with a distinguished history in the visual arts, particularly with respect to the study and exploration of the natural world. Her father, Matthäus Merian the Elder, inherited a prosperous publishing house from Jean Théodore de Bry, whose America (Frankfurt, 1590) presented some of the earliest images of the peoples, plants, and animals of North America to European audiences. Maria Sibylla's half-brothers Matthäus Merian the Younger and Kaspar Merian took over the family business after the death of their father and continued to publish illustrated works of natural history and other subjects. In 1651 Maria Sibylla's mother married Jacob Marrel, an artist who had studied with several prominent German and Dutch still-life painters.

Merian combined her interest in studying the processes of nature with the creation of visual images and from an early age showed an avid interest in insects. She received her artistic training in the workshop of her stepfather Jacob Marrel and in 1665 married Johann Andreas Graff, a painter who had apprenticed in her stepfather's workshop. The couple lived in Nuremberg between 1665 and 1670, where Merian taught painting and embroidery to young women, and where she published the first of her three major works, the Neues Blumenbuch (Nuremberg, 1675–1680), a series of copperplate engravings of flowers for use as models for embroidery and needlework. Merian began publication of her second major work in 1679, when the first volume of her Raupenbuch series appeared, which focused on the life cycles of European caterpillars and butterflies.

In 1686 Merian, her two daughters, and her mother joined a religious community in northern Germany known as the Labadists. It has been suggested that Merian joined the group in part to escape the marital difficulties she had been experiencing with Graff, from whom she was divorced several years later. Merian and her daughters moved to Amsterdam in 1691 and began planning a voyage to the Dutch colony of Surinam; in June 1699 Merian and her grown daughter Dorothea Maria set sail for South America. Merian is best known for the illustrated publication that resulted from this voyage, the Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (Amsterdam, 1705). Merian's compositions presented startling scenes of insects and plants previously unknown to Europeans and highlighted both the life cycles of individual insects and the struggles for survival between insects, plants, and other animals. The brightly colored forms and striking features of Merian's insects provided a disturbing yet fascinating vision of the New World for European readers. Merian's focus on the relationships between insects and plants and their environment had a strong influence on natural history illustration during the eighteenth century, as can be seen in the illustrations for The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (London, 1731–1743) published by the English artist and naturalist Mark Catesby.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Merian, Maria Sibylla. Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. Edited by Elixabeth Rücker and William T. Stearn. London, 1980. Two-volume facsimile edition of the 1705 Amsterdam edition with reproductions of Merian's watercolor drawings and important scholarly essays.

——. Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. Amsterdam, 1705.

——. Neues Blumenbuch. 3 vols. Nuremberg, 1680.

——. Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung. . . . 3 vols. Vol. 1, Nuremberg, 1679; vol. 2, Frankfurt, 1683; vol. 3, Amsterdam, 1717. Commonly cited as Raupenbuch.

Secondary Sources

Davis, Natalie Zemon. "Metamorphoses: Maria Sibylla Merian." In Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives, pp. 140–216. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.

Rücker, Elisabeth. Maria Sibylla Merian, 1647–1717. Nuremberg, 1967.

Wettengl, Kurt, ed. Maria Sibylla Merian: Artist and Naturalist, 1647–1717. Ostfildern, 1998.

—JANICE L. NERI

Anna Maria Sibylla Merian (April 2, 1647 – January 13, 1717) was a naturalist and scientific illustrator who studied plants and insects and made detailed paintings about them. Her detailed observations and documentation of the metamorphosis of the butterfly make her a significant, albeit not well known, contributor to entomology.

The portrait of Anna Maria that was featured on a 500 DM note

Contents 1 Biography 2 Her work 3 See also 4 Bibliography 5 References 6 External links

Biography

Maria Sibylla Merian was born on April 2, 1647 in Frankfurt, Germany, into the family of Swiss engraver and publisher Matthäus Merian the Elder. Her father died three years later and in 1651 her mother married still life painter Jacob Marrel. Marrel encouraged Merian to draw and paint. At the age of 13 she painted her first images of insects and plants from specimens she had captured.

"In my youth, I spent my time investigating insects. At the beginning, I started with silk worms in my home town of Frankfurt. I realised that other caterpillars produced beautiful butterflies or moths, and that silk worms did the same. This led me to collect all the caterpillars I could find in order to see how they changed". (foreword from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium — Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam)

In 1665 Merian married Marrell's apprentice, Johann Andreas Graff. Two years later she had her first child, Johanna Helena, and the family moved to Nuremberg. While living there, Maria Sibylla continued painting, working on parchment and linens, and creating designs for embroidery patterns. She took on many students which helped the family financially, and increased their social standing. This provided her with access to the finest gardens, maintained by the wealthy and elite.

In those gardens, Merian began studying insects, particularly the lifecycle of caterpillars and butterflies. The scholars of the time believed that insects came from "spontaneous generation of rotting mud", an Aristotelian idea held in spite of—or perhaps because of—the teachings of the Catholic Church. Although St Thomas Aquinas concluded that spontaneous generation of insects was the work of the Devil, Pope Innocent V in the thirteenth century had declared that belief in spontaneous generation went against Church teachings, since all life was created in the first days of Creation chronicled in Genesis; however, the Greek tradition prevailed in the scientific community. Against the prevailing opinion, Merian studied what actually happened in the transformation of caterpillars into beautiful butterflies. She took note of the transformations, along with the details of the chrysalises and plants that they used to feed themselves, and illustrated all the stages of their development in her sketch book.

This book of sketches turned into her first book, the first edition of which was sold in 1675 at the age of 28 under the title Neues Blumenbuch -- New book of flowers. In 1678 her second daughter, Dorotha Maria, was born, and one year later she published another book called Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung -- The Caterpillar, Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food. In this book she presented the stages of development of different species of butterflies along with the plants on which they fed.

Portrait of Maria Sibylla Merian
by de Bâle

In 1681 Jacob Marrell died and the Graff family returned to Frankfurt in 1683 to handle the estate, including the house, art work, library and financial issues left unresolved at the time of his death. A lawsuit was filed by the fractured factions of the families. Upon its resolution in 1685, at the age of 38, Merian left her husband. Accompanied by her mother and daughters, she moved to the Labadist religious commune in Friesland, whose practices included celibacy. The family moved into a home owned by Cornelis van Sommelsdijk, the governor of Surinam. Here she studied the world of South American tropical flora and fauna.

Five years later her mother died and she moved to Amsterdam. Merian's husband divorced her two years later, in 1692. In Amsterdam Merian and her work attracted the attention of various contemporary scientists. Her older daughter, Johanna Helena, married merchant Jacob Herolt and moved with him to Surinam, which was at that time a recently acquired Dutch colony.

In 1699 the city of Amsterdam sponsored Merian to travel to Surinam along with her younger daughter, Dorothea Maria. Before departing, she wrote:

In Holland, I noted with much astonishment what beautiful animals came from the East and West Indies. I was blessed with having been able to look at both the expensive collection of Doctor Nicolaas Witsen, mayor of Amsterdam and director of the East Indies society, and that of Mr. Jonas Witsen, secretary of Amsterdam. Moreover I also saw the collections of Mr. Fredericus Ruysch, doctor of medicine and professor of anatomy and botany, Mr. Livinus Vincent, and many other people. In these collections I had found innumerable other insects, but finally if here their origin and their reproduction is unknown, it begs the question as to how they transform, starting from caterpillars and chrysalises and so on. All this has, at the same time, led me to undertake a long dreamed of journey to Suriname. (foreword in Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium)

Merian worked in Surinam for two years, travelling around the colony and sketching local animals and plants. She also criticized the way Dutch planters treated Amerindian and black slaves. She recorded local native names for the plants and described local uses. In 1701 malaria forced her to return to Netherlands.

A painting showing the metamorphosis of Thysania agrippina produced in 1705. Another version exists in which all but the opened-winged butterfly is reversed.

Back in the Netherlands she sold specimens she had collected and published a collection of engravings about the life in Surinam. In 1705 she published a book Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium about the insects of Surinam.

In 1715 Merian suffered a stroke and was partially paralysed. She continued her work but the disease probably affected her ability to work; a later registry lists her as a pauper.

Maria Sibylla Merian died in Amsterdam on January 13, 1717. Her daughter Dorothea published Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis, a collection of her mother's work, posthumously.

In the last years of the 20th century, the work of Merian has been rediscovered and recognised. For example, her portrait was printed on the 500 DM note before Germany converted to the euro. Her portrait has also appeared on a 0.40 DM stamp, released on September 17, 1987, and many schools are named after her. In 2005, a modern research vessel named Maria S. Merian was launched at Warnemünde, Germany.

Her work

A plate taken from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium

Merian worked as a botanic artist. She published three collections of engravings of plants in 1675, 1677 and 1680. Afterwards she studied insects, keeping her own live specimens, and made drawings about insect metamorphosis. In her time, it was very unusual that someone would be genuinely interested in insects, which had a bad reputation and were colloquially called "beasts of the devil." As a consequence of their reputation, the metamorphosis of these animals was largely unknown. Merian described the life cycles of 186 insect species, amassing evidence that contradicted the contemporary notion that insects were "born of mud" by spontaneous generation.

Moreover, although certain scholars were aware of the process of metamorphosis from the caterpiller to the butterfly, the majority of people did not understand the process.

The work that Anna Maria Sibylla Merian published, Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung -- The Caterpillar, Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food, was very popular in certain sections of high society as a result of being published in the vernacular. However, it is notable that her work was largely ignored by scientists of the time because the official language of science was still Latin.

Merian also described many other details of the evolution and lifecycle of the insects she observed. She could, for example, show that each stage of the change from caterpillar to butterfly depended on a small number of plants for its nourishment. As a consequence the eggs were laid near these plants.

Her work places her among one of the first naturalists to have observed insects directly. This approach gave her much more insight into their lives and was contrary to the way that most scientists worked at the time.

A page taken from Erucarum Ortus.

The pursuit of her work in Suriname was an unusual endeavour, especially for a woman. In general, men travelled in the colonies to find insects, make collections and to work there, or to settle. Scientific expeditions at this period of time were almost totally unknown and the work of Merian raised many eyebrows. She succeeded, however, in discovering a whole range of previously unknown animals and plants in the interior of Surinam. Merian spent time studying and classifying her findings and described them in great detail. Her classification of butterflies and moths is still relevant today. She used Native American names to refer to the plants, which became used in Europe:

"I created the first classification for all the insects which had chrysalises, the daytime butterflies and the nighttime moths. The second classification is that of the maggots, worms, flies and bees. I retained the indigenous names of the plants, because they were still in use in America by both the locals and the Indians". (in the foreword of Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium).

Her drawings of plants, snakes, spiders, iguanas and tropical beetles are still collected today by amateurs all over the world. The German word Vogelspinne—mygalomorphae, translated literally as bird spider—probably has its origins in an engraving by Maria Sibylla Merian. The engraving, created from sketches drawn in Surinam, shows a large spider who had just captured a bird. However to this day, no cases are known of a mygalomorphae hunting a bird.

See also

• Women artists
• RV Maria S. Merian is Germany's most modern research vessel, named after the naturalist and illustrator Maria Sybilla Merian.

Bibliography

• Neues Blumenbuch. Volume 1. 1675
• Neues Blumenbuch. Volume 2. 1677
• Neues Blumenbuch. Volume 3. 1677
• Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung. 1679
• Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium. 1705

References

• Patricia Kleps-Hok: Search for Sibylla: The 17th Century's Woman of Today, U.S.A 2007, ISBN 1-4257-4311-0; ISBN 1-4257-4312-9.
• Helmut Kaiser: Maria Sibylla Merian: Eine Biografie. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2001, ISBN 3-538-07051-2
• Uta Keppler: Die Falterfrau: Maria Sibylla Merian. Biographischer Roman. dtv, München 1999, ISBN 3-423-20256-4 (Nachdruck der Ausgabe Salzer 1977)
• Charlotte Kerner: Seidenraupe, Dschungelblüte: Die Lebensgeschichte der Maria Sibylla Merian. 2. Auflage. Beltz & Gelberg, Weinheim 1998, ISBN 3-407-78778-2
• Dieter Kühn: Frau Merian! Eine Lebensgeschichte. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2002, ISBN 3-10-041507-8
• Inez van Dullemen: Die Blumenkönigin: Ein Maria Sybilla Merian Roman. Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-7466-1913-0
• Kurt Wettengl: Von der Naturgeschichte zur Naturwissenschaft - Maria Sibylla Merian und die Frankfurter Naturalienkabinette des 18. Jahrhunderts. Kleine Senckenberg-Reihe 46: 79 S., Frankfurt am Main 2003
• Kim Todd: Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis. Harcourt, USA, 2007. ISBN 0-1510-11087.
• Ella Reitsma: "Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters, Women of Art and Science" Waanders, 2008. ISBN 978-90-400-8459-1

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Anna Maria Sibylla Merian

• http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/SpecialCollections/womennature/sectionpages/MariaSibyllaMerian.html Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung ...images]
• Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium:
  • Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium images
  • Online version of Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium from GDZ
  • Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) - digital facsimile, Linda Hall Library
• German Language Site on Maria with Music and a lot of images
• Online version of Over de voortteeling en wonderbaerlyke veranderingen der Surinaemsche Insecten from GDZ
• Online version of Erucarum ortus, alimentum et paradoxa metamorphosis from GDZ
• The Flowering Genius of Maria Sibylla Merian Ingrid Rowland on Merian from The New York Review of Books

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