Description and Persuasion in Seventeenth-century ...hos/Seeing Sciences Wkshp...French ears.1 Both words entered English in the 1766 translation of Bonnet, whose English translator

Description and Persuasion in Seventeenth-centuryEntomological Illustrations

Brian W. Ogilvie*

Please note: This paper is a work in progress for the workshop “Seeing Science” at Princeton University, March 2005. As you will see, it is very much “in progress,” including notes to myself and passages where I just wave my hands and hope no one will notice what’s missing. I am looking forward to useful suggestions and vigorous discussion in Princeton.

Copyright © 2005 Brian W. Ogilvie. All rights reserved. Do not circulate, cite, or quote without the author’s express permission.

Contents

I. Numbered paragraphs on entomology and entomological illustration 1.........................II. Six moments in 17th-century entomological illustration 6................................................

1. Describing individual specimens 7...............................................................................2. Trompe-l’oeil miniatures 15..........................................................................................3. Recording the insect life-cycle 16.................................................................................4. Composing a microscopic image 24............................................................................5. Microanatomy: intervening and representing 27.......................................................6. Merian’s ecologico-developmental engravings 30.....................................................

III. A brief conclusion to raise questions 31.............................................................................References 32.................................................................................................................................Figures 35........................................................................................................................................

I. Numbered paragraphs on entomology and entomological illustration

1) This essay begins with an anachronism. The word “entomologie” was coined by Charles Bonnet in

1745—only to be rejected in favor of insectologie, a word Bonnet thought would be less offensive to

* University of Massachusetts Amherst, e-mail: [email protected] Through the end of May 2005: Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall, 4 rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris, France, Tel. +33-1-4277-1703; fax +33-1-5680-1495.

1

French ears.1 Both words entered English in the 1766 translation of Bonnet, whose English

translator shared, or aped, Bonnet’s reservations about the Greek.2 The fact that Bonnet coined not

one but two neologisms to describe a field aborning has not stopped generations of writers from

writing the history of entomology (not insectology!) starting in ancient Mesopotamia.3

2) Of course, naturalists studied insects before 1745. Ulisse Aldrovandi’s De animalibus insectis,

published in 1602, was the fruit of a lifetime of collecting insects and insect-lore.4 Aldrovandi’s

contemporary Thomas Penny died before he could publish any of his notes on insects, some of

which came from Edward Wotton and Conrad Gessner; they were organized for publication by

Thomas Moffet and published posthumously by Theodore de Mayerne in 1634.5 The young Basel

naturalist Jacob Zwinger planned a history of insects but succumbed to the plague in 1610 before

finishing the work.6 These books, published or projected, suggest that the study of insects engaged

many Renaissance naturalists. Compared with the dozens of zoological works and hundreds of

botanical works published through the 1630s, they also reveal that entomology was only a minor

1. From the TLF: “Ch. BONNET, Traité d'insectologie, I, avert. p. 16 ds DG : J'ai eu peur qu'entomologie, tout grec, ne choquât les oreilles françoises.”

2. OED, s.v. “entomology”: “1766 tr. Bonnet's Contemp. Nat. IX. ix. I have given the name insectology to that part of natural history which has insects for its object: that of entomology . . . would undoubtedly have been more suitable . . . but its barbarous sound terryfy'd me.” Delicious irony: Bonnet’s “tout grec” has become “barbarous” in the English!

3. E.g. Bodenheimer 1928, and Essig 1936.

4. Aldrovandi 1602.

5. Moffett 1634.

6. See Leonhard Dold to Jacob Zwinger, 18 December 1595 (probably Old Style), Basel UB, MS. Fr.Gr. I.12, 123, and various letters to Jacob Zwinger, Basel UB, MS. Fr.Gr.I.13, especially Pascal Le Coq to Zwinger, 15 March 1596 (no. 82).

Brian W. Ogilvie – Entomological illustration – 2

concern of Renaissance naturalists.7

3) In the second half of the seventeenth century, the number of naturalists who studied insects

seriously continued to be small compared with natural history in general.8 Some of the names are

familiar to historians of science: Marcello Malpighi, Jan Swammerdam, Antony van Leeuwenhoek,

Robert Hooke, and John Ray. Except for Ray, their names underscore the place of the microscope

in the seventeenth-century study of insects, a place that began with the Lincean Academy’s

Melissographia, a description of honeybees that included drawings from microscopic observations.9

Other names are less familiar to historians of science: Jan Goedaert and Maria Sibylla Merian

(though Merian has received attention from recent historians of science).10 The very familiarity of

the first four in history of science suggests how entomology in the late seventeenth century is known

to historians of science through the history of microscopy, and it should make us hesitate to see

seventeenth-century entomology as a continuation of Renaissance approaches.11 As we shall see,

Goedaert and Merian also approached the study of insects differently from Aldrovandi, Wotton,

Gessner, Penny, and Moffett.

4) Entomology, insectology, or simply the study of insects: whatever we call it, it was not a self-

7. Ogilvie 2006; Pinon 1995; Pinon’s thèse de doctorat will be published soon by Droz.

8. Bodenheimer 1928, 1: 325-407.

9. Freedberg 2002.

10. E.g. Quednau 1966; Schneider 1991; Wettengl 1997, and Davis 1995. I had expected to find Goedaert known among art historians, but I have found so far only a handful of references to him in recent literature: Wolloch 1999, Huys Janssen et al. 1991, and Albus 2000.

11. I am leaving out, for the moment, Jonstonus 1657.


evident field of study in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was nothing about insects as

a group, whether in the modern, precise sense or the looser early modern sense of “incised beings,”

that made them the objects of a clearly defined subdiscipline of natural history. From the sixteenth

century through the eighteenth, naturalists who studied insects approached them with different

methods, to attain different ends. The incoherence of entomology, its lack of disciplinary autonomy,

makes it an ideal field for tracing the changes in natural history in this period, and for the purposes

of this colloquium, changes in the form and function of natural history illustrations.12 I will use the

term “entomology” for want of a better term, but keep in mind that it is sous rature throughout.

5) In a recently completed book manuscript I argue that modern natural history was invented in the

sixteenth century as a “science of describing”: an attempt to catalogue the world’s plant and animal

species—above all the former—and to describe them in ways that, by the last third of the sixteenth

century, were above all morphological.13 Description, for the great botanists of the late sixteenth and

early seventeenth century, was a matter of providing, in words and pictures, an account of the

morphology and growth of plants. This concern was shared as well by writers on animals, though

they also considered animal lore to be part of natural history.14

6) In the seventeenth century, classification became a significant intellectual problem for botanists,

12. Compare with botany, where there was a much more pronounced disciplinary tradition that impinged on illustration: Ogilvie 2003.

13. Ogilvie 2006.

14. Harms 1989, though it is worth underscoring that Gessner and Aldrovandi distinguished philology from description.


though not yet for zoologists. Natural history and anatomy, meanwhile, began to entwine

themselves firmly. In the Renaissance, connections between anatomy and natural history were

chiefly occasional, not intellectual: because the cold winter months were the best for conducting

dissections, and plants were best demonstrated in spring and summer, the same person might be

appointed professor of anatomy and materia medica. That was the case at Basel with Caspar Bauhin.

The anatomy of animals was occasionally part of natural history.15 But the great achievement of

Renaissance anatomists was to better elucidate the structure of the human body and to point out all

the places where Galen had gone wrong because he had based his anatomy on animals.

7) Beginning in the seventeenth century, the study of physiology through vivisection required that

anatomists turn again to animals, not as substitutes for the structure of the human body but for

analogies of its function.16 The best-known example: William Harvey vivisected reptiles in his

demonstration of the forceful systole and the circulation of the blood. This interest in anatomy and

the microscope craze of the second half of the century would have a significant impact on

entomological research and publication.

8) But another aspect of entomology had nothing to do with anatomy or the microscope; rather, it

was an outgrowth of the Dutch tradition of nature miniature paintings and simple curiosity. The

artists Goedaert and Merian observed insects carefully not simply to describe them but, more

importantly (in their eyes), to trace their life cycles.

15. Pierre Belon’s comparison of the skeletal anatomy of birds and humans, though famous, was atypical: Schierbeek 1967, 98.

16. For an overview of vivisection and orientation to the literature, see Guerrini 2003.


9) A note on insect life cycles and metamorphoses: Holometabolous insects pass through three

phases after the egg: the larva, the pupa, and the imago (the sexually mature adult form). For

butterflies and moths, these are the caterpillar, the chrysalis or cocoon, and the butterfly or moth. In

hemimetabolous insects (those that undergo partial metamorphosis), the larva is called the nymph

and often resembles the adult. Ametabolous insects (e.g., lice) do not undergo metamorphosis. To

complicate matters, “nymph” used to refer to the pupa, and still does in French.† The French

translation of Swammerdam’s Histoire des insectes uses the term “nymphe dorée” for the chrysalis.

II. Six moments in 17th-century entomological illustration

In the rest of this paper I would like to briefly examine entomological illustrations, chiefly in

printed books, from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth.

My account will have a double emphasis: what were images intended to communicate, and how were

they used as tools in the process of scientific investigation? In this way I hope to contribute to what

Monika Dommann, following W.J.T. Mitchell, has called a “pictorial turn” in the history of science,

while underscoring that pictures only made sense within a discursive web.17 The temporal aspect of

illustration is particularly engaging: how did naturalists represent the development of insects over

time? And when they published illustrations, how were their texts organized and what place did

illustrations have in them?

These six moments are ordered chronologically, but I do not mean to imply a simple

† A nymphette is something else entirely, as the lepidopterist Nabokov knew.

17. Dommann 2004.


development from one to the next. Rather, I wish to underscore the variety of representational

techniques employed by naturalists in specific, changing contexts over the course of the century.

Entomologists (sic) were not botanists. They were few and far between, and individual particularities

of training and temperament weigh heavily in their work. One, Goedaert, seems to have been

completely unaware of any other entomological literature. Their pictorial style, in manuscript and

print, cannot be separated from their context. This is not a linear history but a series of related

episodes. By considering them together, we will be able to begin to understand that neither

seventeenth-century naturalists nor their readers found seeing bugs to be straightforward.

Nonetheless, there is one common element that unites the disparate illustrations of Goedaert,

Malpighi, Swammerdam, and Merian and that separates them from the woodcuts in Aldrovandi’s

1602 publication. That element is the implicit persuasive function of the illustration. All natural

history illustrations, of course, have a residual element of persuasion, in that they claim to represent

a natural object as it really is. Late seventeenth-century published entomological illustrations and

their accompanying texts, however, served also to persuade the reader that the author (and it is

significant that all these authors drew their own figures) was a careful, competent observer.‡ They

offered mediated access to phenomena that required continuous observation (Goedaert), amazing

technical skill and perseverance (Malpighi and Swammerdam), or travel to distant lands (Merian).

1. Describing individual specimens

The hallmark of Renaissance natural history was the careful description of the natural world.

Ulisse Aldrovandi’s De animalibus insectis libri VII, one of the handful of works that Aldrovandi

actually published toward the end of his long life as a naturalist and collector, reveals the descriptive

‡ The revised version will discuss how Malpighi and Swammerdam learned to draw.


impulse at work.

Insects were a particular problem for naturalists because they were small; “one might call them

ἄτομα rather than ἔντομα,” remarked Aldrovandi.18 In his preface to the reader, Aldrovandi

emphasized the difficulty of his enterprise: not only are insects small, but they are practically

innumerable. Despite the difficulty, he set himself the goal of “finding, examining, and describing”

them. Accompanied by an amanuensis and a painter, Aldrovandi prowled the “suburbs” of Bologna,

interrogating peasants, having them bring him insects, flying creatures, and reptiles, and studying

them. The painter illustrated anything worthy of being painted, while the amanuensis noted down

what Aldrovandi considered important; in this way “I was able to assemble a diverse collection

(variam supellectilem) of insects.”19 This collection and Aldrovandi’s indefatigable reading provided the

basis for De insectis.

My purpose here is not to evaluate De insectis as a contribution to entomology.20 Rather, I would

like to look at the purpose and function of his insect collection. It is worth noting that in the preface

to De insectis, Aldrovandi does not mention a collection of specimens but, instead, a collection of

pictures. Aldrovandi’s collection of naturalia was extensive.21 And in the text of De insectis Aldrovandi

referred to his collecting and observing specimens, living and dead, but his emphasis in the preface

was on the image and word, not the specimen, as the heart of the collection.

Aldrovandi was an acute observer, a fact that careless readers might be forgiven for missing,

18. Aldrovandi 1602, sig. †3r.


20. Cf. Bodenheimer 1928, who is generally favorable to Aldrovandi.

21. Findlen 1994, 30.


such is the weight of the antiquarian erudition in his work. And he had a lot of description to do.

For instance, “although there are many kinds of butterflies, I have found none described by the

ancients.”22 To remedy this lack, Aldrovandi used words and pictures in tandem. His descriptions of

butterflies (including moths) involved eleven full-page woodcuts, each containing several different

species (Figure 1a). They were accompanied by morphological descriptions and occasionally by

notes on their generation or behavior, though most of that information came later under more

general headings like generatio and mores.

The woodcuts in the chapter on butterflies (book 2, chapter 1) included only the imagines (adult

forms) of the insects. Aldrovandi discussed the larval form (the caterpillar) three chapters later

(Figure 1b). Again, he provided several pages of woodcuts, each illustrating several different kinds of

caterpillar, along with short morphological descriptions in the accompanying text. Aldrovandi

occasionally noted which butterflies develop from which insects: for instance, “When I had

nourished the first caterpillar of the first table for some time in my house, it did not weave a web or

sack, but rather formed a chrysalis which gave birth to a darkish yellow butterfly, namely the third in

the first table.” But he did not do so systematically, though he noted that butterflies tend to have the

same color as the caterpillars from which they develop, something Aristotle had also observed.23 The

nymphal forms, in turn, received their own chapter, “De chrysalide sive aurelia,” with only one

woodcut showing a handful of chrysalises (Figure 1c).

In brief, Aldrovandi’s woodcuts aimed to show what a perceptive observer would see when

22. Aldrovandi 1602, 236.

23. Aldrovandi 1602, 267: Cum eam [quae prima in prima tabula depingitur] aliquo tempore domi aluissem, telam non texuit, aut folliculum, sed in Chrysalidem immutata Papilionem peperit atro luteum, eum quem in prima Papilionum tabula tertium exhibuimus.


confronted with the individual specimen. The text keyed to them presented additional notes on

color or detail that was too fine to be depicted in woodcuts. Renaissance naturalists recognized that

woodcuts were not perfect tools for description or identification, but by and large they agreed that

they were better than nothing, especially for beginners.24 Aldrovandi’s woodcuts would let the reader

know, or at least guess, that Aldrovandi knew or did not know a specific caterpillar or butterfly.

What they would not convey, systematically, was how the two were related: what would come out of

the chrysalis that the caterpillar would weave, or where that butterfly had come from and whether its

presence signified not only present beauty but also, with the next generation of caterpillars, future

devastation.

Aldrovandi had reasons for dividing imagines from their larvae. Those reasons were based on

morphology and on a view of natural history that was predominantly synchronic. The first, largely

tacit, reason was a common-sense distinction with its roots in folk biology. Caterpillars and

butterflies are both salient to human observers and, of course, very different. There were practical

reasons as well. Not every caterpillar becomes a butterfly: some die, wrote Aldrovandi, while others

form a chrysalis that produces not a winged insect but several worms. And not every butterfly comes

from a caterpillar; some come from worms.25 Here the biological facts of metamorphosis and

parasitism created problems for descriptive natural history: by distinguishing “worms” from

“caterpillars” based on the gross morphology of the larva, Aldrovandi perforce separated some

butterfly larvae from others. And since he did not recognize the parasitism of ichneumons,

Aldrovandi implied that the life cycle of butterflies was more complex than his manuscript

24. Gessner (get citation from SoD manuscript).

25. Aldrovandi 1602, 254-255.


illustration suggested.26

Aldrovandi’s organization of his chapters echoed his emphasis on the morphology of the

individual specimen. Each chapter began with names, including homonyms, and then indicated

“genus, differentiae, forma.” It was in this section that he placed his illustrations—hardly surprisingly,

but significant. Generation and habits followed after, and though Aldrovandi sometimes devoted

carefully argued pages to them, he did not systematically draw parallels, nor did his general

introductory remarks in the book offer an overall discussion of insect metamorphoses. The

classificatory table at the beginning of the book also sharply separates the different stages of an

insect’s life.27 Insects are divided into aquatic and terrestrial, the latter into those without feet and

those with feet, the latter into those with wings and those without. Among winged, footed, terrestrial

insects, we find the butterfly. Among wingless, footed, terrestrial insects, we find the caterpillar. In

the body of the book, the two are separated by vast gulfs of Aldrovandian prose. Butterflies get the

place of honor after bees and their relatives (Figure 2a), in book 2, “De caeteris Anelytris

quadripennibus.” Caterpillars are in the same book, but three chapters later.

Aldrovandi was well aware of the connections. The very fact that he placed caterpillars in the

book of four-winged insects without elytrae, rather than among the footed, wingless insects (where

the table said they should be), testifies to this fact. But his emphasis on descriptive morphology led

him to play down what he had carefully learned (or in some cases, he admitted, carelessly observed)

of their generation and growth.§

§ In the final version of the paper, I will expand on this discussion of generation. Aldrovandi repeats26. Aldrovandi knew of the ichneumon but, based on his classical sources, limited its prey to

spiders: Aldrovandi 1602, 206, 218.



However, if we turn to Aldrovandi’s collection, the basis for what he finally published near the

end of a long career as a naturalist, we find something else: hints of a research program on insect

metamorphosis.Many of the pages from his paper collections show insects in only one of their

forms, usually the larva or the imago (Figure 2a). It is clear that Aldrovandi placed great value on

such manuscript illustrations as a source of knowledge. Illustrations showed naturalists distant

species; they allowed for communication with contemporaries and posterity in a way that was much

more precise than words alone. In a rather naive fashion, Aldrovandi conceived of the artist’s task as

imitating nature, a conception that, as Giuseppe Olmi has underscored, made the artist a manual

laborer who needed a naturalist’s direction.28 For the most part, though, Aldrovandi’s MS

illustrations of insects resemble closely his woodcuts in De insectis: pages of imagines, larvae,

sometimes nymphs or eggs, and the occasional mouse or frog, sometimes annotated, sometimes not.

They could well be a kind of visual field notebook, with annotations taken from the secretary’s

notes.

But on one page, Aldrovandi has grouped together several stages in the development of a

butterfly (Figure 2b). This is no simple field notebook. The second row shows a caterpillar, a cluster

of eggs, a small larval form (perhaps a predator?), two views of a pupal case, and an adult insect.

This page may have been originally intended as part of a systematic study of insect life-cycles: its

original layout may have been as follows:

a prodigy from Joseph Acosta: a winged bird being born from a butterfly.

28. Olmi 1992, 24-27.


caterpillar

caterpillar and eggs pupa imago (moth)

caterpillar imago (moth)

imago (moth)

imago (moth)

If this is the case, the small larva in the center and the cicadas on the lower left were added later to

fill up empty space. Aldrovandi might have intended to fill in the blanks by systematic study: that is,

identifying the pupa and imago of the first caterpillar and identifying the caterpillar and pupa of the

last two imagines.

In this case, the manuscript illustration goes beyond replacing the specimen. If Aldrovandi’s

printed illustrations were synchronous, this page and a few similar sheets have an implicit

diachronous element. They represent an aspiration to show the relationships among different phases

of the insect. In his text, Aldrovandi discusssed such relationships in general. But in his notes,

Aldrovandi aimed for the specific: for relating this particular kind of caterpillar to that particular

kind of moth. The illustration has a programmatic element, the blank spots reminded the naturalist

of work remaining to be done. Natural history might be more than description, cataloguing, and

antiquarianism.29

But if Aldrovandi intended a systematic study of insect life cycles, as vol. 7, 2, fol. 16 implies, he

did not carry it out. Other pages in his notebooks include occasional notes on the relationship

between different phases of an insect’s life-cycle, but nothing so systematic.30 And they rarely

29. Sixteenth-century botanical descriptions included this chronological element: they began with the plant’s emergence from the ground, described its leaves, flowers, and fruit, and then its root, as if the naturalist had pulled it out of the ground. Seventeenth-century descriptions began with the root. See Ogilvie 2003.

30. See the online version of Aldrovandi’s notebooks, <http://www.filosofia.unibo.it/aldrovandi/


contain much if any information about where an insect would be found or what it ate; though

Aldrovandi occasionally noted such associations in his published text, they were not a systematic

concern of his.

Hence, to summarize, for Aldrovandi, printed illustrations of insects served the goal of

morphological description of the individual form. They went hand-in-hand with a text that was

organized around such descriptions, relegating the insect life-cycle and its ecological niche (to use a

gross anachronism) to a secondary level. In his investigations and his manuscript illustrations,

though, Aldrovandi cast a broader net. He was intrigued by life-cycles and by the associations

between insects and plants. But he downplayed those aspects when he came to organize the mass of

material he had collected, in order to produce a descriptive, antiquarian natural history that fit his

and his contemporaries’ notions of the discipline.

Before turning to transformations in the seventeenth century, I would like to note a continuity.

Thomas Moffett’s Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum (1634) provides another example of

Renaissance descriptive natural history of insects. Moffett’s work was cobbled together from notes

by Edward Wooton, Conrad Gessner, and Thomas Penny; Moffett himself added little or nothing

beyond the arrangement. And the two books of the Theatrum were divided according to whether the

insect had wings. Like Aldrovandi, Moffett made no distinction between larva, pupa, and imago in

his differentiation of insects. Thus the butterflies found a home in book 1 (Figure 3a) and the

caterpillars and pupas in book 2 (Figure 3b).31

Moffett’s sometimes indicated which butterflies developed out of which caterpillars, and his

pinakesweb/>.

31. Moffett 1634, 89-108, 179-194, 318-319.


illustrations occasionally showed the different forms together (e.g., the second woodcut from the

top in Figure 3b). But like Aldrovandi, he did not do so systematically. And his discussion of the

pupa was minimal, chiefly a criticism of Aristotle’s analogy between the chrysalis and eggs. “I don’t

know what use they have,” he admitted, “though I know that they try Aristotle’s cleverness with

their marvelous transformation and display to us God’s unlimited power.”32 Moffett was content to

describe insects under their salient forms; the thought that the transformation itself was worthy of

careful study may have crossed Wooton’s, Gessner’s, or Penny’s mind, but it did not enter his.

2. Trompe-l’oeil miniatures**

The northern artistic tradition of trompe-l’oeil miniatures of naturalia is another moment in the

history of entomological illustration (keeping in mind my caveats). Dürer’s famous painting of the

stag beetle is a well-known example. The most systematic and sustained such effort is in the

manuscript miniatures of Georg Hoefnagel and the related series of engravings by his son Jacob

(Figure 4).

This tradition appears to have close connections to pilgrimage books and manuscript

illumination; its origins have nothing to do with natural history, itself a new discipline in the

sixteenth century.33 By the fifteenth century, insects were a common feature of such illustrations,

often associated with plants—a colorful combination.34 But I am not sure whether those

associations were ecological: that is, whether specific insects were associated with the plants on

** This is a section I intend to flesh out a bit in the final version.

32. Moffett 1634, 319.

33. On the origins of trompe-l’oeil miniatures, see Kaufmann and Kaufmann 1993.

34. Ruestow 1996, 48-52.


which their larvae or imagines lived and fed.

It would be a stretch to consider the Netherlandish trompe-l’oeil tradition as part of natural

history in contemporary terms. Unlike Aldrovandi, who employed artists as part of a project to

catalogue and describe nature, its practitioners were not naturalists and saw representation of the

individual as an end in itself. However, one of the seventeenth century’s most important

entomological studies came out of this tradition: the studies of Johannes Goedaert.

3. Recording the insect life-cycle

Johannes Goedaert (1617-1668) was a painter and engraver by profession. He spent his whole

life in the town of Middelburg, in the Netherlands (though whether he traveled, I do not know).

Goedaert was literate in Dutch but probably knew no Latin.35 His passion was raising insects from

larvae caught in the field, which he fed and observed as they underwent their metamorphoses. His

book Metamorphosis naturalis (3 parts, 1662-1669), written in Dutch, had the good fortune to be

published when naturalists not only said that they wanted firsthand observations stripped of

citations and quotations from authoritative predecessors, but had begun to mean it.36 Goedaert’s

careful observations and neglect of the authorities ensured him a pan-European reception: the work

was translated into Latin (1662-1669), English (1682, from the Latin edition), and French (1700).37

Goedaert’s method was simple. He caught larvae (“worms”) and brought them home, where he

35. Van der Pas 1970.

36. Compare Aldrovandi’s mixture of personal observations and involved discussion of authorities. I am simplifying a complex matter. To see the complexity, see Ogilvie 2006, especially chapters 4 and 5.

37. Van der Pas 1970, 440, citing Kruseman 1956, which I have not yet examined. In this draft of the paper I am basing my remarks on the English version by Lister; I plan to consult the original Dutch edition before I revise.


placed them in glass containers. After a while, when he had become known for his hobby, his

neighbors would bring him caterpillars, and when his reputation had spread further, he would be

sent material from further afield.38 He fed them, sometimes on the plant where he had found them,

sometimes by offering them different kinds of leaves until he found one they liked. He drew them as

larvae, noted when they changed, drew their pupae, noted how long they remained in pupal form

and when they emerged, and drew what emerged (imago or parasite). His notes occasionally

remarked on the insect’s form, but they were mostly on its behavior and metamorphosis.

Illustration was essential to Goedaert’s work. His publications consisted of engraved plates

keyed to short textual notes, a form that allowed Martin Lister to cut and paste the work together in

a completely new order, with re-engraved plates reflecting the new organization.39 Unlike the Dutch

miniaturist tradition, Goedaert’s plates represented the insect itself in its different phases (Figure 5).

In a complete history (e.g. Figure 5, all except no. 15), this involved three stages: the larva, the pupa,

and what emerged from the pupa. Occasionally Goedaert depicted the leaf on which the adult laid

its eggs or which the caterpillar ate. With his naive eye and “excellent pencill,”40 Goedaert depicted

form without context: not surprisingly, for he observed his captives in their glass cells, occasionally

lamenting their untimely death by starvation when he could not figure out what to feed them. This

approach doubtless contributed to the sympathetic reception he found among naturalists like Lister,

for his depictions combined his acute observation, the finesse of copperplate engraving, and—for

the first time—studies of insects that emphasized their metamorphosis rather than relegating it to

38. One butterfly was sent to him from the Jardin du Roy in Paris via the Dutch ambassador: Goedaert 1682, REF.

39. On Lister’s collaboration with artists on Goedaert and other projects, see Unwin 1995.

40. The phrase is Lister’s, Goedaert 1682, 37.


the second rank. There are a few precursors to Goedaert’s approach in some of Aldrovandi’s and

Moffett’s woodcuts, and as we have seen in Aldrovandi’s manuscript illustrations, but none who so

single-mindedly, for a period of several decades, observed, drew, and noted the life-cycle of insects.

Goedaert’s illustrations, unlike those of Aldrovandi, Moffett, or the miniature tradition, have an

irreducible diachronic element. Each engraving has a sequence, usually from larva at the bottom to

imago at the top. The figures appear to be drawn at the same scale, so that the relative size of larva,

pupa, and imago can be identified, though the text is silent about scale. Because the figures appear

alone, against a neutral background, their diachronic relationship is implicit, not explicit. From a

descriptive standpoint, the engravings merely denote that the insects depicted belong together; the

reader must turn to the notes to figure out the exact nature of their relationship.

To Goedaert himself, on the other hand, the act of illustration was necessarily diachronic. He

drew the caterpillar and waited. He drew the pupa and waited. Then he drew the animal that

emerged from it. Sometimes it was a butterfly. Sometimes it was a fly. Sometimes it was another

“worm,” or several of them. When Goedaert did not know what to feed the adult, or when it

refused nourishment, it ultimately starved, though sometimes he released the adults before they

reached that point. Only occasionally did he illustrate an adult form by itself: for instance, one

particularly magnificent butterfly captured in the Parisian Jardin du Roy and sent to him via the

Dutch ambassador to Versailles.41 Even in this case, though, Goedaert had hoped to find the

“origin” of the butterfly in its caterpillar; the illustration was intended to be part of a series, just as

the blank spaces in Aldrovandi’s manuscript page were intended to be filled in (Figure 2b). Indeed,

Godaert was sent the butterfly in hopes that he would find the origin: that, and the translations of

41. Goedaert 1682, 37-38.


his work into Latin that followed quickly on its publication in Dutch, suggest the degree of interest

in insect metamorphosis in the late seventeenth century. Leibniz even thought that Goedaert’s and

Jan Swammerdam’s insects should be part of a public curiosity cabinet.42

It also suggests the permeability of the natural history community, at least in matters

entomological. Goedaert had no training in natural history, and he probably did not read Latin. His

work is innocent of the long literary tradition that lies behind Aldrovandi’s and Moffett’s tomes. It is

also innocent of any theory of insect reproduction (or generation, in contemporary terms). Goedaert

drew what happened. He was unaware of the parasitic behavior of ichneumons and blowflies.43

Even had he been able to read Aldrovandi and Moffett, they would scarcely have helped him:

neither was aware that ichneumons were parasitic on caterpillars as well as spiders.44

To return to illustration, though: Goedaert needed his illustrations. Until he finished the history

of any particular kind of insect, they were working papers; when the series was done, they became

documents to reproduce.45 Goedaert was the first naturalist to devote himself to the detailed study

of insect metamorphosis and to see his results through to the end. He gives no indication that he

had any broader interest in natural history; but naturalists were quite interested in his work once they

found it.

Martin Lister was sympathetic to Goedaert’s methods but critical of his naiveté and lack of

42. Wiener 1940, 237.

43. Ichneumon wasps lay their eggs in living spiders or caterpillars, sometimes paralyzing them first; the host’s flesh becomes food for the ichneumon larvae, which emerge to pupate. Blowflies lay their eggs in dead animals, including larval insects.

44. On Aldrovandi, see above; Moffett 1634, 45-46.

45. It would be interesting to know whether Gessner did anything like that; his botanical working papers suggest that he might.


order. During the 1670s, in York, Lister was studying spiders in the same way that Goedaert studied

caterpillars and their transformations: through careful observation over time of specimens that he

had caught or received from friends.46 He acquired the Latin translation of Goedaert and rendered it

in English, reorganizing it according to his own notions of systematics. In his introduction, Lister

blows hot and cold: Goedaert made beautiful drawings but wrote little and left his work in a mess.

He spent forty years observing insects, but scarcely seems to have improved in his observing. His

observations are “every where very just, and true,” but cursory and sometimes unintelligible. He only

noted down and drew the changes he saw himself,

so he committed little or nothing to Writing or Designe, but what succeeded with him, and (as he understood it) had its right Change: Which is more, than any man ever did before him; So that we need not admire, that so long, and pertinatious an Industry produced so few Historys: For he Designed not all, that came to hand, but such only, as it was his good fortune to Feed, and bring up to Change. And yet in these few Historys, you will have something of all the severall Genus's of Insects, that are in Nature.47

Lister had Goedaert’s plates re-engraved on copper; since booksellers would not underwrite

illustrations, Lister made only 150 copies at his expense. “And upon this occasion I must needs say,

that Naturall History is much injured, through the little incouragement, which is given to the Artist,

whose Noble performances can never be enough rewarded; being not only necessary, but the very

beauty, and life of this kind of learning.”48

Lister’s criticisms are fourfold. First, Goedaert discussed relatively few species, though more

than his predecessors. He was too sparing with his words—despite Lister’s praise for art, he was

convinced that it made sense only when explained in words. And Goedaert did not arrange his

46. Unwin 1995, 220.

47. Goedaert 1682, sig. A3r-v.

48. Goedaert 1682, sig. A4r.


material in any methodological order. To remedy this defect, Lister reorganized it and had

Goedaert’s engravings redrawn following his own order.49 Another fault was more grave, though:

Lister knew about the ichneumon, and he repeatedly taxed Goedaert with failing to distinguish

between “by-births” and “genuine” transformations of the insect.50 As a result, his illustrations and

descriptions were not as instructive as they might be: at least, not unless they were annotated and

corrected by a naturalist like Lister. Goedaert’s eye saw very well the changes that occurred in his

individual specimens, but because he lacked a clear idea of natural order and its subversion, the

changes he portrayed were equivocal. Though Goedaert often observed the same kind of caterpillar

multiple times, his illustrations convey, at least in their diachronic element, some of the

individualism that characterizes the trompe-l’oeil tradition. They persuaded Lister that Goedaert was an

accurate observer but that he all too often did not understand what he observed.

Another of Goedaert’s critics, the tormented genius Jan Swammerdam, was similarly critical of

Goedaert’s naive eye.51 Like Lister, Swammerdam recognized the value of Goedaert’s work but

criticized it vehemently, though he surmised that some of Goedaert’s faults were introducd by his

publisher.52 Swammerdam’s principal objection to Goedaert is that he did not really understand the

insect life-cycle; like Lister, Swammerdam thought that Goedaert’s ignorance vitiated much of his

accomplishment. Swammerdam was fascinated by insect metamorphosis. His illustrations portrayed

49. Lister’s English text includes keys to the plates in the Latin edition on which it was based.

50. Goedaert 1682, 72.

51. Swammerdam is one of the few figures in the history of science to whom the hackneyed phrase “tormented genius” might legitimately be applied. For his life, see Schierbeek 1967, an unedited translation of Schierbeek and Engel 1947; Cobb 2000; Ruestow 1996; and Swammerdam 1975.

52. Swammerdam 1685, 44-46, 111.


not only the different stages of the insect’s life but also, unlike Goedaert, the moment of

transformation itself.53 In his first entomological publication, the Historia generalis insectorum (written

in Dutch), Swammerdam used metamorphoses as the basis for an audacious new classification of

insects.54

The distinction between normal and abortive transmutations was thus essential for

Swammerdam, who was obsessed with order in nature as the sign of God’s handiwork and dismayed

by the work required to observe it.

Now it is certain that God’s works are based on constant and uniform rules, and that we do not know at all the true causes of the effects that we see. And since we know only the shadow of his marvels, we believe firmly that the true knowledge of philosophers consists only in the distinct idea that they can have of the effects that strike their eyes. For that reason, to understand those effects, to form certain rules, and to draw the correct consquences, we must employ every imaginable care and diligence.55

Observation was thus the only key to true philosophy, and it was philosophical knowledge of insects

to which Swammerdam aspired, knowledge that would ultimately be part of a natural theology.

Hence, unlike his compatriot Goedaert, Swammerdam elaborated a theory of observation and its

relation to reason. He drew from Descartes the notion of clear and distinct ideas, though he derived

them from the senses. He cited Harvey (another of his whipping-boys) approvingly on the dangers

of relying on authorities, which leads one to accept as true what is merely plausible. And he drew on

53. Swammerdam 1685, 186ff. and plate 10.

54. I have used the French translation, Swammerdam 1685.

55. Swammerdam 1685, 163: Or il est certain que les ouvrages de Dieu sont fondez sur des régles constantes & uniformes, & que nous ne sçavons nullement les veritables causes des effets que nous voyons. Et puisque nous ne connoissons que l'ombre de ses merveilles; nous croyons assurément que la vraye connoissance des Philosophes ne consiste que dans l'idée distincte, qu'ils peuvent avoir des effets, qui leur frappent les yeux. C'est pourquoi pour les bien connoître, & pour former des régles certaines & tirer des consequences, justes, nous avons besoin d'employer tous les soins & toute la diligence Imaginable.


Boyle’s justification of observing and experimenting. He concluded, “I admit freely that one must be

extremely puffed up with pride to maintain that our reasoning can lead us to every truth in the

world. On the contrary, we see that it is by using our senses properly that we can, through

knowledge of visible things, understand the truth of things we cannot see.”56

In the 1669 history of insects, Swammerdam instantiated this commitment to seeing with reason.

His goal in the work was to overturn what he saw as the common belief that insects underwent a

radical metamorphosis from one kind of creature to another. Swammerdam wished to depict what

was in fact “the slow and almost imperceptible manner in which thir limbs grow.”57 To do this, he

had to demonstrate that the apparently swift, radical transformations of some insects from larva to

pupa and pupa to imago disguised a slower process of change that lay beneath the surface.

This task would ultimately lead Swammerdam to the detailed microanatomies which he

conducted in the 1670s and that were published in the Bybel der Natuure. In the 1669 book, though,

Swammerdam limited himself to what could be seen if an insect were examined closely on the

surface. The plates of the Historia generalis insectorum display the results (Figure 6). Swammerdam

seems to have used a lens or low-powered microscope to examine insects, and he removed the pupal

case to demonstrate underneath the slowly forming limbs of the adult insect. The plates reflect long

hours of observation and careful delineation on Swammerdam’s part. They are also part of

Swammerdam’s deliberate attempt to persuade his readers of two things. First, the limbs of insects

56. Swammerdam 1685, 169: J'avoüe certes qu'il faut être extremement enflé d'orgueil, de vouloir soûtenir que nos raisonnemens nous puissent fournir toutes les veritez du monde: puisque nous voyons au contraire qu'en nous servant à propos de nos sens, nous pouvons, par la connoissance que nous avons des choses visibles, comprendre la verité des choses qu'on ne voit pas.

57. Swammerdam 1685, 1; cf. the book’s title.


do develop slowly; the metamorphosis is not a complete transformation. Second, there are four

main ways in which insects transform, and those transformations can serve as the basis of a

classification. The pictures serve as evidence for the first claim: they show what Swammerdam, with

his patience and skill, was able to accomplish.

Their persuasive role in establishing the second proposition is indirect. The plates in the Historia

generalis, and later in the Bybel, were meant to be typical, not exhaustive. In this regard they differ

strikingly from Goedaert. They do not attempt to show that several kinds of insects undergo the

same transformation. Rather, they show a model, and demonstrate Swammerdam’s observational

skill and perseverance. In so doing, they serve to subtly predispose the reader to believe

Swammerdam when he claims that his plates are typical. But they cannot demonstrate it.

With Swammerdam’s illustrations from the late 1660s, we see the beginnings of his amazing

accomplishments of the 1670s in microscopic anatomy. Before turning to them and to those of his

rival Malpighi, I would like to pause a moment on the microscopical observations of external

anatomy that stunned and delighted virtuosi on the publication of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia

(1665).

4. Composing a microscopic image††

Robert Hooke’s engravings in the Micrographia are visual clichés in the history of science.58 Yet

for this reason it is worth dwelling on them, because their very familiarity (to us) can be misleading.

Hooke’s reference to his “sincere Hand” and “faithful Eye” seems only his due to the reader

†† From here on out, things are pretty sketchy. See Zauberman and Lynch 2005.

58. Is there an illustrated textbook on the Scientific Revolution that does not have a picture from Hooke? See also the jacket art for Campbell 1999.


perusing the stunning plates in this work (Figure 7).59 Yet in many ways, Hooke’s images and those

of his contemporary microscopical investigators are the most problematic images that we have

encountered so far.

With such illustrations, the original manuscript illustrations go beyond being a subsitute for or

supplement to the object itself, as with Aldrovandi and Moffett, or a representation of a diachronic

process, as with Goedaert and Swammerdam’s illustrations in the Historia generalis. Instead, they

come to constitute the object itself as known, not just to the reader but to the investigator himself.

The field of view and depth of focus of the microscope do not permit comprehension of the entire

object at once. Edward Ruestow’s description of Leeuwenhoek at work drives this fact home:

“Peering through a small hole often less than a millimeter wide, he encountered looming shapes

that, as he turned some screws on his instrument ever so slightly, condensed out of a shifting haze.

Now vague and indistinct, now startlingly clear, the shapes materialized as a spectacle of new forms

and movements.”60

Under such conditions, the illustration of each individual specimen was necessarily a diachronic

product. The microscopist observed, drew, observed again, redrew, corrected the image. The sincere

hand guided, and was guided by, the faithful eye. Short-term memory was essential—or even long-

term memory, as in the case of someone like Swammerdam, who observed during the day and drew

at night (see below). Hooke reflected on the weaknesses of memory and the need to improve it

through artificial techniques, just as instruments aided observation.61 But he seems to have been

59. Hooke 1665, preface, sig. a2v.

60. Ruestow 1996, 32. For some useful photographs see Ford 1981.

61. Mulligan 1992.


unaware of its crucial role in the process of microscopic observation itself.

Microscopists themselves knew of the difficulties of preparing specimens, observing them, and

distinguishing between optical effects and real features of the objects they were observing. Skill in

preparations, as much as patience and sharp eyes, distinguished Malpighi, Swammerdam, and

Leeuwenhoek.62 Swammerdam and Malpighi argued politely (by contemporary standards) over

whose observations of the silkworm were more correct.63

Still, faced with such illustrations and the accompanying descriptions, many contemporaries were

convinced. Writing to Christiaan Huygens in 1691, Leibniz asked: “Is there no one at present who is

reflecting on medicine from a philosophical standpoint? The late Mr. Crane was suited to it, but the

Cartesians are too prejudiced by their hypotheses. I prefer a Leeuwenhoek who tells me what he sees

to a Cartesian who tells me what he thinks. But it is necessary to add reasoning to observations.”64

Leibniz was convinced that Leeuwenhoek was a faithful observer. But as is often the case with

Leibniz, he put his finger on the right spot to catch the pulse of contemporary developments.

Leeuwenhoek saw, but he told Leibniz (and others) what he saw. They did not, and indeed could not,

see for themselves.

Hooke’s and Leeuwenhoek’s images were a crucial part of persuading contemporaries that what

62. Ford 1981; Schierbeek 1967, REF.

63. Cobb 2002.

64. Leibniz to Christiaan Huygens, 20 Feb/2 Mar 1691, Huygens 1888, 10: 52: N'y a-t-il personne à present qui medite en philosophe sur la medicine? Feu Mr. Crane y estoit propre, mais Messieurs les Cartesiens sont trop prevenus de leur hypotheses. J'aime mieux un Leeuwenhoek qui me dit ce qu'il voit, qu'un Cartesien qui me dit ce qu'il pense. Il est pourtant necessaire de joindre le raisonnement aux observations.


they saw was real—and teaching others what to see in the first place.65 The image did not merely

stand in for the object; in a significant sense, it constituted it, for no one could actually see a fly or a

flea the way Hooke represented it. Curious or skeptical readers could make or obtain a microscope,

learn how to use it and how to prepare specimens, and see if their observations of a part

corresponded with what they saw in microscopists’ engravings. What they could not do was

compare the engraving to the whole—not without making their own drawings and notes. The

engraving was a persuasive visual representation, but when it came to manipulation, it was closer to

a map.

5. Microanatomy: intervening and representing

In his general preface to De insectis, Aldrovandi had repeated Aristotle’s claim that “insects live

without guts and nerves.”66 The microanatomical investigations of Marcello Malpighi and Jan

Swammerdam would convince their contemporaries that Aldrovandi and Aristotle were dead wrong.

In those investigations, illustrations would prove to be a powerful tool of investigation and

persuasion.

If microscopic observation was difficult, Swammerdam’s and Malpighi’s microscopic dissections

were even more taxing. Both Swammerdam and Malpighi complained about the difficulty of their

work and the ease with which the observer could see things that weren’t there.67 This was especially

true because the only way to observe the anatomy of insects was to prepare them properly.

Malpighi’s and Swammerdam’s studies must have stunk of turpentine, since that was one of the

65. Hacking 1983, REF, notes that students have to be taught what to see in a microscope.

66. Aldrovandi 1602, 4.

67. Cobb 2002, 140.


main solvents used to separate delicate structures from the globules of fat that surrounded them.68

They had to prepare their own delicate scissors and scalpels. Swammerdam spent months on his

study of the bee’s anatomy, though by the end of his life he could dissect several lice a day.

If Hermann Boerhaave is to be believed, Swammerdam’s study of bees irremediably ruined his

health:

On the last day of September of this year Swammerdam completed his treatise on the bees, which proved so fatiguing an undertaking that he never afterward recovered even the appearance of his former health and vigour. Indeed, it was a work too great for the strongest constitution, to be continually employed by day in making observations and almost as constantly engaged by night in recording these by drawings and suitable explanations. This was summer work, so his daily labour began at six in the morning when the sun afforded him light enough to discern such fine objects, while from that hour until twelve noon he continued without interruption in the open air, bareheaded so as not to block any light, with the heat of the sun causing his head to dissolve as it were into sweat. And if he desisted at noon, it was only because his eyes were weakened by the bright sunlight and could no longer make out such small creatures and their parts, even when aided by microscopes.

This fatigue our author submitted to for a whole month together, without any interruption, merely to examine, describe and represent the intestines of bees....In his essay on the mayfly, he ingenuously owns that this treatise on the bees was formed amidst a thousand torments and agonies of heart and mind, and self-reproaches natural to a mind full of devotion and piety. On the one hand his genius urged him to examine the miracles of the Great Creator in his natural productions, while on the other the love of that same all-perfect Being deeply rooted in his heart struggled to persuade him that God alone, and not his creatures, was worthy of his researches, love, and attention. The distress of mind our author felt upon this occasion was so severe that as soon as he had finished his book he put it into the hands of another, without knowing or giving himself the least concern about what might become of it.69

To Edward Ruestow, this behavior was that of a man who found pleasure, and forgot his material

and spiritual cares, in the intense concentration on a painstakingly demanding task.70 Perhaps every

scholar shares this trait, but Swammerdam had it in spades.

68. Bodenheimer 1928, 2: 262-268.

69. Schierbeek 1967, 25-26.

70. Ruestow 1996, REF; cf. the more naive psychological profile offered by Schierbeek 1967, REF.


The illustrations in Swammerdam’s and Malpighi’s microanatomical works show results that

literally no one else could obtain (Figures 8 and 9).71 It was on receiving Malpighi’s De bombyce that

Swammerdam decided to combine his skills as an anatomist with his interest in insect development;

he did so at least partly because he was skeptical of some of Malpighi’s claims and wanted to verify

them.72 Because Malpighi did not describe his techniques, Swammerdam had to devise his own. But

Swammerdam was a dextrous genius; no one else could match his achievement in replicating

Malpighi’s research.73

Matthew Cobb claims that Malpighi's work on the silkworm initiated a new kind of scientific

illustration: “In particular, the style of drawing, in which the insect was reduced to its parts, with no

reference to its overall anatomy or its natural surroundings, helped to establish a new style of

representation that eventually divided scientific illustration from natural history.”74 Cobb claims that

this new style represented a break with the prevailing style of illustration, represented by the trompe-

l’oeil tradition, by schematizing and systematizing illustrations, removing fat, modifying proportions,

and the like.75 But in fact, Renaissance naturalists (particularly botanists) had already developed a

similarly analytical set of visual conventions in the sixteenth century.76

71. Swammerdam conducted this work in the 1670s; when he died in 1680 the work was largely organized for publication but remained unpublished until Hermann Boerhaave discovered it: Swammerdam 1737.

72. Cobb 2002, 124; Ruestow 1996, 124.

73. Compare Robert Boyle’s air pump: Boyle made a working pump after hearing about Otto von Guericke’s experiments in Magdeburg, but no one else could get a pump working without some experience of Boyle’s device: Shapin and Schaffer 1985.

74. Cobb 2002, 119.

75. Cobb 2002, 143-144.

76. Ogilvie 2003; see also Treviranus 1855.


Cobb very rightly emphasizes, however, that the combination of this representational

convention with microanatomy made it difficult if not impossible for the reader to know where an

organ was in the insect and how it related to others.77 The images of individual, isolated organs

found in works like Vesalius’s De fabrica could be situated in larger, synthetic views of the human

body. But that was impossible for the reader of Malpighi’s De bombyce, which provided only one

overview of the entire silkworm caterpillar, undissected. Only the text provided clues as to where an

organ belonged and what it did. The illustrations might well persuade the reader (though not

Swammerdam) that Malpighi was trustworthy and careful, but the eye that could see them had to be

far more than faithful, and it had to have a hand that was skilled as well as sincere at its command.

6. Merian’s ecologico-developmental engravings

This section, which remains to be written, will examine the representations of insects in Maria

Sibylla Merian’s works, especially the Metamorphoses insectorum surinamensium (1705).78 The argument in

a nutshell: Merian combines Goedaert’s interest in the diachronic representation of the insect life-

cycle with a sensitivity to the ecological situation of insects. The figures in the Metamorphoses

represent the insects in all the phases of their development, like Goedaert, but Merian presented

them on the plants that host them (see Figure 10a). Merian’s figures are not entirely realistic: many

of her figures combine the natural attitude of insects (e.g., butterflies with their wings folded back,

moths with their wings spread out) with a representation of them as they would appear pinned in a

collector’s box (Figures 10b).

77. Cobb 2002, 144, an insight he credits (n. 127) to E. H. Gombrich.

78. Merian 1705.


III. A brief conclusion to raise questions

After reading Brian Ford’s essay in vol. 4 of the Cambridge History of Science, one might

wonder why we are holding this workshop at all. Only in the eighteenth century, asserts Ford, did

scientific illustration free itself from a “tradition of obscurantism,” in which fanciful illustrations

were used to bamboozle an ignorant public. This went hand in hand with the transition from crude

woodcuts to more precise copperplate engravings in the eighteenth century, but more important was

a new spirit: “The clumsy caution of the earliest illustrators was maturing into a full appreciation of

the wonder of reality, and the present-day tendency to distort and impress was yet to arise. In this

singular century we saw the new currency of scientific honesty beginning to emerge.” Ford begins

this period of “scientific honesty” with where I end: Merian’s illustrations of plants in the

Metamorphoses insectorum Surinamensium, though he complains that she made some errors with plant

representations. (Apparently he didn’t think the title significant.)79

But of course it is significant that Merian was studying insects. And I offer up Ford as a self-

made straw man only to underscore that seeing the history of scientific illustration—or indeed,

entomological illustration—as a singular history is no more helpful than seeing entomology as a self-

evidently unitary object of historical study. The “scientific illustration” is no more unitary a category

than the “scientific text.”

In the case of entomological illustrations, I have traced a shift from a largely descriptive role, in

which the illustration is synchronic and is produced largely independently of the text in which it is

located, to a persuasive role, in which the illustration condenses one of several diachronic processes

79. Ford 2003, 563-564.


and can be understood only in conjunction with a text, whose claims it supports but cannot

demonstrate. Alone, the image might inspire wonder, awe, delight, or puzzlement, but not

understanding. Clearly that was one of Maria Sibylla Merian’s aims in her work. And once one

understands the conventions of Merian’s work, her images are perhaps the easiest of all to “read”

without reference to the accompanying text. That is not the case with Swammerdam or Malpighi, or

even Hooke, whose images are literally keyed (as were Vesalius’s) to the text. As Swammerdam

insisted, and as Leibniz concurred, observation was crucial to knowledge, but only in conjunction

with reason: discursive reason, reason which had to be made explicit in the text.

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Documents

Description and Persuasion in Seventeenth-century ...hos/Seeing Sciences Wkshp...French ears.1 Both words entered English in the 1766 translation of Bonnet, whose English translator