SYMHC Classics: Maria Sibylla Merian

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Maria Sibilia Marianne was born on April twod seven, so we are bringing out our episode on her as today Saturday Classic. Maria Sibilia Marianne was a naturalist and an illustrator who made significant contributions to the field of entomology, and whose artwork was also an achievement in its own right. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Tracy, you know this, but it's worth mentioning that there was a time and people believed the insects were somehow spawn from mud. In fact, I had a book as a child that was about animals that discussed this fact, and I was perplexed that anyone ever would have thought that was a thing. It seems very far fetched now, but that's because science and there were plenty of other misconceptions where bugs came from. But the woman that we're talking about today helped dispel a lot of those myths and really improved the scientific study of insects and plants, and she did it beautifully. This is sort of a wonderful marriage of art and science. Although she was not a scholar in the sense of having attended college for education, her work would go on to be studied by naturalists and was even used by the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, as he identified and named plant an animal species. So today we are talking about naturalists and scientific illustrator Maria Zibuya Marianne. In an interesting thing, her star is apparently on their eyes, because I have noticed all of a sudden as I was researching this, articles were cropping up on other sites about her. So she is kind of a buzzword at the moment, apparently, but she's really amazing and worthy of all this attention. So that's who we're talking about today. Maria Zibuya Mayan was born on April second, sixteen forty seven, in Frankfurt, Germany. Her father was Matteius Marion, one of seventeenth century Germany's best illustrators, and her mother was Johanna Sabaya Hain. Johanna was Matteius's second wife, and he had inherited a print shop from his father in law from his first marriage, and Maria was born into a family of much older siblings that were from her father's first marriage. Before his first wife died, that couple had had five children together, so when she was born, Maria had two half sisters who were in their twenties, another half sister who was a teenager, and a brother who was twelve. So she was the baby by a significant margin. But though her father was a renowned illustrator and she undoubtedly inherited talent from him, she wasn't able to benefit from his influence because he died when she was only three. But her mother remarried and Maria's stepfather, Jacob Merril, was a pay in tor. He was well known for his still life work, which focused on just meticulously rendered florals. Yeah, this is a moment during research when I reached out to Tracy and said, this is one of those weird times when a thing I love meets up with a thing i'm researching because I really like, in particular YAKA Meryl's paintings. Uh. He has this one sort of signature color scheme on a lot of flowers that look almost like a peppermint stripe, and it's very beautiful and you'll see it appear first in like individual images of tulips that he would paint and then they kind of get worked into bigger Dutch Golden Age florals that you've seen, undoubtedly, So it was kind of a lovely discovery that he tied into our show today. H And Maria was interested in art from the time she was very tiny. I don't know how you couldn't be in that family. So her stepfather took the role of teacher and gave her a foundation that was going to serve her for the rest of her life. And it was assisting Merril in his work that she found her own personal passion. While still very very young, Maria would collect the plants and insects that served as models for Meryl's still life paintings, and gathering those specimens sparked her curiosity and she became more and more fascinated with insects and plants. Caterpillars were of special interest to Maria, and she began keeping her own collection of them so that she could follow their life cycles as they transformed through the puba stage and into butterflies. As she observed these processes, she started documenting them through illustrations and Maria's practice of keeping insects and other living things, and watching the metamorphos and or grow through their life was really quite significant. Other artists that made illustrations of plants and animals almost always were working from dead, preserved specimens, but Maria preferred to see all of her subjects alive to truly understand what they looked like and how they functioned. And it was undoubtedly this practice that she began as a child that earned her a reputation for work that surpassed all the scientific illustrators that came before her. At the age of eighteen, in sixteen sixty five, Maria was married to one of Meryl's apprentices, an artist named Johann Andreas Graff. In addition to working as a painter, he was also a draftsman and a publisher, as well as a copper engraver. In sixteen sixty eight, Maria and Johan had their first child, a daughter named Johanna Elena, and after Johanna was born, the family moved to Johann's hometown of Nuremberg. In the early years of Johanna's life, Maria began producing more serious illustration studies of flowers and insects. She once again began raising her own specimens, and has said to have even spent nights where she got no sleep because she was watching over pupa's that were expected to produce metamorphosed moss or butterflies. She didn't want to miss any of their transformations. Yes, she was dedicated to watching them. She really like if she saw any movement in a pupa that suggested it might be about to release the um the metamorphosed creature, she was like, Nope, I'm just gonna sit here and watch this no matter what. Uh. And in Nuremberg, Maria also began a series of floral engravings, which were published in three volumes over the course of five years from sixteen seventy five to sixteen eighty. This publication, titled bloom In Book or Book of Flowers, was so popular that it was later republished as Neius Bloomin Book New Book of Flowers, with additional plates and a new preface. Thirteen years into their marriage, Maria and Johan had a second daughter, Dorothya Maria I, was in sixteen seventy eight. The year after Dorothy's birth, Maria produced the first of two volumes titled Caterpillars Their Wondrous Transformation and peculiar nourishment from flowers. That was in sixteen seventy nine. Volume two didn't publish until almost four years later, in sixteen eighty three. Marian's volumes on insects were greeted with acclaim immediately. She had chosen to show moss and butterfly throughout their life cycles, and in each image she showed them in each of their life stages alongside and interacting with the plants that served as the insects, food sources and habitats. Both the insects and the flowers were illustrated in incredible and accurate detail, with annotation for each and Maria's work had achieved an entirely new level in scientific illustration, as no one had ever documented the entire life cycle in this particular way. That astonishes me that it was the seventeenth century before anyone did this, because it's such a ubiquitous feature in like science books for children. Now, yeah, you always show the habitat plants along with the insects, but they were always just drawn separately prior to this. Just after Maria's Floral Book finished publication, and in the years between the publications of volume one and two of her book on insects. Her family pulled up stakes from Nurnberg, which had been their home for fourteen years, and they moved back to Frankfurt. Jaka Merrill had died in one leaving Maria's mother a widow, and so she and her husband Graf had moved to take care of her. Four years later, Graf moved back to Nuremberg. Maria and their two daughters did not move with him. In six six, Maria, her mother Johanna, and her daughter's Johanna and Dorothea, all moved to a village and what was West Frisland but would now be part of the Netherlands. They joined Maria's half brother, Casper, and a colony of Labidists, which was a Protestant communist sect that could be its own whole story in and of itself. Perhaps one day it will be. But we're about to talk about the official end of Marian's marriage and her ongoing studies of the natural world. But first we will pause and have a sponsor break. Maria's mother, Johanna, had died in the village where her her brother Casper lived in six and the following year Marianne took her daughters to a new home in Amsterdam, and throughout their stay with the lobbyists, Maria and Johann Graff were still legally married, but they divorced the same year that Maria took the children and left the colony. She would later confide in a friend that the marriage had been poor and joyless, and she also sometimes lied about the end of their relationship later in her life, telling people not that she and Graff had divorced, but that he had died and left her a widow. Just kind of the the cruelest thing you can possibly do to an x So they died in Amsterdam. The family had a studio where they all worked on their painting. Both of Maria's daughters with Graff would go on to become skilled painters themselves. Yeah, this was definitely a family line of artists from before Maria and after. And at the age of fifty two, Maria and Dorotea, who was when he one at the time, traveled to Surinam. That was in six and at this time Surinam was a Dutch colony almost five thousand miles away from their home in Europe. For two women to be traveling there for an extended period of time, without a man to accompany them. This was considered a very, very dangerous move. Add to that the fact that the trip was beyond expensive, and it becomes clear just how much of a risk it was. Maria had sold as many drawings as she could and had gone into debt to finance the journey. Her hope was that she would be able to make her money back after she published a new book about Surinam's native wildlife, so this was really a huge gamble. But Maria, who up to that point had only been able to see dead, de hydrated, preserved specimens of the plants and animals that lived in Surinam, really craved the opportunity to see those species alive so that she could draw them as accurately as possible. They had planned to visit South America for a five year expedition, but it was cut short after two years because Maria became ill. Initially, she thought her weakness was the result of too much sun and heat, but things really progressed to the point that she thought she might die if she stayed there, so she made the decision to return home. She and Dorotea returns to Amsterdam in September seventeen O one and exactly what she had contracted is unknown, although the two most likely candidates are malaria and yellow fever. Yeah, there's a lot of speculation, and since she did work with insects and was routinely going into the jungles to study them, those were probably the two most likely things. But in those two years that they did stay there, both mother and daughter dedicated themselves to learning everything they could about the new species of plants and animals that they were exposed to. Of the many illustrations produced during this time, there have been some issues actually identifying which were done by Maria and which were done by Dorotea, because their styles were very similar. This is a debate that sometimes still goes on. She published a new book in seventeen oh five, Metamorphosis Insectorum surinam Insium, which was metamorphos of the Insects of Suriname. There were more than five dozen engravings in the book, carefully detailing the life cycles of surinames insect world. The work followed the same format as her work on caterpillars, featuring each creature alongside its host plant life with detailed descriptive text. While her books on flowers and caterpillars were lauded as extraordinary achievements for botany and zoology. It was the Insects of Surinam book that would be considered her most significant work. For one, it was one of the first such studies of flora and fauna of that area, and second, it offered a wealth of new information about the food chains and developmental cycles of insects. This was really groundbreaking because it abandoned the idea of spontaneous geration, that maggots came not from eggs but from meat, and that insects were the products of mud, among other incorrect ideas about how insects come to be. Yeah, for a long time, people thought rotting meat was where maggots came from. And while that may be where their eggs, the eggs get laid that produced them, they didn't realize that there was a whole egg aspect, but they just thought the meat started some process. Uh. And while those myths were addressed, Maria's work was not above criticism, although most of that criticism came after her life. And we've got some bun proboscis talk. Right after we first paused for a word from one of our sponsors, because of her dedication to carefully watching every moment of the insects lives unfold. Included in her surinam book was a detail that she observed in sphinx moths, which went contested for quite some time. In her illustration of a newly metamorphosed moth that appears in the book, she shows it with what looks like a split tongue if you're just looking at the picture, and in her accompanying notes she described the two pieces combining to form a tube that allowed this moth to drink nectar. This is a time where prior, unrelated research for my job allowed me to get to read this whole part and just feel already vindicated. This was the text that accompanied the plate of the space moth, which notes the split proboscus and also gives you a sense of the types of notes that generally accompanied her illustrations. Here's the quote. The large green caterpillar ate the leaves both of this plant and of the sweet stop described in plate fourteen. It ate vigorously and greedily, yet had as little discharge an excrement as the smallest caterpillar. When touched, it thrashed around wildly. On twenty June, it remained still and shed its skin. The skin it discarded is on the leaf. After the molting, it was no longer so green, but became more reddish in color. The next day it changed into a liver colored chrysalis with an external protuberance like the one which can be seen on the stock below. The chrysalis was very restless, throwing itself to and fro continuously for about a quarter of an hour. On twenty August there emerged a large moth with six orange and yellow spots on its body, whose four wings and six legs were strangely covered with black thoughts. It's long proboscus consists of two long tubules, which in this species of moth are joined together, thus making a small tube through which they can suck honey from the flowers. When they have finished sucking, they roll the proboscus up tightly and place it under their head between the eyes, so that it is scarcely visible. And there were critics of this particular drawing who claimed that it was proof that her work was not as accurate as had been Lane, hinting that she had added flourishes to her observations. And again this happened after she had passed, and we'll talk about that timing in a little bit. But eventually it was confirmed that some moths, the sphinx moth among them, have to half tubules that do join together to form one proboscis. They are one of the most fascinating features of moths, yes, along with like little rows of hooks that connect their wings together. Sometimes to return to the subject at hand. Similarly, Marian's illustration of a tarantula making a meal out of a humming bird was decades out of her death called out as an impossibility. Early nineteenth century naturalist Landsdown Gilding called the plate a quote entomological caricature. British entomologist William McClay tested the idea and the eighteen hundreds by offering a large spider in his lab of birds eat and when the bird or when the fighter fled. He resolved that Marian had quote told a willful falsehood. But of course we know now that such things do indeed happen in nature. When Henry Walter Bates observed this same behavior and published his findings in eighteen sixty three, Marian's depiction was validated. I literally did multiple she was right dances in my chair while reading that one. When Polly wrote it, there were to be clear some errors in metamorphosis of the insects of Surinam. Some of these have been attributed to the abrupt end of her studies in South America and her need to create some of her illustrations from memory and preserved samples. For example, army and leaf cutter ants are grouped together as though they lived in the same colonies, and some of the caterpillars are pictured with different butterflies than the ones they actually metamorphosed into. Yeah, I mean to be fair, any scientists has some errors along the way, and she did. That trip did not go as planned, so you could kind of see why. There's a really long and wonderful paper that I will link to in our show notes. It was one of my sources that kind of outlines why we should not discount her work just because there are some errors. Well, we make errors sometimes, everybody, everybody to anyone that deals with lots of information does. You can't help it unless you're a robot, and even then sometimes robots make mistakes. But in that same book, slipped in along with the various notes on an illustration of a peacock flower with a caterpillar climbing its stem, and a pupa resting on a leafy segment, and a moss sipping nectar from the flowers is an annotation that is not about botany or insects, but about slavery. In the notes, Marian wrote that enslaved women of Surinam would use the seeds of the peacock flower as an apportive face it, choosing not to have a child rather than to allow one to be born into the cruelties of slavery. She continued, quote, indeed, they even kill themselves on account of the of the usual harsh treatment needed out for them. So they consider that they will be born again with their friends in a free state in their own country, so they told me themselves. This was, of course a unique outtake in Marian's notations, a rare deviation from the science of her work on flora and insects to comment on the dark side of colonialism and the slavery that came with it. She continued that the slaves quote must be treated benignly. Biographer Kim Todd wondered in her book about Marian if this notation wasn't intended to provide food for thought for the people of Europe who might own slave plantations, many of whom would be the likely audience for this book. But as Maria made no further known remarks on the subject, we don't really know what she hoped to achieve with these particular passages. Yeah, it does stand out though, it's sort of like, here we are leaf cut her ants and look at the what the spiders are doing. Hey, slavery is horrible, and also let's look at this plant. It's really like it jumps out as as out of context with the rest of the book. Uh. And we should note that while the peacock flower that she described in that passage was brought back to Europe by other explorers in the seventeen hundreds because of the appeal of its showy blossoms, that information of its use as an abortifation it was not widely shared, even though it had been known because of this work that Maria had done. And though the Surinam book brought praise and admiration, it did not bring the wealth she had hoped for. It did not stave off difficult times. At the end of Maria's life, she really struggled to bring in enough money to sustain herself. To drum up cash, she painted flowers and sold her work for likely far less than it was worth in most cases, and she also began selling the many and varied specimens that she had acquired it over her life, and even used her connections to collectors to purchase more of them and then flip them to make a little more money. She continued to work, and she began collecting new insects as soon as the last illustrations for her Surinam book were completed. She also published revisions of her previous books and cases. Where new information about the insects became known, she would update the illustrations and annotations to include the most current information. Maria's daughter, Johanna, who was also an artist and was not the one she took on that trip, followed that trail blazed by her mother and her sister Dorotea, and she actually moved to Surinam permanently in seventeen eleven, taking her husband with her. And the following year, Maria, who had liquidated most of her collections at that point, really had a big sort of shift where she stopped corresponding regularly with friends and business associates, and seventeen fifteen, Marian had a stroke, possibly related to the fever that she had contracted, and Sir and Um she had been working on another caterpillar book, but the project sat largely dormant after that due to a partial paralysis. Her son in law and Dorotea's second husband, Swiss Baroque painter George Zell, painted Maria's portrait in these years, near the end of her life, and in it she is surrounded by curiosities and specimens from her collection. Maria Zebulla Marion died on January seventeen seventeen. She was sixty nine. A few days later, all of her remaining watercolors were bought for the Tsar of Russia, Peter the First. As a result of the Tsar's interest in her illustrations, Maria's daughter Dorotea was offered a job at St. Petersburg as the official scientific illustrator for the Tsar, and nearly one hundred years after her death, Maria's work was still influencing scientific illustrators. In eighteen o one, English botanist and zoologist George Shaw included an illustration of a frog in his book General Zoology amphibia, and that frog was named the Marian frog or Rana marianna. It would later come to be known by the scientific name Trachycephalis venulosis or by the more common identifiers of vained tree frog or common milk frog. The decades of observing insects and plants and taking copious notes on their life cycles that Maria did significantly advanced the scientific community's knowledge of entomology and botany. Unfortunately, some poor reproductions of her work that were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries really damaged her reputations. Would examine these sloppily executed prince and that led them to believe that she had not been as skilled as she really was. And that time gap before the criticism of her work began is a really interesting aspect of her career and how her work was viewed at different points in history. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, when Marian published her book on surinam, it was really well received and it actually wasn't until nineteenth century that people started to question things like the split proboscis on the sphinx moth and the bird eating tarantula. As we mentioned some of the problem was due to bad reproductions that just didn't capture the fine and careful details that she had poured into every illustration, but some of the problem can also be traced to the shifting role of women in European society. When disbelievers of the nineteenth century saw elements and Mary and Marian's work that they thought were incorrect, they wrote her off as a silly woman who must not have understood what she was looking at, never mind that she had actually already advanced entomology significantly while she was alive. Yeah, she got written off because she was a woman a lot, which really kind of stunk. But thankfully, despite those criticisms, uh one, she was proved correct on most of them, and to her work has once again become recognized as a really important contribution both to science and to art, so much so that her book on surinams insects was actually republished at the end of last year, and just a few days from when this episode will air, there will actually be a symposium on her work in Amsterdam, So she kind of is becoming really really popular again, which I love because again, her illustrations are so beautiful. Um, I could just gaze at them all day, and it makes sense that she was trained by a Dutch Golden Age painter when you look at her for illustrations. And I don't know why my brain never made that connection before. Yeah. Well, and I had seen her illustrations before, but I knew virtually nothing about her life or even how long ago. It was like in my head, illustrations with the level of skill and detail that she had would would have been a little later recent, right, And that's because they were so good in many cases, and she had so perfectly captured things that there they were used for. I mean still they get referred to so uh, you know, that's why they seem like they must be more recent, because we still see them in textbooks on occasion. And of course I do know that there was plenty of scientific work going on before this point, but a lot of a lot of their aspects do seem to come off as a little more recent than they really were. Yeah, and again, her work was so amazingly good that that's why it feels more modern than it was. Bay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive. If you heard an email address or a Facebook u r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuffy miss in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H