SciArt Magazine - All Issues | Page 15
And judging from the images on display, the
conversations would have been lively. Take, for
instance, the Cancer reticulatus crab drawn by
artist and author Johann Friedrich Wilhelm
Herbst in the 1780s, for his book called Versuch
einer Naturgeschichte der Krabben und Krebse… (Attempt at a natural history of crabs and crayfish…) The
crab’s carapace looks like it is inlaid with mother-of-pearl, or shards of stained glass. Or examine the flying gurnard (Trigla volitans) in Marcus
Elieser Bloch’s Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der
Fische (General Natural History of Fish), published
in Berlin in the late 1800s. Bloch had very little
education and in fact was still almost illiterate
when he began studying anatomy at age 19. He
got his medical degree at age 42, and then, after
establishing a successful career, began collecting
fish specimens. The gurnard that he depicted
Above image captions, from left to right:
Egg Collection. In his major encyclopedia of
nature, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte für alle
Stände (A general natural history for everyone),
German naturalist Lorenz Oken (1779-1851)
grouped animals based not on science, but philosophy. Nevertheless, his encyclopedia proved to
be a popular and enduring work. Here Oken is
illustrating variation in egg color and markings found among water birds. © AMNH\D.
Finnin
SciArt in America April 2014
has green, wing-like fins, which resemble a
peacock’s tail, and looks like it’s speeding across
the page. Or, for a poignant peak back in time,
gaze upon an image of a Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, found in the pages of John Gould’s The
mammals of Australia. This once world’s-largest
meat-eating marsupial now exists only in books
like these.
“Natural Histories” is, all in all, a testament to
the power of art to further inquiry. The exhibition argues convincingly that the growth of science as we know it would have been hampered
if scientists had not had the ability to communicate visually, and that a common visual language
can stimulate discovery. Illustrations, it seems,
are much more than just pretty pictures.
Frog Dissection. A female green frog
(Pelophylax kl. esculentus) with egg
masses is shown in dissection above
a view of the frog’s skeleton in the
book Historia naturalis ranarum
nostratium…(Natural history of the
native frogs…) from 1758. Shadows
and dissecting pins add to the realism. © AMNH\D. Finnin
Angry Puffer Fish and Others. Louis
Renard’s artists embellished their work to
satisfy Europeans’ thirst for the unusual.
Some illustrations in Poissons, écrevisses
et crabes, de diverses couleurs et figures
extraordinaires…, like this one, include
fish with imaginative colors and patterns
and strange, un-fishlike expressions. ©
AMNH\D. Finnin
15