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