May 31, 2017 • 28 mins
As a naturalist illustrator, Maria Sibylla Merian helped dispel many entomological myths and improved the scientific study of insects and plants, and she did it beautifully.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Tracy, you
know this, but it's worth mentioning that there was a
time and people believe the insects were somehow spawn from mud.
(00:24):
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
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
and named plant an animal species. So today we are
talking about naturalist and scientific illustrator Maria Zibuya Marianne in
an interesting thing. Her star is apparently on the rise,
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
(01:29):
all this attention. So that's who we're talking about today.
Maria Zibullia marian was born on April second, sixteen forty seven,
in Frankfurt, Germany. Her father was Mattheus Marion, one of
seventeenth century Germany's best illustrators, and her mother was Johanna
Sabaya Haine. Johanna was Mattheus's second wife, and he had
(01:51):
inherited a print shop from his father in law from
his first marriage, and Maria was born into a family
of much older sibylings 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
(02:12):
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
(02:33):
a painter who 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, Jacob Meryl's paintings. Uh.
(02:53):
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. Uh. 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. Uh. And Maria was interested in
(03:16):
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 Merrily 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
(03:39):
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 process she started documenting them through illustrations,
(04:03):
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,
(04:26):
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
(04:46):
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 Johan's hometown
of Nurnberg. In the early years of Johanna's life, Maria
began producing more serious illustration studies of flowers and insects.
(05:10):
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 moths 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
(05:32):
release 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
(05:53):
popular that it was later republished as Neius bloom In
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
(06:16):
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 butterflies
throughout their life cycles, and in each image she showed
(06:37):
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
(06:59):
in this particular way. It 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,
(07:19):
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 six one,
(07:41):
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 Nurremberg. Maria and their
two daughters did not move with him. In six six, Maria,
her mother Johanna, and her daughter's Johanna and Dorotea all
moved to a village and what was West Friesland but
(08:02):
would now be part of the Netherlands. They joined Maria's
half brother, Casper, and a colony of Labadists, 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.
(08:24):
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 nine, and the following
year Marianne took her daughters to a new home in Amsterdam,
and throughout their stay with the Lobbyists, Maria and Johann
(08:46):
Groff 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 relation and ship later in
her life, telling people not that she and Graff had divorced,
but that he had died and left her a widow.
(09:07):
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
(09:29):
the age of fifty two, Maria and Dorotea, who was
twenty 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
(09:52):
the fact that the trip was beyond expensive, and it
becomes clear just how much of a risk it was.
Maria had old 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
(10:15):
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
(10:39):
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 Darthea returned to
Amsterdam in September seventeen o one, and exactly what she
had contracted is unknown, although the two most likely can
(11:00):
to dates 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
(11:20):
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 incium, which was metamorphos of
(11:45):
the Insects of Suriname. There were more than five dozen
engravings in the book, carefully detailing the life cycles of
Surnames insect world. The work followed the same format as
her work on caterpillars, featuring each creature here alongside its
host plant life with detailed descriptive text. While her books
(12:06):
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
(12:29):
the idea of spontaneous generation, 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,
(12:50):
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, though most of that criticism came after her life.
And we've got some bun proboscis talk right after we
first pause for a word from one of our sponsors.
(13:14):
Because of her dedication to carefully watching every moment of
the insects lives unfold, included in her Suriname 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,
(13:37):
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
(13:58):
of the Sphinx 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
(14:20):
as the smallest caterpillar. When touched, it thrashed around wildly.
On twenty third June, it remained still and shed its skin.
The skin it discarded is lying on the leaf. After
the molding, 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
(14:42):
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 six legs were
strangely covered with black thoughts. It's long proboscus consists of
(15:05):
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
(15:26):
that it was proof that her work was not as
accurate as had been claimed, hinting that she had added
flourishes to her observations. And again this happened after she
had passed, and we'll talk about that timing and 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 proboscus. They are one
(15:48):
of the most fascinating features of moths. Yes, along with
like little rows of hooks that connect their wings together,
sometimes to return to this object at hand. Similarly, Marian's
illustration of a tarantula making a meal out of a
hunting bird was decades out of her death called out
(16:09):
as an impossibility. Early nineteenth century naturalist Landsdown Gilding called
the plate a quote entomological caricature. British entomologist William McClay
tested the idea in the eighteen hundreds by offering a
large spider in his lab of birds eat and when
the bird or when the spider fled. He resolved that
(16:32):
Marian had quotes 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 line when Polly wrote it. There were
(16:57):
to be clear some errors in metamorph Us 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
(17:21):
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
(17:41):
kind of outlines why we should not discount her work
just because there are some errors. Well, we make errors sometimes, everybody.
Everybody that anyone that deals with lots of information does.
You can't help it unless you're a robot, and even
then sometimes you're about to make mistakes. But in that
same book, slipped in along with the various notes on
(18:02):
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
(18:25):
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 meted
out for them. So they consider that they will be
born again with their friends in a free state in
(18:46):
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 colonial is
um and the slavery that came with it. She continued
that the slaves quote must be treated benignly. Biographer Kim
(19:08):
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
(19:28):
particular passages. Yeah, it does stand out though, it's sort
of like, here we are leaf cutter ants and look
at that. 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
(19:49):
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 and though it had been known
because of this work that Maria had done, and though
the Suriname book brought praise and admiration, it did not
bring the wealth she had hoped for. It did not
(20:12):
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 over her life, and
even used her connections to collectors to purchase more of
(20:34):
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 surname 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
(20:59):
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
(21:19):
corresponding regularly with friends and business associates, and seventeen fifteen,
Marian had a stroke, possibly related to the fever that
she had contracted in Surinam. 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 Zel painted
(21:43):
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 Marian 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 Czar's interest
(22:06):
in her illustrations, Maria's daughter Dorotea was offered a job
in 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
(22:28):
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 Trachycephalus venulosis,
or by the more common identifiers of vained tree frog
or common milk frog. The decades of observing insects and
(22:48):
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. You would examine these sloppily executed prince and
(23:08):
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
(23:30):
the 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
(23:55):
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,
(24:15):
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 seranoms Insects was
actually republished at the end of last year, and just
(24:36):
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 her illustrations. And
(24:57):
I don't know why my brain never made that connection before. 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
(25:20):
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
(25:42):
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. He has
some listener mail for us. I do. I have to
have two short things. The first one is from our
listener Mary, and she says, high ladies, I teach freshman composition,
(26:02):
and I've always heard colleagues say they don't really know
a text until they teach it. Your podcast recently led
me to a fascinating manifestation of that fact. I listened
to the podcast regularly, and I'm always finding interesting points
to share with my classes or interesting ways to make them.
This time, I was teaching about eighteenth century poet Mary
Lupour's poems Mira to Octavia, and I discovered a new
(26:22):
tidbit thanks to you. She references Tico Brahey, which I
didn't know when I studied it years back. It was
all your podcast. I also used your podcast on Great
Zimbabwe to talk about the dangers of approaching research with
a theory you wish to support rather than a question
to be answered. Thank you for the great teaching material, Mary, Mary.
First of all, thank you for being an educator. Second,
(26:44):
it's an honor that we could help. Uh. Super cool.
I'm always so grateful when teachers write us, because I'm
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(27:05):
on the air. But I just want to say to
the person that sent me the three fashion books, I
got them and they are amazing. Thank you. Um their
heaven so so uh. That is our listener mail for today.
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(28:08):
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How stop works dot com.
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Tracy, you
know this, but it's worth mentioning that there was a
time and people believe the insects were somehow spawn from mud.
(00:24):
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
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
and named plant an animal species. So today we are
talking about naturalist and scientific illustrator Maria Zibuya Marianne in
an interesting thing. Her star is apparently on the rise,
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
(01:29):
all this attention. So that's who we're talking about today.
Maria Zibullia marian was born on April second, sixteen forty seven,
in Frankfurt, Germany. Her father was Mattheus Marion, one of
seventeenth century Germany's best illustrators, and her mother was Johanna
Sabaya Haine. Johanna was Mattheus's second wife, and he had
(01:51):
inherited a print shop from his father in law from
his first marriage, and Maria was born into a family
of much older sibylings 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
(02:12):
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
(02:33):
a painter who 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, Jacob Meryl's paintings. Uh.
(02:53):
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. Uh. 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. Uh. And Maria was interested in
(03:16):
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 Merrily 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
(03:39):
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 process she started documenting them through illustrations,
(04:03):
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,
(04:26):
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
(04:46):
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 Johan's hometown
of Nurnberg. In the early years of Johanna's life, Maria
began producing more serious illustration studies of flowers and insects.
(05:10):
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 moths 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
(05:32):
release 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
(05:53):
popular that it was later republished as Neius bloom In
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
(06:16):
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 butterflies
throughout their life cycles, and in each image she showed
(06:37):
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
(06:59):
in this particular way. It 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,
(07:19):
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 six one,
(07:41):
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 Nurremberg. Maria and their
two daughters did not move with him. In six six, Maria,
her mother Johanna, and her daughter's Johanna and Dorotea all
moved to a village and what was West Friesland but
(08:02):
would now be part of the Netherlands. They joined Maria's
half brother, Casper, and a colony of Labadists, 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.
(08:24):
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 nine, and the following
year Marianne took her daughters to a new home in Amsterdam,
and throughout their stay with the Lobbyists, Maria and Johann
(08:46):
Groff 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 relation and ship later in
her life, telling people not that she and Graff had divorced,
but that he had died and left her a widow.
(09:07):
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
(09:29):
the age of fifty two, Maria and Dorotea, who was
twenty 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
(09:52):
the fact that the trip was beyond expensive, and it
becomes clear just how much of a risk it was.
Maria had old 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
(10:15):
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
(10:39):
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 Darthea returned to
Amsterdam in September seventeen o one, and exactly what she
had contracted is unknown, although the two most likely can
(11:00):
to dates 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
(11:20):
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 incium, which was metamorphos of
(11:45):
the Insects of Suriname. There were more than five dozen
engravings in the book, carefully detailing the life cycles of
Surnames insect world. The work followed the same format as
her work on caterpillars, featuring each creature here alongside its
host plant life with detailed descriptive text. While her books
(12:06):
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
(12:29):
the idea of spontaneous generation, 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,
(12:50):
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, though most of that criticism came after her life.
And we've got some bun proboscis talk right after we
first pause for a word from one of our sponsors.
(13:14):
Because of her dedication to carefully watching every moment of
the insects lives unfold, included in her Suriname 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,
(13:37):
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
(13:58):
of the Sphinx 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
(14:20):
as the smallest caterpillar. When touched, it thrashed around wildly.
On twenty third June, it remained still and shed its skin.
The skin it discarded is lying on the leaf. After
the molding, 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
(14:42):
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 six legs were
strangely covered with black thoughts. It's long proboscus consists of
(15:05):
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
(15:26):
that it was proof that her work was not as
accurate as had been claimed, hinting that she had added
flourishes to her observations. And again this happened after she
had passed, and we'll talk about that timing and 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 proboscus. They are one
(15:48):
of the most fascinating features of moths. Yes, along with
like little rows of hooks that connect their wings together,
sometimes to return to this object at hand. Similarly, Marian's
illustration of a tarantula making a meal out of a
hunting bird was decades out of her death called out
(16:09):
as an impossibility. Early nineteenth century naturalist Landsdown Gilding called
the plate a quote entomological caricature. British entomologist William McClay
tested the idea in the eighteen hundreds by offering a
large spider in his lab of birds eat and when
the bird or when the spider fled. He resolved that
(16:32):
Marian had quotes 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 line when Polly wrote it. There were
(16:57):
to be clear some errors in metamorph Us 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
(17:21):
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
(17:41):
kind of outlines why we should not discount her work
just because there are some errors. Well, we make errors sometimes, everybody.
Everybody that anyone that deals with lots of information does.
You can't help it unless you're a robot, and even
then sometimes you're about to make mistakes. But in that
same book, slipped in along with the various notes on
(18:02):
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
(18:25):
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 meted
out for them. So they consider that they will be
born again with their friends in a free state in
(18:46):
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 colonial is
um and the slavery that came with it. She continued
that the slaves quote must be treated benignly. Biographer Kim
(19:08):
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
(19:28):
particular passages. Yeah, it does stand out though, it's sort
of like, here we are leaf cutter ants and look
at that. 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
(19:49):
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 and though it had been known
because of this work that Maria had done, and though
the Suriname book brought praise and admiration, it did not
bring the wealth she had hoped for. It did not
(20:12):
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 over her life, and
even used her connections to collectors to purchase more of
(20:34):
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 surname 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
(20:59):
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
(21:19):
corresponding regularly with friends and business associates, and seventeen fifteen,
Marian had a stroke, possibly related to the fever that
she had contracted in Surinam. 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 Zel painted
(21:43):
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 Marian 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 Czar's interest
(22:06):
in her illustrations, Maria's daughter Dorotea was offered a job
in 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
(22:28):
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 Trachycephalus venulosis,
or by the more common identifiers of vained tree frog
or common milk frog. The decades of observing insects and
(22:48):
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. You would examine these sloppily executed prince and
(23:08):
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
(23:30):
the 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
(23:55):
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,
(24:15):
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 seranoms Insects was
actually republished at the end of last year, and just
(24:36):
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 her illustrations. And
(24:57):
I don't know why my brain never made that connection before. 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
(25:20):
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
(25:42):
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. He has
some listener mail for us. I do. I have to
have two short things. The first one is from our
listener Mary, and she says, high ladies, I teach freshman composition,
(26:02):
and I've always heard colleagues say they don't really know
a text until they teach it. Your podcast recently led
me to a fascinating manifestation of that fact. I listened
to the podcast regularly, and I'm always finding interesting points
to share with my classes or interesting ways to make them.
This time, I was teaching about eighteenth century poet Mary
Lupour's poems Mira to Octavia, and I discovered a new
(26:22):
tidbit thanks to you. She references Tico Brahey, which I
didn't know when I studied it years back. It was
all your podcast. I also used your podcast on Great
Zimbabwe to talk about the dangers of approaching research with
a theory you wish to support rather than a question
to be answered. Thank you for the great teaching material, Mary, Mary.
First of all, thank you for being an educator. Second,
(26:44):
it's an honor that we could help. Uh. Super cool.
I'm always so grateful when teachers write us, because I'm
just grateful they're dedicated teachers out there educating the minds
of tomorrow. I mean their minds now. But you know
what I'm saying, tomorrow's leaders. Uh. The other thing is
kind of a little bit of a nebulous thing because
there was a tiny note put in this parcel for
me that said, don't you don't have to read this
(27:05):
on the air. But I just want to say to
the person that sent me the three fashion books, I
got them and they are amazing. Thank you. Um their
heaven so so uh. That is our listener mail for today.
Maybe you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
You can also reach out to us across the spectrum
of social media, where we appear as missed in History
(27:26):
pretty much everywhere. So that's on Twitter at misst in history,
on Facebook dot com slash mist in history, at mist
in history dot tumbler dot com, at pinterest dot com
slash misst in history, and on Instagram as at misst
in history. If you would like to do a little
research of your own, whether that be on insects or
plants or anything else, you can go to our parents site,
how stuff Works, type in your search term in the
(27:48):
search bar and you will get a plethora of interesting
things to look at. You can also visit me and
Tracy at missed in history dot com, where we have
back episodes of every podcast episode that has ever insted
of the show from long before we were involved to
present day, as well as notes on any of the
shows that Tracy and I have worked on together. So
(28:08):
we encourage you please come and visit us at misston
History dot com and how Stuff Works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, is It,
How stop works dot com.
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