Kim Todd, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007).

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Notes

• 2 – “Conches, plump beetles, limp birds with eyes shuttered closed lay in the wood drawers, a background blank as a sheet of paper. She wanted to fill in that background, to see what plants the animals fed on, how they moved. Which caterpillar turned into each glossy moth? How long did it take from spinning a cocoon to hatching? How might the lives of these insects of New World forests be different from the ones she found in Old World flower beds?”
  • Against mechanism — not the species in isolation but in conjunction with its environment
• 5 – “In her beautiful and scientifically accurate drawings and detailed field notes, she documented the lives of South American beetles and moths, recording life histories and behaviors previously unknown to western science. Her careful observations made her on of the first to describe metamorphosis, the unsettling process by which a species, in the middle of its life, swaps one body form for another. These transformations had long been the source of speculation and intrigue because the dramatic shape shifting seemed to hold the key to the unidentified origins of life.”

 

• “While many of her naturalist contemporaries like Jan Swammerdam, Mercello Malpighi, and Robert Hooke used sharp dissecting knives and finely ground lenses to look deeper under a creature’s skin than had ever been possible before, Merian investigated animals in their natural habitat, observed the plants they fed on, and charted the stages of their development. Many artists of the time drew colorful butterflies, pinned and preserved, growing dusty on collectors’ shelves. Impatient with this limited view, she put exploration to the service of science and pioneered some of the first field studies. Her focus on direct observation, field work, the entire life cycle, and the interrelationships between plants and animals helped lay the groundwork for modern-day biological science, particularly ecology.”

 

• 6-7 – “Starting with the few clues on the back of the notecard, gradually pieces of her biography came together. Speculation, though, is necessary. She left two wills, a lawsuit, scattered watercolors, four books about insect metamorphosis and one about flowers, a study book with pictures and notes about hundreds of creatures from moths to snails to frogs, and seventeen letters. The letters, preserved by chance, were not the ones we might choose.”
• 7 – “They are heavy on business negotiations and instructions for mixing varnish and light on personal detail. But that’s all there is. We know nothing about what she felt for her husband. Or her daughters. Or her God. Her interior life is as remote as the innermost whorl of a snail shell on the ocean floor.”
• 8 – “Francis Bacon, contrary to tradition and contrary to Descartes, who wanted to move knowledge forward by thought alone, suggested in his ‘On Natural and Experimental History,’ the need for a science rooted in experimentation. Since, to that point, experiments were often the province of alchemists and other purveyors of the ‘mechanical arts,’ he warned this might require embracing things out of the scope of most university-educated men, including things ‘most ordinary,’ things ‘mean, illiberal, filthy,’ and things ‘trifling and childish.’ . . . This created opportunities for those like Merian who, limited in her position as a woman and a craftsperson rather than an aristocrat, could still make notes about and drawings of what she saw . . ..”

 

• “At this time, the boundaries between certain kinds of art and science were fluid, since the nascent discipline of biology was all about documentation of the ever expanding natural world. Many breakthroughs involved new ways of seeing: the telescope, the microscope, the camera obscura.”

 

• 11 – “As I researched Merian, I became more interested in the history of metamorphosis — its importance both as a scientific discovery and an evolutionary breakthrough. The questions shifted: How did metamorphosis alter the way people thought about animals and their potential for change? Did the natural world appear more threatening as its shapes were revealed to be unstable or did it seem filled with hope, more ripe with possibility?”

 

• “Metamorphosis has a strong grip on our psyche, from Ovid’s vivid descriptions of arms spreading to branches, throats turning to stone, to Kafka’s Gregor waking to find himself a beetle. One of the first ways children understand nature and how it functions (a cocoon in a jam jar is a staple of elementary school classrooms), metamorphosis has metaphorical potential that is strong and easy to grasp. It is a process integral to the way we perceive ourselves and our ability to change lives.”

 

• 58 – “But for a determined science-minded woman, the kitchen itself could be a site for experimentation. In a way, testing was part of the domestic and crafts culture. How-to volumes, called ‘books of secrets,’ contained instructions on everything from cooling a fever, to changing the color of gold, to crafting quality armor. The Royal Society recognized the value of this knowledge and, while members reached out to educated men like Malpighi, they also launched a ‘History of Trades,’ to plumb the expertise of dyers and winemakers for clues to chemistry and fermentation. Many of the books of secrets targeted tradespeople, but others were aimed at an audience of housewives. As a girl, Merian might have looked at these recipe books with Marrel . . ..”
• “In a seventeenth-century handbook detailing a proper education for gentlewomen, experimentation is actively encouraged. Merian was a craftsperson, not an aristocrat, but the suggestions are still revealing.”
• 61 –  “One house, just a few down from the Graff’s, had a painting of scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the ceiling.”
  • How does she know this?
• “As much as Frankfurt was marked by Merian’s father’s vision, Nuremberg was marked by her husband’s. Graff grew up there . . . and his engraved portraits of the city helped frame her view.”
• “The scenes pulse with busyness, but, somehow, not vitality. One twentieth-century critic described Graff’s work of exhaustive detail as ‘executed with great care, but obviously in a fairly dull manner.’”
  • “The evidence of proximity”
• 66 – “Even if she found permission in Solomon’s nature studies in teh Bible, Merian’s interests remained inextricably odd.”
  • How does she know this tidbit, for example. Assuming she did find it somewhere, and isn’t just assuming that because Merian could have found support in the Bible, she did, how do I evaluate sources when none are listed. There are notes but no citations connecting them the passages from the text.
• “In his 1675 survey of German artists, he included not only Merian’s brothers and father, but Merian herself.”
• 72 – “Another, Christoph Arnold, a professor of languages and poetry at the Egidien school, had traveled throughout Europe and met some of the scientists doing pioneering insect work. Through conversation with these men and browsing in their libraries, Merian could have learned of breakthroughs in insect studies far beyond the borders of Germany.”
• 89 – “Schurman was very old when Caspar arrived at Wiewert, but she still made an impression. Merian’s stepfather Marrel, who spent time in Utrecht and joined the same painter’s guild as Schurman, likely knew of her as well. Seeing the ambitions of he stepdaughter, ambitions he had nurtured, he might have mentioned the accomplished woman and her achievements, igniting an interest in the young painter.”
• 179 – 180 – “Unlike her search for living cabinet specimens, guided by interests of the mostly male collectors, here she followed her own lead. If one image from de Bry’s Grand Voyages lingered in the memory of a young girl, it might have been one from Benzoni’s expedition to Hispaniola (the island now split between the Dominican Republic and Haiti). In it, a woman eats a plant, two dead children beside her. The caption describes how some natives, faced with the European onslaught, killed their sons and daughters while others, ‘terminated their pregnancies with the juice of a certain herb in order not to produce children.’ In the background, both male and female suicides hang from the trees. What was this unnamed herb with sinister powers over female anatomy?// One day, Merian wet her brush and painted a sprig of scarlet and yellow flowers spilling long stames. The colors may have caught her eye, or her servants and slave may have drawn it to her attention. She called the plant ‘peacock flower,’ capturing its lavish display. The top of the tree . . . threads into round buds, some gold and ready to bloom. A gray moth with a spotted body, Manduca sexta, feeds on the nectar. Seeds dangle like peas in a pod. One seed shows through, where part of the pod is peeled away. In its colors and composition, the picture is bright and cheerful, starkly at odds with the accompanying text.// Both Amerindians and women from Guinea and Angola told Merian athey used peacock flower seeds to abort children to protect them from slavery. As for the women in control over their destinies. Suicide provided a similar escape. Merian wrote next to plate 45, the peacock flower, in her Surinam book: ‘Indeed, they even kill themselves on account of the usual harsh treatment meted out to them; for they consider that they will be born again with their friends in a free state in their own country, so they told me themselves.’”
  • [Her grandfather publishes a book and her father continues to print it (which are already the proximity support for the claim that she read this book, she paints the same flower and investigates its purpose with the indigenes, these two facts are linked by the supposition that that image may have stuck in her memory the most . . . so must going on here. At what point does storytelling have stronger evidentiary claim than documentation? How does this relate to Griot History?]
• 185 – “She gathered a green and black caterpillar with a yellow face from a wild tree that dripped sap like that used in gum Arabic. She put it into a box, fed it leaves, noted how it molted in a red and black caterpillar, then wove an egg-sized cocoon. Out came the ‘white witch’ or ‘ghost moth.’ La Providence offered good fortune. The wings of this species, Thysania agrippina, with soft beige and brown markings tinged with violet, have the widest span of any New World moth. They can reach of to a foot when spread. It was a collector’s treasure. She would have pinned and kept it.”
• 192 – “In the grip of a fever, she might have watched ships traveling down the Surinam River toward the sea, squinting against the sun sparking off the ripples, the blades of the palms and thought of cool mornings in Amsterdam. She would have been torn between desire to be back in a more friendly climate and the need to finish the work she set out to do.”
• 210 – “Here, though Merian had in hand a learned scientific opinion, she went back to what the Amerindians told her. No one in Amsterdam would have more credibility than Ruysch, but while she could seek academic opinion, she could also ignore it. Experts often contradicted each other, and she knew from first-hand experience that they could be wrong.”
• 240 – “Like Merian, Alexander von Humboldt chafed at the lifeless cabinets and what, in the wake of Linnaeus, had developed into a full-fledged mania for classification. There must be more to biology than finding and naming.”
• 262 – “Also, the tobacco hawkmoth raised in a glass box is often blue rather than green because its artificial diet doesn’t contain the yellow molecules from leaves that interact with the blue proteins in the blood. Though the tobacco hawkmoth is one of the most studied insects, its natural diet is only now beginning to be understood. For a long time the caterpillars were thought to eat only plants in the nightshade family — poppers, potatoes, tobacco — until researchers in Arizona found them munching on representatives of an entirely different family. Life in the lab is life stripped of seasons, the search for a mate, the need to evade predators, all of which could tip the balance of one hormone or another. How much else could we learn by looking at the organism in its natural context?”
• 267 – “And now, at the start of the twenty-first century, metamorphosis is once again undergoing a re-evaluation. The very relationships Merian looked at and field techniques she pioneered are at the center of scientific explorations today. Her insistence on observing development in its natural context is coming back into vogue after decades of tracking metamorphosis mostly in the laboratory and under the microscope, isolating animals from their surroundings as absolutely as the seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosity that Merian found so frustrating. Undoubtedly, Merian’s greatest contribution to both science and art was her sense of ecology, the tracking of plants, seasons, parasites, predators, the way a species isn’t just a flash of pretty wings in the sun, but a moment in space and time.”