—This is a guest post by Cindy Connelly Ryan, a preservation science specialist in the Preservation Research and Testing Division, and Jessica Fries-Gaither, an Albert Einstein distinguished educator fellow at the Library. It also appears in the September-October issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.
Would you raise insects in your kitchen? Travel thousands of miles from home to study them?
Born in Germany in 1647 and later a resident of the Netherlands, Merian raised the larvae of caterpillars, butterflies and moths, determined their preferred food plants and observed adults emerging from their pupal chrysalides and cocoons. Her detailed notes and sketches became the basis for several groundbreaking books on caterpillars. She pioneered scientific illustration techniques by using counterproof printing to create softer images that more closely resembled her original drawings. She published De Europischen Insecten, and the Library preserves a copy of that book, now more than 300 years old.
In 1699, the intrepid Merian and her youngest daughter journeyed to the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America to study and paint insects. Back home, she published a book in 1705 — Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (Metamorphosis of Surinamese Insects) — that featured vibrant color illustrations of exotic species.
Recent analysis by scientists in the Library’s Preservation Research and Testing Division revealed details about how the book’s colors were created. X-ray fluorescence provided elemental “fingerprints” of materials, and reflectance spectroscopy captured chemical bonds’ visible and near-infrared absorption features. Multiband microscopy revealed details of the paints’ textures, layering and application techniques.
The red cherries are rendered with the poisonous pigment vermilion applied in matte and glossy layers to model depth. The caterpillar hungrily advancing up the branch is rendered in at least eight shades of yellow, gold, orange and red, all made from mixtures of just two pigments.
The colorants were created with a combina tion of European and imported raw materials. Butterflies get their blue colors from thin layers of azurite, a mineral mined in Hungary and Germany. Translucent pink and burgundy tones come from brazilwood, a South American tree first used by European artists in the early 1600s.
In this way, modern science sheds new light on centuries-old science and art.
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Comments (4)
Interested in Science and reserch
If you’re in the D.C. area, the Museum of Women in the Arts has a wonderful exhibition of women painters in the 17th & 18th centuries. It includes several additional paintings by Merian as well as Cornelia de Rijk, a contemporary of Merian. (Easy to use the Metro to get to this museum.)
Greatly enjoyed reading your blog post about your detailed analysis of the pigments used to hand color the Merian illustration. Your work elucidated the technique to achieve her beautiful work and added to my appreciation of it. A benefit to find the timeline for availability of the pigments consistent with the book’s creation.
Your work reminds me and contributes to providing answers to the question that arises when looking at hand colored prints in books or individual works – that is, whether the coloring is contemporary with the print and the creator’s original intention or was the coloring a later addition.
Thank you for sharing your work.
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