it's Ada Lovelace Day, my contribution: Maria Sibylla Merian
Back when I was a teenager, I hated biology. I chose it to do my exams in, because of my love for plants and animals, but I just hated the cutting up frogs and studying the single cell organisms and drawing them.
I was so happy that I made it to my exams, one of the first things I did was throw out my biology books. Then one day I was browsing a thrift store, and found some drawings that took my breath away. Detailed botanical drawings of a couple of flowers. I marveled at the detail of the drawing, the flower just seemed to jump off the paper. My love for botanical drawings was born. And now, on Ada Lovelace day, I want to share a wonderful botanical illustrator, and a woman whom has made a valuable contribution to entymology, with her detailed depiction of a butterfly's metamorphosis. Maria Sybilla Merian was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1647. Her stepfather (her birth father died when she was a very young girl) was instrumental in her life, he encouraged her to start painting, and at age 13 she already painted butterflies and flowers she found in her neighbourhood, and studied them thoroughly, She married young, and had two children. She kept working on her art, both by teaching it to students from the high ranks of society, and she kept painting her flowers and studied the metamorphosis of the catterpillar into butterflies. This resulted in her first book, the book of flowers, or Blumenbuch in german. After the death of her stepfather, she soon left her husband (following some legal battles amongst the family), and moved to the Netherlands with her mother and daughters. They ended up living in the house belonging to the governor of Surinam, which gave her a chance to study the plant and insect life in that country. After the death of her mother, she moved to Amsterdam. Her daughter married a wealthy merchant, and moved to Surinam with him. Maria's work was already well known there, and thanks to that she was allowed access to many private collections. In 1699 the Amsterdam city counsel fulfilled her dream of traveling to Surinam and study the many different forms of insect life there and especially her great interest: the metamorphosis of caterpilar to butterflies. She worked there for two years, travelling around the country, sketching the plants and insects, and recorded the native's use of the plants and their names. All this work would culminate in her most important book, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. She described the metamorphosis in detail, which was quite unique, until then scientists believed insects just crawled out of the mud. Seeing pictures of them crawling out of eggs and transforming was quite a feat at those days.She travelled back to the Netherlands in 1701, forced due to a very bad case of Malaria. The book was published in Amsterdam in 1705. She died, reportedly a pauper, in Amsterdam in 1717. The sad thing is, that she never received the recognition she deserved amongst her peers during her lifetime. Probably because she did not publish in Latin, the language of science during her years. But her work was and is remarkable. She was among the first to show the process of metamorphosis, and that fact is recognized only since the last couple decades. It is also astonishing that she made the journey to Surinam at that day and age, driven by her love for nature, and her forceful will to draw what she saw there. She was one of the first natural scientists, and her work deserves the recognition it now receives. Her passion for nature shows in her drawings, or copper etchings as most of them were. She was a remarkable woman, and I am happy to share her and her work with the world in this little blog post :)
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