Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What was Maria Sibylla Merian's first publication?
Merian first made a name for herself as an botanical artist. In 1675 she started to publish a three volume series, each with 12 plates depicting flowers.[22] In 1680 she published Neues Blumenbuch, combining the series.[23]
The name honors Maria Sibylla Merian, a 17th century European naturalist and entomologist who studied butterflies in South America.
Timeline of women in science
The younger Basel line includes a Frankfurt sub-branch founded by the engraver Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593-1650), whose descendants became artists during the Baroque period and ran what became one of Europe's largest publishers in the 17th century. Matthäus Merian's daughter was the naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian.
From 1685 onwards Merian, her daughters and her mother lived with the Labadist community, who had settled on the grounds of a stately home – Walt(h)a Castle – at Wieuwerd in Friesland. They stayed there for three years and Merian found the time to study natural history and Latin, the language in which scientific books were written.[7] In the moors of Friesland she observed the birth and development of frogs, and collected them to dissect them.[10] Merian stayed with the community until 1691.[7]
The role of caterpillars in the life stages of butterflies was badly understood. In 1679 Maria Sibylla Merian published the first volume of "The Caterpillars' Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food", which contained 50 illustrations and a description of insects, moths, butterflies and their larvae. An earlier popular publication on moths and butterflies, and their caterpillars, by Jan Goedart had not included eggs in the life stages of European moths and butterflies, because he had believed that caterpillars were generated from water. When Merian published her study of caterpillars it was still widely believed that insects were spontaneously generated. Merian's illustrations supported the findings of Francesco Redi, Marcello Malpighi and Jan Swammerdam.
Merian was one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly.[4] Merian collected and observed live insects and created detailed drawings. In her time insects still had a reputation as "beasts of the devil" and the process of metamorphosis was largely unknown. While a handful of scholars had published empirical information on the insect, moth and butterfly life cycle, the widespread contemporary believe was that they were "born of mud" by spontaneous generation. Merian documented evidence to the contrary and described the life cycles of 186 insect species.[14]
Maria Sibylla Merian's father, the Swiss engraver and publisher Matthäus Merian the Elder, married her mother, his second wife, Johanna Sybilla Heyne, in 1646. Maria was born within the next year in 1647, making her his 9th child. Her father died in 1650, and in 1651 her mother remarried Jacob Marrel, the flower and still life painter. Marrel encouraged Merian to draw and paint. While he lived mostly in Holland, his pupil Abraham Mignon trained her. At the age of thirteen she painted her first images of insects and plants from specimens she had captured.[4] Early on, she had access to many books about natural history.[5] Regarding her youth, in the foreword to Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Merian wrote:[6]
Other women still-life painters, such as Merian's contemporary Margaretha de Heer, included insects in their floral pictures, but did not breed or study them. While women of Merian's day did collect butterflies, the amateur science of naturalism was practised by men.[9] In 1679 she published her first work on insects, the first of a two-volume illustrated book focusing on insect metamorphosis.[4]
Merian received her artistic training from her stepfather, Jacob Marrel, a student of the still life painter Georg Flegel. Merian published her first book of natural illustrations in 1675. She had started to collect insects as an adolescent and at age thirteen she raised silk worms. In 1679 Merian published the first volume of a two-volume series on caterpillars, the second volume followed in 1683. Each volume contained 50 plates engraved and etched by Merian. Merian documented evidence on the process of metamorphosis and the plant hosts of 186 European insect species. Along with the illustrations Merian included a descriptions of their life cycles.
Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium: images at website sponsored by Johns Hopkins University (1705) - full digital facsimile from the Linda Hall Library from the Digital Library of the Caribbean Ingrid Rowland on Merian from The New York Review of Books , images from collection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with links to digitized works from Maria Sibylla Merian and digital sources
In 1678, the family had moved to Frankfurt am Main, but her marriage was an unhappy one.[4] She moved in with her mother, after her stepfather died in 1681. In 1683 she travelled to Gottorp and was attracted to the Labadists community in Holstein. In 1685 Merian travelled with her mother, husband and children to Friesland where her half-brother Caspar Merian had lived since 1677.
Unlike other Dutch naturalists, Merian was not employed by a commercial enterprise or corporation. But her journey was partly financed by the directors of the Dutch West India Company.[18] In her subsequent publication on the expedition Merian criticised the actions of the colonial merchants, saying that "the people there have no desire to investigate anything like that; indeed they mocked me for seeking anything other than sugar in the country." Merian also condemned the merchants’ treatment of slaves. She was given a slave helper for her research and the interaction she could thus have with the Amerindian and African slaves in the colony assisted her in researching the plants and animals of Surinam. Merian also took an interest in agriculture and lamented the colonial merchants' resistance to plant or export anything other than sugar. She later showcased the vegetables and fruits that could be found in Surinam, including the pineapple.[19]
In 2018 a rare butterfly, Catasticta sibyllae was named after her.[62][63]
Merian was the first European women to independently go on a scientific expedition in South America. In the 19th century Ida Pfeiffer, Alexandrine Tinne, Florence Baker, Mary French Sheldon, Mary Henrietta Kingsley and Marianne North followed in her footsteps and explore the natural world of Africa. Margaret Fountaine studied butterflies on five continents.[48] Merian's scientific expedition of Surinam predated Alexander von Humboldt's famous South America expedition by 100 years, and that of Princess Theresa of Bavaria by 200 years.[49] Merian's publication on her expedition was later identified as a key exponent of illustrated geographical publications originating in Holland in the late 17th century, which marketed an exotic but accessible new world to Europeans.[50]
In 1715, Merian suffered a stroke. Despite being partially paralysed she continued her work.[14] Maria Sibylla Merian died in Amsterdam on 13 January 1717 and was buried four days later at Leidse kerkhof.[20] The death register lists her as a pauper.[21] Her daughter Dorothea published Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis, a collection of her mother's work, posthumously.
In 1617, Merian married Maria Magdalena de Bry, daughter of the publisher, and was for a time associated with the de Bry publishing house. In 1620, when Oppenheim was destroyed by fire during the Spanish occupation, they moved back to Basel, but three years later returned to Germany, this time to Frankfurt. They had four daughters and three sons, including Matthäus Merian the Younger. Maria Magdalena de Bry died in 1645 and the following year Matthäus married Johanna Catharina Hein. Five years later, Matthäus died, leaving his wife with two small children, Anna Maria Sibylla Merian (born 1647) who later became a pioneering naturalist and illustrator and a son, Maximilian, who died before his third birthday.
Gsell was born in St. Gallen where he married his first wife in 1697, Marie Gertrud von Loen of Frankfurt am Main. They moved to Amsterdam in 1704 where their fifth daughter Katharina was born in 1707. His wife died and he remarried Anna Horstmans, but divorced her in 1715, when he married a third time to Dorothea Maria Merian, the daughter of Maria Sibylla Merian. The couple was recruited by Peter the Great in 1716 and went to Russia, where he became first curator of the Imperial art gallery founded in 1720. His wife, Maria-Dorothea, became the curator of the Kunstkamera. Their daughter Katharina married mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1733.
The universal classification system for all organisms was started by Carl Linnaeus about 30 years after Merian had published her research on Suriname. It is organised in five levels of kingdom, class, order, genus and species.[47] After her death Merian became so renowned among biologists that number of taxa, and two genera, were named after her. Two butterflies have been named after her, the common postman butterfly Heliconius melpomene meriana and a split-banded owlet butterfly Opsiphanes cassina merianae. The Cuban sphinx moth has been named Erinnyis merianae. A bug with no common name has been named Plisthenes merianae. A genus of mantises has been named Sibylla.[61]
The renewed scientific and artistic interest in her work was triggered in part by a number of scholars who examined collection of her works, such as the one in Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen.[66] In 2005, a modern research vessel named Maria S. Merian was launched at Warnemünde, Germany. In 2016, Merian's Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium was re-published with updated scientific descriptions and, in June 2017, a symposium was held in her honour in Amsterdam.[67][68][69] In March 2017, the Lloyd Library and Museum hosted a "Off the Page", an exhibit rendering many of Merian's illustrations as 3D sculptures with preserved insects, plants, and taxidermy specimens.[70][71]
In 1699, the city of Amsterdam granted Merian permission to travel to Suriname in South America, along with her younger daughter Dorothea Maria. On 10 July, the fifty-two year old Merian and her daughter set sail. The goal of the mission was to spend five years illustrating new species of insects.[4] In order to finance the mission, Maria Sibylla sold 255 of her own paintings.[16] Before departing, she wrote:
Merian also sold hand coloured editions of the Blumenbuch series.[28] Merian's process of creating her art used vellum which she primed with a white coat.[29] Because of the guild system women were not allowed to paint in oil.[16] Merian painted with watercolors and gouache, instead.[29]
Merian's drawings of plants, frogs,[35] snakes, spiders, iguanas, and tropical beetles are still collected today by amateurs all over the world. The German word Vogelspinne—(a spider of the infraorder Mygalomorphae), translated literally as bird spider—probably has its origins in an engraving by Merian. The engraving, created from sketches drawn in Surinam, shows a large spider who had just captured a bird. In the same engraving and accompanying text Merian was the first European to describe both army ants and leaf cutter ants as well as their effect on other organisms.[36] Merian's depictions of tropical ants were subsequently cited and copied by other artists. Her depictions of the struggle among organisms predates Charles Darwin and Lord Tennyson theories on the struggle for survival and evolution.[37]
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Maria Sibylla Merian (2 April 1647–13 January 1717[1]) was a German-born naturalist and scientific illustrator, a descendant of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss Merian family. Merian was one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly.