Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis

Copyright © 2007 by Kim Todd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Illustrations are from Erucarum Ortus, Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis, a compilation of three of Maria Sibylla Merian’s books published in 1718 and are courtesy of Dover Publications.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Todd, Kim, 1970–

Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the secrets of metamorphosis/Kim Todd.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Merian, Maria Sibylla, 1647–1717. 2. Naturalists—Germany—Biography. 3. Artists—Germany—Biography. I. Title.

QH31.M4516T63 2007

508.092—dc22 2006015367

[B]

ISBN 978-0-15-101108-7

ISBN 978-0-15-603299-5 (pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-547-53809-9

v2.0117

[Image] For Ben and Peregrine [Image]

PROLOGUE

Surinam, 1700

In the fields, cassava plants grew fiercely green, fed by the June rains that raked the plantation. Underground, their roots swelled with poison. When ripe, they would be grated, their juice extracted and boiled to leech out the toxins, their flesh baked into bread. Above ground, glossy leaves like seven-fingered hands soaked up the sun. The heat was unyielding, gripping temples and lungs like a meaty fist.

A small caterpillar with brown stripes inched along the plant, chewing its way across the leaf. Tufts of hair sprouted from each segment down its back. As the furry body carved a methodical, voracious path, a sharp-eyed woman stood in the field and watched its progress. She hadn’t seen one like it before, that nut color, those stripes, and was curious what it would become.

She had traveled here to Surinam, this sugar-fueled Dutch colony in the South American rain forest, to document metamorphosis, the progression of change that revealed new talents, new aspects of personality, new body parts—antennae, sexual organs, wings. She wanted to observe and paint each stage, capturing the shifts in color and form.

Not long before, she had been living in Amsterdam, peering at the dead butterflies in cedar-scented natural history cabinets of collectors. 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?

Now, here she was, miles up this tropical river, far from the sophisticated streets of Europe, in a dangerous and undocumented place. Smells of boiling cane juice, swamp mud, and split guava replaced Amsterdam’s city air. Fevers paced the coast. Diseases plagued the entire country from dock to dense jungle—leprosy, yaws, guinea worms, worms that crawled under the ankles, worms of the stomach and intestines, dry gripes, the bilious putrid fever of the West Indies. It was frightening to breathe.

The insects themselves were bold and untamable. They didn’t respect human authority. Mosquitoes claimed stretches of forest and swamp by the ocean, forbidding trespassers with their dense swarms. Wasps circled her as she painted, building a mud nest nearby. Biting wood ants rained from the trees. When the mood struck, the ants swarmed through houses, carpeting the floor, papering the walls, leaving them shining and bare, ravaging any insect specimens she left unprotected.

In its box, her captive caterpillar consumed leaf after leaf, choosing flesh closest to the middle vein. Holes gaped in its wake. Then, one afternoon, it spun a silk button, disappeared into a pupa anchored to the silk, and dangled there like a small, unripe fruit. At this stage, she called them date pits. Like seeds, they were hard kernels of potential. She’d witnessed the transformation thousands of times, but each new pupa was wrapped in suspense.

Of all the shapes, wing patterns, color splotches, what will it become? Nothing as spectacular as the golden emperor moth, a hand span across, or the emerald-colored beetle with ruby-red eyes whose larva she found in her potato patch, surely, but a workable model. Maybe it was one of the small white-winged moths she’d seen in fluttering clouds over the cassava crops.

Days passed without movement. Thunderstorms came and went, pelting the earth with heavy drops then rising up as steam. She worked on other projects, hunted other caterpillars, sketched and took notes, but kept her eye on the date pits. Often they broke open and pesky flies crawled out rather than the butterfly she waited for. That, or the pupa dried up and died, never moving to the next stage. Patience is a very beneficial little herb, she later wrote to a patron. It’s an herb she cultivated.

She watched for the moment of hatching, ready to heat a darning needle, and, careful not to damage the wings, pierce the furry body. Some of her discoveries—snakes, iguanas, a gecko—could be preserved in glass jars of brandy, but butterflies and moths were too delicate. They died quickly, still perfect. She placed them in a box and rubbed turpentine oil over the edges to ward off wood ants.

She painted her finds on leftover chips of parchment—larva, pupa, adult with wings open, adult with wings closed, a quick sketch just to get down the details. She wielded her brush with a casual skill, knowing more about her insect subjects than perhaps any painter in Europe. Then she pasted them in the study book she’d carried with her for years, creating a blue-paper frame, sticking it to the page with beeswax, and sliding the watercolor in. On the opposite page, she noted when and where she found the insects, recording how they behaved and what they ate.

This particular picture will be a strong addition to the book opening in her imagination. She’ll capture all the colors of the cassava, from greens sliding toward brown to greens sliding toward blue, and the leaves will reach to every corner of the page. Close up, each cassava is a miniature jungle, and her rendering will draw the viewer into the thicket. Maybe to add interest, she’ll include an azure and black lizard, gripping the plants red stems. Its curling tail can fill out the bottom, tongue flicking at an ant on the stalk.

For the moment, though, the pupa ripened, turned transparent. Caterpillars rustled in the box. Her notebook was filled with blank pages. The plantation owner tallied up his harvest. They were all on the edge of change.

Before Darwin, before Humboldt, before Audubon, Maria Sibylla Merian sailed from Europe to the New World on a voyage of scientific discovery. An artist turned naturalist, Merian studied insects for most of her life. She started in the gardens and forests near her home in Germany, but in 1699, her fascination with the bizarre and stunning specimens carried from South America on trade ships pushed her farther. Over the course of two years, she stalked the sweltering rain forests of Surinam, flipping over leaves and peering down the throats of flowers, looking for the caterpillars that were her passion. Braving pounding heat, drenching rain storms, tarantulas and piranhas, with only her younger daughter for company, Merian searched out and sketched a record of her finds. Merian invested heavily in her experimental journey: she sold years worth of her paintings to pay for the trip, abandoned her husband, and rejected expectations of what a seventeenth-century woman should be and do.

In 1701, Merian returned to Amsterdam and wrote a book called Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam, covering species from iridescent blue morpho butterflies to giant flying cockroaches. 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 one 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, Marcello 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.

I have been fascinated with Merian ever since a box of notecards decorated with meticulously painted moths caught my eye. The insects were lovely, wings rippling with bark and lavender scallops. A delicacy in the lines captured the fragile nature of the subject, but the images had obviously been executed with a scientific as well as an artistic sense. Many butterfly and moth pictures show only the pretty adults, but not these. An ungainly cocoon bulged along the stalk and the leaves were tattered with holes. A caterpillar crept up the branch and the artist didn’t shy from including its bristles and the wicked edge of its jaw. There was an empirical coldness in the details combined with a lush, almost sensual feeling for color. To look at the picture was to brush against a unique mind at work.

I flipped the card over. The back read Maria Merian, German, 1647–1717, followed by a citation of a book about the metamorphosis of insects from Surinam housed in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History. The time period seemed so at odds with these few facts. When she was born, Shakespeare had been dead only thirty years. Galileo stood trial a mere thirteen years before for suggesting the earth moved around the sun. My image of an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century naturalist/explorer was a wealthy, university-educated young man seeking adventure or a ship’s surgeon picking shells off the beach in between treating cases of scurvy. If I had a picture of a naturalist/explorer earlier than that, which I didn’t, it surely wasn’t a fifty-two-year-old German woman with little formal education. What was Merian doing drawing insects in South America three hundred years ago, I wondered. How did she get there? What did she hope to find?

This book started as an effort to answer some of these questions, to delve deeper into the life of a woman whose actions would be exceptional today, much less in 1699. 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. Those to her close friend Dorothea Auer and to her brother when he lived with a pietist religious sect are lost. Instead we have those she wrote to the naturalist and collector James Petiver because his papers wound up in the British Museum. We have those she wrote to her pupil Clara Regine Imhoff, a girl from an influential Nuremberg family, whose letters ended up in the Imhoff archive. 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.

But on the other hand, how can we complain? Her passion was charted as diligently as anyone’s could be. We know day by day what she saw when she looked at insects: the seasons of their hatching, the alteration of colors, how they respond when touched, the weight of their cocoons. She left in-depth reports throughout her life, recording what she saw and did. Her voice, mute on marriage and motherhood, tells instead of caterpillars in a quince tree which, when given only the slightest prod, bang their head several times in any direction as if angry. Of another insect, she says: they eat so much every day that they get so fat they soon start to roll and then fall off the trees. And of a particularly pretty metamorphosis: they became such snow white moths and had a shimmer like a mother of pearl.

At the time of Merian’s work, science was in its infancy, still struggling to balance the developing scientific method with a belief in magic, trying to reconcile theories of matter with the creation as described in Genesis. Direct observation was replacing reliance on words of authority passed down from Aristotle and Pliny, but slowly. Galileo took the risk of saying, I think that in the discussion of natural problems, we ought not to begin at the authority of places of Scripture, but at sensible experiments and necessary demonstrations. 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. For instance, though every cook knows crabs change color when boiled, he wrote, the humble pot might not be a bad place to study the nature of redness.

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, starting close to home with finds in the roots of vegetables and the walls of her house, and eventually moving on to palms on the banks of the Surinam River. 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. Observational skills developed during Merian’s training as an artist made her a stronger naturalist, and her artwork turned from its starting place—designs for needlepoint—to records of animals most of her peers would never see.

In the late seventeenth century, the Netherlands, where Merian moved in the 1690s and launched her most serious work, was a center of metamorphosis investigations. In Delft, Leeuwenhoek perfected his microscope, allowing intimate views of a drop of pond water, the legs of a bee. Natural historians like Swammerdam used these tools and others to understand how insects developed, drawing links between creatures that, at least visually, seemed completely unconnected.

Amsterdam, in particular, was a nexus of science, arts, and commerce. The city pulled in painters like Rembrandt with its rich resources of talent and funds for patronage and drew naturalists and doctors to look at its flourishing botanical gardens. Natural philosophers and the curious public ventured into the cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch to view a branching vein and the interior of a lung, preserved and on display. Dutch trading ships raided the globe, bringing back exotic seashells, plants promising cures for all sorts of ailments, preserved hummingbirds and crocodiles. The streets and shops filled with the new scents of chocolate and coffee. The city teetered at the pinnacle of its Golden Age, brimming with wealth and creativity.

If Amsterdam drew artists and merchants with its prosperity, Surinam called to adventurers and pirates, big dreamers and get-rich-quick schemers. On its northwest border, according to some accounts, lay the mythical El Dorado, a city with gold so plentiful that goldsmiths lined the streets, furniture was fashioned of gold, and citizens traded golden shields in exchange for rare iron. Many explorers, including Sir Walter Ralegh, who lost his son in the search, staked their reputations on finding the glittering metropolis on the banks of Lake Parima, led by stories from the Amerindians who couldn’t have told a more enticing tale if they’d tapped straight into European fantasies.

At the time of Merian’s visit, Surinam was a country fed by sugar rather than gold, energetic and impatient, often with a nasty temper. While to European eyes, it represented a source of ready cash and an endless font of biological wonders that dazzled viewers with the strange riches of the newly expanded world, as much as 90 percent of the residents were slaves, imported to work the sugar fields. They were brought over by the English, and after the colony was swapped to the Dutch for Manhattan in 1667, they were brought over by the Dutch. Many escaped from the brutal treatment on the coastal plantations, described by Aphra Behn in her 1688 book Oroonoko, to form maroon communities in the interior. By the time Merian arrived, thousands of maroons staked their independence in the dense jungle.

What she found in this conflicted place is the subject of her book, Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam, whose large plates displaying slices of insect and animal life brought the tropics vividly to Europe. One of the first to study the rain forest, Merian inspired a century of scientists, both those who traveled to South America to conduct their own research and those who stayed closer to home and tried to make sense of the information flooding in from the New World. In books and articles, they cited Madame Merian over and over again. Her portraits and descriptions of Surinamese insects were so definitive that Linnaeus, in compiling his systemization of natural life, used her drawings rather than actual specimens. Her visual catalog of a country’s natural history was a precursor to books like John James Audubon’s Birds of America.

During the nineteenth century, though, both a campaign to discredit her and the few bastardized and mistranslated copies of her books still in circulation undermined her reputation, and Merian’s work sunk into obscurity. But still, the pictures themselves retained their stirring, unsettling power. As a boy, Vladimir Nabokov discovered a collection of insect books in the attic of his family’s country home in Vyra. He flipped through Merian’s Surinam work along with other colorful volumes, and they helped inspire his own lifelong passion for Lepidoptera.

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 our lives.

To some, it appears so complex, so unexplainable, that it must be miraculous. Creationists use it as a prop for intelligent design, claiming that no one has explained how organs and bodily structures can rearrange themselves so completely. A squirming, consuming larva one day stills and turns into a pupa, becoming completely immobile. If this case is opened, liquid leaks out, a formless fluid where once were legs and mouth. Then, after this apparent death, one day the pupa cracks, a butterfly emerges, and flits away. The rudimentary six eyes of the caterpillar turn to the multifaceted compound eyes of the adult. Entire body parts appear where before there were none. How could such an existence evolve? Bernard d’Abrera, in his 2001 book Concise Atlas of Butterflies of the World, complains at length about the misguided theory of evolution via natural selection. At the height of forums on college campuses, creationist debaters will issue the final challenge, daring opponents to explain metamorphosis.

Wonder is built into the language. One of the earliest terms for butterfly, used by Aristotle, was psyche, also the word for breath and soul. The larva, the creeping early stage, takes its name from mask, but its Latin roots are tangled with the notions of ghost and hobgoblin, too. The pupa, the stage of rapid change in an immobile shell, means girl and doll in Latin. In German, Merian’s native tongue, it still has that meaning. In English it became a puppet, waiting for animation. Chrysalis, the usually naked and often particularly beautiful pupa built by a butterfly, comes from the Greek for gold, commemorating the metallic glow or spots on species like the monarch and painted lady. The cocoon, the protective silk enclosure many moths spin around the pupa, comes from the French for shell. The imago, the winged final stage, indicates that everything before was just practice or a mask for the revealed true form, as it has the meaning of natural shape. Of all these phrases, perhaps nothing is so lovely as imaginal disk, used to describe the pockets of cells in the caterpillar that become complex eyes and wings. They are, of course, the seeds of the imago, but it’s easy to see them too as the aspirations of the caterpillar, imagining its future.

While many natural phenomena capture a grim vision of life and potential—the rosebud doomed to fading—metamorphosis offers the reverse trajectory. A humble worm becomes an iridescent moth. A plague of caterpillars turns into a blessing of butterflies. It is a biological adaptation that embodies hope, from religious use of the butterfly as a symbol of rebirth to high school girls who tattoo butterflies on their arms, a promise of blossoming.

Beyond capturing hope in a metaphorical sense, metamorphosis exemplifies success in evolutionary terms. About 300 million years ago, when insects first developed the ability to separate their lives into distinct phases, they set the stage for world domination. Metamorphosis is efficient because the young and their adult counterparts don’t compete with one another for the same limited resources. A larva can live inside an apple, gorging on the sweet pulp, in a body tailored to the task of feeding. The hatched (or eclosed) moth can survive on nectar, superbly crafted for the work of flying to new territory and attracting a mate. It allows one creature the benefit of two completely different bodies and life strategies, each employed when most useful. Within the insect class there are varying levels of change: hemimetabolous insects like grasshoppers go through an incomplete metamorphosis, moving gradually from molt to molt into an adult; holometabolous insects like maggots and caterpillars metamorphose completely, undergoing a dramatic change in the pupae into flies and moths. While butterflies, transformation is most astonishing, at least to human eyes, others metamorphose as well. Young crabs look like armored tadpoles, all head and tail. As they molt, they gain muscles, lengthen the abdomen, add legs and claws. Amphibians also do without a pupa, but no one would confuse a tadpole with a full-grown toad. Some sea snails spend their youth as larvae with flaps that allow them to swim, before settling down to an adulthood of creeping. But their heavy reliance on metamorphosis has helped make insects the most successful of animals with 1 million known species and an estimated 4–5 million yet to be discovered.

Though we have centuries more experience and libraries now contain countless volumes about butterflies, for many of us, a hatching chrysalis is no less mysterious than it was for Merian, sweating over her boxes in a wooden room in Surinam. In fact, it might appear even more of a marvel, since she spent so much time watching pupae building and breaking. To explore these two stories—that of Merian’s experience as an artist and naturalist and that of the developing understanding of metamorphosis to which she contributed—it’s best to start at the matrix where they intertwine: a transformation.

Inside the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, a crowd clustered around a display cabinet featuring live chrysalises hanging on pins. Behind the glass door of the case, the cloudless sulphur pupa was bent as a fat comma, meatiest at the curve. The Julia chrysalis hung like a carved wood totem. The monarch was perhaps the most improbable. Pale sea green with dots of gold, it looked like it should come in a blue box from Tiffany. The curators must have had an impeccable sense of timing; a new chrysalis broke open every minute, slow-motion firecrackers. All around, adult butterflies tasted trays of oranges, felt for nectar in the potted flowers, flocked to corners by the heating pipes, tangled in girls’ long hair.

Behind the glass, a modest green pupa, slightly translucent, began to tremble. Anartia jatrophae, the white peacock, it was the same species Merian captured three hundred years ago in a cassava field. It shook more violently. Finally, the pressure too high, the skin ripped. The abdomen pushed forward, legs flailing through the gap. Blood-colored fluid dripped from the ribbed thorax as the legs found purchase and the insect crawled out. It was hard to tell part from part in the glistening rush. Then it came into focus. Wings bulged like cheeks on either side of the thorax, and the insect turned to hang from the shell of the pupa, no longer pregnant and dark. There was something too quick and raw, almost obscene, about the split, the body shoving its way out. Now transparent and broken, the empty shell dangled, holding a shape that no longer existed, a memory of an earlier life.

Resting, the hatchling was diminished, huddling more like a housefly than a butterfly. It seemed like it would never move, that it would harden and die in this shriveled shape. Then, the insect stirred. Somehow, wings emerged from those wrinkled balls. Opening and closing, they stretched to a long curve, a taut sail. A familiar landscape appeared, as when a hand flattens a map: the pattern of white banded with orange and black, with dark spots echoing eyes. The wings pumped more confidently. The peacock rolled and unrolled its proboscis as if sampling the air. It was fully itself, and something new.

Chapter One

The Most Noble