La “nuovissima invenzione” di Maria Sibylla Merian, artista e scienziata

Abstract

In 1660 in Frankfurt am Main, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), who was only thirteen years old, made an important and unusual decision: to devote her life to observing nature and studying the metamorphosis of caterpillars. Trained as a painter in her family's art workshop, as an artist depicting nature, she becomes a naturalist, dealing, in a completely new way, with insects, a group of organisms that are still little studied. Art and science merge in her: the language of art and science are used in a depiction of nature as a vital whole. Merian's work is revolutionary. Unlike other books, in which organisms are arranged as a list, motionless and isolated from their environment, Merian depicts ‘living’ creatures, placed on plants, leaves and flowers on which they feed, during the various stages of their transformation from egg to butterfly or moth. The artist-naturalist uses the opportunity of art to talk about science and with his pioneering work introduces a change in natural history. His works, enhanced by images of extraordinary beauty and effectiveness, have made an important contribution to the understanding of insects, their life cycles and habits. But above all, they have for the first time delivered a new vision of nature, through words and images, of what we now call food chains and interactions within an ecological community. In an adventurous life, the result of anomalous and courageous choices, which also led her to embark on a scientific journey in Surinam, she conducted pioneering and long-term work, elevating the representation of insects to art. Long before the term ecology came into being, she showed us a new idea of nature that was to dominate subsequent works of natural history.