Maria Sibylla
Merian in the Cocoon:
Childhood Confusions
…all
precision and luster are evidence of spiritual weakness, unable to understand the truth, which is fuzzy and
messy.
—Alexandru Philippide
Anna
Maria Sibylla
Merian (1647-1717),[1] a German-Dutch female painter of flowers, insects and
small
animals, grew up in a century when all children were subject to great
stresses
and strains due to the religious, social, and political unrest around
them. As the early modern world took
shape, the nature of the family was redefined, and the whole of
domestic
politics seemed to be as tumultuous and violent as the religious and
civil wars
that shook
In this paper, I
want to focus on the confused and conflicted nature of
her childhood to see how her upbringing and education fitted her into
the
transforming intellectual and aesthetic traditions of her ever-changing
family
relations. Leonard Shengold shows, in a
series of studies on nineteenth-century writers, such as Dickens,
Chekhov and
Kipling, that the creative person is able to rise above the abuses of
infancy
and early childhood by virtue of their art.[2] In Maria Sibylla’s case it was not so much
physical torment or sexual interference as the constant replacement of
parental
objects and the death of parents and siblings which caused her
anxieties. That she was female in an age
when women’s
social, political and cultural place was ambiguous at best, makes this
story
even more interesting.
A year later
Johanna remarried, this time to the Dutch flower-painter called Jacob
Marrell,
(1614-1681),[32]
a
pupil of deHeem.[33]
Marrell was born in 1614 , the son of a Syndikus, in the painters’
colony of
Frankethal, and was then apprenticed in Frankfurt to a still-life
painter named
Georg Flegel (1563-1638), one of the leaders of the Flemish school of
flower-painters, and he also later studied
with the renowned flower painter Jan i Davidsz de Heem (1606-1679)[34]
of Utrecht.[35]
Hence Marrell was recognized as part of the
The marriage to
Jacob Marrell in 1651 meant that young Maria Sibylla had a second
artistic
circle and a new set of step-siblings in the family’s
multi-generational and
competing domestic political and intellectual environment. This second
family was
deeply embedded in the new naturalism of the Dutch and German schools. As he never gave over his atelier in
Insofar as he
spent any time with Maria Sibylla, the new step-father—at this point,
in his
late thirties—took an active part in the young girl’s education. [37] Like many fathers of female artists,
poets and scholars of the early modern period, Maria Sibylla’s
step-father
(like her birth-father when she was three) recognized her
talents and nurtured them. Typically,
mothers[38]
tended to take a more conservative, domestic approach.[39] “He taught her painting and took her with him
on field trips, despite the objections of her mother, who felt such
excursions
were distinctly unladylike.”[40] Despite her concern that the young girl be
brought up according to strict rules of pietistic morality and gender
divisions, Johanna had to accept the child’s manifest genius and her
husband’s
promotion of this talent. Maria Sibylla
was consequently alotted a small workplace in the attic where she could
draw. There are stories told that the
child had an irrepressible urge to climb into the neighboring
Not only did
Marrel thereafter give Maria Sybilla his own expensive exercise sheets
to work
on, but he instructed the apprentices Flegel and de Heem to tutor her. As she grew older, she was placed into the
hands of Abraham Mignon (1640-1679) [41]
another student who was to become a well-known Dutch nature painter. Mignon especially was charged to look after
the young girl while Marrel was absent and to ensure that she was
receiving advanced
lessons in art from the two other apprentices in the
In addition to
the
mixed messages she was receiving about her place in the family and the
community of artisans and artists from her mother and step-father,
Maria
Sibylla—still a very young child—also was experiencing the traumas of
family loss
and instability that were so common in pre-Modern
While there is no
evidence that she was neglected or abused in any way, there is no doubt
that
the experience of parents disappearing from her life—through death or
merely
through extended travel—as well as brothers and sisters, whether blood
relations or not, would certainly leave its mark on her character and
her
artistic achievement. As Shengold shows
in the case of Rudyard Kipling, albeit in the nineteenth century, when
a child
suddenly realizes some loved caregiver or companion is gone, he cannot
understand the confusion within himself (or in Maria’s case, herself)
or the
changed circumstances in the home.[42] Feelings of loss and disorientation become
too strong for the child’s immature psyche to contain and he or she
rages with
mysteriously and suddenly erupted passions of hatred against both the
missing
individuals and those who have substituted for them.
Most children have no overt means of expression,
particularly since the girl will at the same time realize both that she
is
dependent upon her new caregivers and become more anxious about the
rage within
her.[43]
Luckily for Maria Sibylla, however, she found an outlet to articulate
her
confusions in her talent for drawing and interest in natural life, at
the same
time as she was encouraged in this expression by the remaining family
members
and new adults in her life.[44] She also was able to create a new place in
her drawings and embroidery for herself, a place which she could
control and
gain praise for, and she could take over the role of progenitor,
care-giver and
divine protectress by concentrating on flowers, insects and small
animals.[45] Of course, the reality of her life required
her to pass through three major stages of development before she could
do more
than dream out this magical-thinking: her difficult marriage, her
refuge in a
strict Calvinistic religious order, and her journey to
At the age of
eleven, shortly before she reached puberty and sexual awakening, we
learn that
Maria Sibylla mastered the art of copper etching. At
the same time, she was introduced to the
wonders of silkworms. This fascination
with small creatures would prove the key to her later successes in the
world of
artistic-naturalism and entomology.[46] What for others, since the days of Aristotle,
were regarded as the product of spontaneous generation and within
Christianized
folklore as “the devil’s vermin,” became for this unusual little girl,
on the
verge of her adolescence, and cut off from a normal supportive
family-life, the
center of her attention. Maggots, worms,
flies, fleas, gnats, beetles were her playmates and imaginary friends. They also proved to be a key metaphor which
over the course of the years, and through many difficult periods of
self-doubt
and turning to false structures of support, a lens for finding insight
into her
own character.[47] Shengold explains briefly:
The
metaphor
insight refers to the coming to consciousness of the power that
metaphor itself
possesses to make psychic connections of force and meaning. Insight is a “condition, catalyst and
consequence
(Blum 1979, 66) of the psychoanalytic process in what Kris (1956a)
called the
“circularity” of the insight process (p. 261).[48]
Maria Sibylla
Merian’s first book on these silk-spinning worms and other creeping
creatures
appeared in 1669 when she was twenty-two years old, but the
illustrations must
be the product of at least the previous ten years of concentrated study
when,
as she tells us, she gave up other social connections.
These adolescent years, then, were negotiated
by intellectual and aesthetic manipulation of her character-shaping
metaphor,
even though it would not be until after her journey to Surinam—when she
had
finally left her husband, given over her attraction to the cult of the
Labadists, and come to a new commercial understanding with her
daughters and
their husbands—that she allowed herself to emerge from the cocoon as a
full-fledged artist-naturalist and accepted her European-wide
reputation. As David Lashmet puts it,
hinting at the
shift from Renaissance symbolism to the Baroque mixing of this older
Aristotelianism with a Neoplatonic sense of a more dynamic and secret
coherence
in the world of nature,
She
noticed
for the first time in Western culture that each caterpillar depended on
a
particular flower, and she judiciously followed the pollinating and
egg-laying
butterflies to the appropriate leaves.
These she included in her paintings, careful too to include the
land,
the earth, the ground of the composition of the whole.
In this she diverged from her father, who
doubtless influenced her sense of light as transcendence.[49]
But this
proleptic knowledge of
an organically coherent world—not quite achieved until the journey to
Surinam—came at the expense of a normal socializing into the world of
young
girls, to the dismay of her mother who could not understand why she was
always
stealing the fruit and staring at its rotten pulp crawling with
disgusting
creepy things. The unaesthetic nature of her artistic and scientific
research was
moving her away from the more acceptable drawing of beautiful flowers
and
butterflies, subjects which were part of the art books for young ladies
learning embroidery and other home crafts.
Maria Sibylla’s interest in the devil’s vermin, as her mother
warned,
put her at risk of being called a witch or a heretic.
Her obsession with caterpillars, however, did
not lead directly to a scientific understanding of insect
metamorphosis. It
wound through a more oblique track that led back into her father’s
occult and
Rosicrucian background, where the knowledge of signatures in nature
moved slowly
towards Neoplatonic mysticism.
Yet she also
could
not shake off completely the Calvinistic pietism that came through her
mother and
her step-father Marrell. Her entry into the Labadist cult with her
mother and
her daughters represented both a further retreat from worldly success
and
independence and a necessary refuge from the ties to an unhappy and in
many
ways emotionally disabling marriage. Lashmet’s
attempt to read a late eighteenth-century romantic spirituality into
this
flirtation with the cult of the Labadists may go beyond the more
complicated
hesitancy of Maria Sibylla’s situation (which makes her a figure
somewhere
between Aphra Behn in England[50]
as well-aware of the Enlightenment and Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz in
First
and
foremost, [Maria Sibylla] Merian’s painting and publishing became both
spiritual
quests and spiritual teachings. Still
stinging from a public and bitter divorce, Merian’s seclusion into the
Labadist
community and later the Labadist colony [in]
Dutch Surinam also gave her work a notably feminist character.[52]
Once her mother
died, Maria Sibylla felt free enough to leave the cult headquarters in
Frieseland and embark on the dangerous voyage to the tropical jungles
of
Yet she could not
cut
herself off completely from the intellectual heritage received through
her
connections to the de Bry and Merian families. Eventually, she could
not stop
depicting nature in itself as alive with signs (“signatures”) of God’s
power
and influence and (as in those circles of nature painters and engravers
she
grew up in), the beauty of the divine.
Her concentrated observations of the growing, transforming, and
interacting
forms of nature finally revealed to her, however, not so much the
secrets of a
fixed universe of occult mysteries, evident in the works illustrated
and
printed by the de Bry brothers and the Merian family, but the new
biological sciences
of the eighteenth century that were emerging out of the so-called
occult
sciences of the previous generations in her family, and
forever-flitting among
the flowering rational systems of Linnaeus and other scientists who
found the
accuracy of Maria Sibylla Merian’s books stimulating to their work.
[1] This account
began with the
biographical information provided in Sharon D. Valiant, “Questioning
the
Caterpillar: How a Curious Girl became one of the Premier Painters of
Nature’s
Wonderland” Natural History 101:12
(1992) 46-59.The reproductions of plates by Maria Sibylla Merian remain
its
main inspiration.
[2] Leonard
Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse
and Deprivation (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989).
[3] Shengold, Soul Murder, p. 182.
[4] Richard Feller
and Edgar
Bonjour, Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz
vom Spätmittelalter zur Neuzeit, Bd. 1 (Basel/Stuttgart:
Helbing & Licherhahn,
1979) pp. 370-372.
[5] Alexander Roob, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy and Mysticism
(Cologne, Lisbon, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo: Taschen, 1997) p.
15.
[6] Arthur M. Hind, A History of Engraving & Etching from
the 15th Century to the year 1914, being the Third and Fully
Revised
Edition of “A Shoirt History of Engraving and Etching” (New York:
Dover,
1963 [1923]) p. 105, n. 105.
[7]
Brockhaus Enzyklopädie
(Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus, 1971) vol. 12, p. 424. Cp. Hind,
A History of Engaving & Etching, pp. 124-125 and 136.
[8] Johann Israel’s
second name
suggests some kind of Jewish connection, just as the oblique allusion
to Maria
the Jewess the Egyptian alchemist, does in regard to Maria Sibylla’s
name; but
as both the de Bry and the Merian families were strong Protestants, the
Old
Testament resonance could more probably derive from this source.
[9] Bernadette
Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of
the Illustrations of de Bry’s Great Voyages, trans. Basia Miller
Gulati (Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981 [1977]) p. 3.
[10]
[11] Henry M.
Stevens, “The De Bry
Collector’s Painefull Peregrination along the Pleasant Pathway to
Perfection” Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to
Wilberforce Eames (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924)
p. 269.
[12] Bucher, Icon and Conquest, p. 20.
[13] Bucher, Icon and Conquest, p. 21.
[14] Hind,
A History of Engraving & Etching, p. 428.
is A. Yates
points out that this John
Theodore de Bry was the son of the Theodore who died in 1598, also a
well-known
printer and engraver (The Art of Memory
[Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969 (1966) p. 413, n. 4].
See also Roob, The Hermetic Museum, p. 15.
[16] Schweizerisches
Geschlechterbuch (1955), vol X, p. 282.
[17] Read,
Prelude to Chemistry, pp. 235-236.
[18] Cate, “De Bry
and the Index Expuragatorius” 136.
[19] For a discussion
of how the
de Bry print-works passed into the control of the Merian family, see
Read, The Alchemist, p. 68.
[20] Anonymous, “A
[21] Schweizerisches
Geschlechterbuch (1955), vol X, p. 282
[22] See the
Publisher’s Note to
Carol Berlanger Grafton, ed., 1300 Real
and fanciful Animals from, Seventeenth-Century Engravings,
Matthäus Merian
the Younger (Minola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), p. iv.
[23] On Matthias
Merian as an
engraver of plants, see Coats, The
Treasury of Flowers, Plate 38 and Note..
[24] Bucher, Icon and Conquest, p. 55.
[25] Terry
Brown, “Merian, Maria Sibylla: Natural Historian (1647-1717)” online at
http://www. astr.ua.edu/ 4000WS/MERIASN.
[26] Feller and
Bonjour, Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz,
p. 370.
[27] Das
Grosse Duden Lexicon (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut,
1964) Vol. 5 L/M/N.
[28] Phaidon
Encyclopedia or Arts and Artists, (London: Phaidon, 1978)
p. 440.
[29] Encyclopedia
Britannica (Chicago, London, etc.: William Benton,
1970), vol. 15, p. 191.
[30] Phaidon
Encyclopedia of Arts and Artists , p. 440.
[31] In an Internet
page on
“Merian, Maria Sibylla: Natural Historian (1647-1717), Terry Browne of
[32] There seems some
confusion as
to whether the name should be spelled Morrel or Marrel.
[33] Coats, A Treasury of Flowers, p. 16.
[34] Some sources say
he died in 1684.
[35] Terry Browne,
Internet Page.
[36] “A
[37] Whitney
Chadwick, Women, Art and Society, 2nd.
ed. rev. and expanded (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996 [1990]), p. 134.
[38] Elsen Honig Fine in Women
& Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptors from the
Renaissance to
the 20th Century (Montclair/London: Allenheld & Schram/Prior,
1978)
states that “she expressed an early interest in art and entomology,
much to her
mother’s distress” (p. 34).
[39]
[40] “A
[41] Browne implies
that Mignon
was Maria Sibylla’s first husband, whom she divorced before her wedding
to
Graff, but I have found no mention elsewhere, let alone confirmation
for this
marriage.
[42] Shengold, Soul Murder, p. 248.
[43] Shengold, Soul Murder, p. 275, and the references
there and on p. 276 to Anna Freud.
[44] Shengold reports
a case study
with interesting near-parallels to Maria Siybylla’s life: “R. began to
mirror
her idealized teacher; her father had
previously recognized and encouraged her brightness.
The comparatively benign indifference of R’s
mother changed when her father left for a long European business trip. The mother began to interfere with R.’s going
to school, insisting that the child was ill.
When the mother was called to school for a conefrence with the
teacher,
R. became both hopeful and anxiou”, Soul Murder, p. 306).
[45] Octavio
Paz, Sor Juana Ines de
[46] David Lashmet,
“Unfurling the
Worm: Insecto-theology in William Blake’s Thel,” Prometheus
Unplugged
online at http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panels/1A/D.Lashmet.
[47] Shengold, Soul Murder, pp. 284 ff.
[48] Shengold, Soul Murder, p. 297. The
references are to H. Blum, “The Curative
and Creative Aspects of Insight,” Journal
of the American Association, Supplement 27 (1979) 41-70 and E. Kris, “Some Vicissitudes of Insight” in Selected
Papers of Ernst Kris (New Haven
and London: Yale University Pres, 1975) pp/ 252-297.
[49] Lashmet,
“Unfurling the
Worm.”
[50]
[51] Paz, Las tampas de la fé, p. 369.
[52] Lashmet,
“Unfurling the
Worm.”
Second Part: Maria Sibylla Merian:
Crises in Spirit, Intellect and Marriage
Links:
Norman Simms:
A Preference for Horses: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
and Luis de Carvajal el Mozo's Autobiography
The Healing of Aeneas and Menelaus:
Wound-Healers in Ancient Greek
and Classical Roman Medicine
Andrés Laguna, Marrano Physician,
and the Discovery of Madness (Jan. 4, 2006)