The representation of insects in the seventeenth century: a comparative approach

Summary

The investigation and representation of insects in the seventeenth century posed huge problems: on the one hand, their size and texture required optical tools and fixation techniques to disentangle and identify their tiny parts; on the other, the esoteric nature of those parts required readers to make sense of images alien to their daily experiences. Naturalists and anatomists developed sophisticated techniques of investigation and representation, involving tacit and unusual conventions that even twentieth-century readers found at times baffling. This essay develops a comparative approach based on seven pairs of investigations involving Francesco Stelluti, Francesco Redi, Giovanni Battista Hodierna, Robert Hooke, Marcello Malpighi, and Jan Swammerdam. Seen together, they document an extraordinary time in the study of insects and reconstruct a number of iconographic dialogues shedding light on the conventions and styles adopted.

Acknowledgements

Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at Bloomington, Indiana, and Bologna University. I thank all who offered comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Anita Guerrini, who went through an earlier draft of this paper with a fine comb, Marco Bresadola, Kimberly Hart, Eric Jorink, and Armin Moczek, for his expert advice on entomology. All reproductions are by courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Notes

¹The following items provide a useful introduction to the extensive literature on representation in the history of science: Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, eds, Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998). Brian S. Baigrie, ed., Picturing Knowledge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). Sachiko Kusukawa and Ian Maclean, eds, Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Focus section on Science and Visual Culture in Isis, 97 (2006), 75–220. Nancy Anderson, ‘Eye and Image: Looking at Visual Studies of Science’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 39 (2009), 115–25. Mario Biagioli, Galileo's Instruments of Credit. Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 185. A striking case of iconographic dialogue is Yve Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (Paris: Flammarion/Kimbell Art Museum, 1998).

²Francesco Stelluti, Persio tradotto (Rome: Mascardi, 1630), 127. David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 186–94.

³Luigi Guerrini, ‘Contributo critico alla biografia rediana. Con uno studio su Stefano Lorenzini e le sue “Osservazioni intorno alle torpedini”’, in Francesco Redi. Un protagonista della scienza moderna, edited by Walter Bernardi and Luigi Guerrini (Florence: Olschki, 1999), 47–69, at 50–1. Francesco Redi, Esperienze intorno alla generazione degli insetti (Firenze: All'insegna della Stella, 1668), plate 25. There is a modern edition with an introduction by Walter Bernardi, (Firenze: Giunti, 1996), 223.

⁴Silvio A. Bedini, ‘Seventeenth-Century Italian Compound Microscopes’, Physis, 5 (1963), 383–422. Edward G. Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 1. Redi, Esperienze, Bernardi's edition, 117, 155, 170, 196.

⁵Mario Pavone and Maurizio Torrini, eds, G.B. Hodierna e il ‘Secolo cristallino’ (Florence: Olschki, 2002).

⁶Clelia Pighetti, ‘Giovan Battista Odierna e il suo discorso su L'occhio della mosca’, Physis, 3, (1961), 309–35, at 329, 331–2. Marcello Malpighi, Opere scelte, edited by Luigi Belloni (Torino: UTET, 1967), 13–4.

⁷Pighetti, ‘Hodierna’, 326–7.

⁸Pighetti, ‘Hodierna’, 320, 328. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: John Martin and James Allestry, 1665), 175–80, at 177. Nick Wilding, ‘Graphic Technologies’, in Robert Hooke. Tercentennial Studies, edited by Michael Cooper and Michael C.W. Hunter (Aldershopt: Ashgate, 2006), 123–34. Gerard L.E. Turner, ‘The Impact of Hooke's Micrographia and its Influence on Microscopy’, in Robert Hooke and the English Renaissance, edited by Paul Kent and Allan Chapman (Gracewing: Anthony Rowe Ltd, 2005), 124–45.

⁹John T. Harwood, ‘Rhetoric and Graphic in Micrographia’, inRobert Hooke. New Studies, edited by Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989), 119–47. Allan Chapman, England's Leonardo: Robert Hooke and the Seventeenth-Century Scientific Revolution (Bristol and Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 2005).

¹⁰Hooke, Micrographia, 175–80.

¹¹Hooke, Micrographia, 185–91. William Harvey, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (Frankfurt: Wilhelm Fitzer, 1628); translated by Kenneth J. Franklin with introduction by Andrew Wear as The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings (London: Everyman, 1993), 29. Janice Neri, ‘Between Observation and Image: Representations of Insects in Robert Hooke's Micrographia’, in The Art Of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400–1850, edited by Therese O'Malley and Amy R.W. Meyers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 83–107, at 90.

¹²Swammerdam's treatise was originally published in Dutch. I refer to the French translation, Histoire generale des insectes (Utrecht: Guillaume de Walcheren, 1682), 101–5. See also Observation 54 in Hooke, Micrographia, 211–3, and the accompanying plate of a louse, which is shown grasping a hair. Marian Fournier, The Fabric of Life. Microscopy in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 62–72.

¹³Hooke, Micrographia, 125 and scheme 12.

¹⁴Swammerdam, Histoire, 171. Ruestow, Microscope, 131n.101, 134. Abraham Schierbeek, Jan Swammerdam. His life and Works (Amsterdam: Sweets & Zeitlinger, 1974), 132–73, at 148. Matthew Cobb, ‘Malpighi, Swammerdam, and the Colorful Silkworm: Replication and Visual Representation in Early Modern Science’, Annals of Science, 59 (2002), 111–47, at 131, 135, 145n129.

¹⁵Howard B. Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 5 vols, vol. 1, 338–44 and 669–76. Marcello Malpighi, Correspondence, edited by Howard B. Adelmann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 5 vols, vol. 2, 577–9, Bonfiglioli to Malpighi, Rome, 21 March 1671, at 578–9. At 577 Bonfiglioli reports that he had ordered microscopes from Eustachio Divini, which Malpighi had requested in a previous letter.

¹⁶Hooke, Micrographia, 181–2.

¹⁷Marcello Malpighi, De bombyce (London: John Martin and James Allestry, 1669). I refer to the edition in Opera Omnia (London: Robert Scott and George Wells, 1686, reprinted in Hildesheim: Olms, 1975), 2 vols, vol. 2, 1 (wrongly numbered 64)–44.

¹⁸Malpighi, De bombyce, 35. The eggs appear to us shaped like red-blood cells. Adelmann, Embryology, 343. Francis Joseph Cole, A History of Comparative Anatomy (London: Macmillan, 1944), 194–6. Hooke, Micrographia, preface. Willem D. Hackmann, ‘Natural Philosophy Textbook Illustrations 1600–1800’, in Non-Verbal Communication in Science prior to 1900, edited by Renato Mazzolini (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 169–96, at 182–3. Y. Kawaguchi, Y. Banno, K. Koga, H. Doira, H. Fujii, ‘Polygonal Patterns on Eggshells of Giant Egg Mutant and Large Eggs Induced by 20-Hydroxyecdysome in Bombyx mori’, Journal of Insect Physiology, 39 (1993), 437–43, at 440 figure A.

¹⁹Malpighi, De bombyce, 20–1. Cole, Anatomy, 190–1.

²⁰Swammerdam, Histoire, 74–5, 212. Ruestow, Microscope, 30–1, 61, 112, 127n87, 143; Fournier, Fabric, 147. Matthew Cobb, ‘Reading and Writing ‘The Book of Nature’: Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680)’, Endeavour, 24 (2000), 122–8.

²¹Jan Swammerdam, Miraculum naturae, sive uteri muliebris fabrica (Leiden: apud S. Matthaei, 1672), 16–7.

²²Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, Ms 936, I, K. The sheet is reproduce in black and white in Malpighi, Opere scelte, plate II. Jan Swammerdam, Biblia naturae (Leiden: Apud Isaacum Severinum, Balduinum vander Aa, Petrum vander Aa, 1737–8), 2 vols.

²³Malpighi, De bombyce, 19–20. Francis Joseph Cole, A History of Comparative Anatomy (London: Macmillan, 1944), 190. Cobb, ‘Malpighi’, 115. Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, Ms. 2085 II, f. 63r.

²⁴Jan Swammerdam, Ephemeri vita (Amsterdam: Abraham Wolfgang, 1675). I reproduce the corresponding plate from Swammerdam, Biblia naturae.