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44
FALL 200 6 GASTR O N O M I CA
invest igat ions | hannah blument ha l
A Taste for Exotica
Maria Sibylla Merian’s
Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium
The seventeenth-century Dutch were perhaps the first to pay
for their unprecedented prosperity with their teeth.1
By the end of the seventeenth century, Europe
had grown its sweet tooth. Sugar replaced honey as the
sweetener par excellence and became the necessary com-
plement to fashionable (and addictive) beverages such as
coffee, tea, and chocolate. Amsterdam, already prominent in
the international spice trade, grew even more prosperous as
it became the center of the European sugar industry. Dutch
merchants, with their enterprising spirit and capital from
investors, built plantations in the New World that could
produce sugar on a massive scale. They then imported this
commodity to refineries back home.2
It is against this backdrop of commerce and consumption
that the life and work of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717),
a German-born Dutch artist famous in her day but now rel-
atively unknown, took shape. In 1699, the same year that
nearly four thousand tons of raw sugar were shipped east from
the colony of Surinam to Holland by the Dutch West India
Company, Merian and her daughter Dorothea boarded the
Peace in Amsterdam to sail west to the Americas. Their des-
tination was Paramaribo, Surinam’s capital and home to
several of the large plantations, but unlike their mercantile
fellow travelers, they did not have sugarcane harvests foremost
in their minds. On the return voyage to Amsterdam in 1701,
their precious cargo was not sugar or other comestibles but
watercolors on parchment and specimens of insects, plants,
and animals of the New World. The paintings, tightly sealed
in wooden boxes, and the once-living creatures, preserved
in jars of brandy, would provide the basis for Merian’s great-
est artistic achievement, the Metamorphosis insectorum
Surinamensium, or Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam.
This volume of sixty engraved prints documenting the life
Left: Pineapple Plant, from Metamorphosis insectorum
Surinamensium by Maria Sibylla Merian (Hague Comitum: Apud
Petrum Gosse, 1726).
library of the arnold arboretum, harvard university, cambridge, ma
gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 45–52, issn 1529-3262. © 2006 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press ’ s rights and permissions web site, at www.ucpress.edu / journals/ rights.htm.
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cycles of Surinamese insects, each one shown on the plant
on which it fed, was published in Amsterdam in 1705.3
Although traveling to South America marked a new
chapter in the life of Merian, expressing a scientific and
artistic interest in the natural world did not. By the time she
arrived in Surinam at age fifty-two, she had already published
a two-volume treatise on the metamorphosis of European
insects. Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandelung und sonder-
bare Blumennahrung, or The Wonderful Transformation and
Strange Plant-Food of Caterpillars, earned her praise from
numerous German artists and scholars, not least of all because
she was a woman whose skill in rendering creatures from
life rivaled that of her male contemporaries.4 Comprised of
fifty plates, this earlier work utilized the same compositional
structure of insect and plant as respective foreground and
background that she would later employ in the Metamorphosis.
Merian was the daughter of an artist, the well-known
printmaker and engraver Matthias Merian the Elder
(1593–1650). As such, she would seem to have followed the
family career, but in fact she found her own path, foregoing
traditional expectations in both art and life. Although she
trained in her birthplace of Frankfurt-am-Main in the work-
shop of the Dutch floral still-life painter Jacob Marrel
FALL 200 6
(1613–1681), her interests, even as a young student, diverged
from those of her teacher (who was also her stepfather). She
continued to paint flowers, as she had been taught (eventu-
ally publishing a book of flower prints, the Neues Blumenbuch, 45
in 1680), yet she found greater artistic expression in the por-
GASTR O N O M I CA
trayal of insects, beginning with the silkworms she collected
from a local garden at age thirteen. At thirty-eight, Merian
left her husband, the artist Johann Andreas Graff (1637–1701),
along with their comfortable middle-class home in Nürnberg,
and moved with her daughters and elderly mother to Waltha
Castle in Friesland, the Netherlands, to join a Labadist
religious settlement.5 A few years later, citing religious dif-
ferences, she obtained a divorce from Graff and moved to
Amsterdam to pursue her art and her fortune. It was there
that she planned her voyage to Surinam.
 An initial turn through the pages of the Metamorphosis
insectorum Surinamensium would seem to confirm that
Merian’s journey was yet another manifestation of her inde-
pendent spirit. The prints appear to be focused entirely on
her passion for insects and devoid of any concern for the
overriding Dutch interests in the territory. Indeed, although
each engraving prominently features a Surinamese plant,
over half of which are shown bearing the fruit and vegetable
staples of the local diet, sugarcane, the colony’s most
prevalent and important foodstuff—at least in the eyes of
Europeans—is nowhere to be found.
Despite this omission, sugarcane’s economic and cultural
impact on seventeenth-century Europe played a critical role
in the production and successful reception of Merian’s work.
Not only had sugar enlivened the European palate; it had
inspired curiosity about the distant tropical lands from which
it came. This was especially true for those who had built
their fortunes trading in it. To reinforce their status as wealthy
merchant-adventurers, these Dutch capitalists, like their
predecessors in the spice trade, established collections of
objects from abroad, including examples of flora and fauna,
such as those featured in Merian’s book. In fact, it was this
interest in exotica, combined with an increasing scientific
curiosity about the natural world, that financially and intel-
lectually supported projects like the Metamorphosis. And
although the insects it depicted were undoubtedly exotic, a
case can be made that the fruits and vegetables Merian por-
trayed were perceived as even more tangibly so, because
people could readily compare foodstuffs to local varieties,
making the judgment of strangeness easier to confer.
Nevertheless, when writing about Merian, scholars have
given little more than passing notice to the plants illustrated
in her prints or to the commentaries that describe them.6
We can assume that the artist herself meant the insects to
FALL 200 6
take center stage, given the fact that the botanicals were
merely the backgrounds for the comprehensive representa-
tions of the insects in their various life stages, from egg to
46 caterpillar to pupa to butterfly or moth. Similarly, most
published accounts of Merian’s life are narrowly focused on
GASTR O N O M I CA
her role as an independent, successful woman—chiefly
signified by her “unescorted” trip to Surinam—rather than
on the social and economic context in which she lived and
worked.7 But to view her simply as a woman who led an
exotic life, ignoring her community and her era’s penchant
for exoticism, is to severely limit our historical understand-
ing of both the artist and the world in which she lived.
A detailed look at the botanical elements of Merian’s
illustrations from a gastronomic point of view provides a
new perspective on Merian and her socioeconomic milieu.
Specifically, an analysis of the fruit components of the
Metamorphosis, along with the accompanying commentaries,
reveal how these previously overlooked elements of Merian’s
work serve both as a metaphor for and a manifestation of
her audience’s desire to assimilate foreign foods into their
diet and their larger cultural appetite for exotica during the
colonial period.
Edible Flora
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The Metamorphosis opens with two different engravings of
the pineapple. One shows the entire plant, while the other
is a close-up of the fruit itself, surrounded by butterflies,
small flying insects, and caterpillars. Although a few plant
species appear more than once in the volume, none but the
pineapple is represented twice in succession. Indeed, it was
deemed by Merian “the noblest of all the edible fruits,”8
and not without reason. The pineapple was considered such
a rare treat in seventeenth-century Europe that when the
first of its kind was grown in an English hothouse in 1642, it
was presented as a gift to King Charles ii and immortalized
in oil on canvas by his court painter.9 A work of fiction pub-
lished in Holland almost forty years later provides evidence
of the pineapple’s continued high status in Europe. When the
wife of the ne’er-do-well main character becomes pregnant,
she develops a craving for “black cherries, strawberries in
wine, black and white plums, peaches and apricots, pineap-
ples, hazelnuts,” and other delicacies. The text implies that
these desires could be satisfied locally, although at great
expense and with difficulty on her husband’s part.10 Pineapples
retained their cultural currency even in eighteenth-century
colonial America, where a hostess’s ability to showcase a
pineapple on her dining table or serve it as part of a meal
revealed much about her family’s social standing. These
prickly fruits were so sought after that shopkeepers rented them
to households by the day; later, the same fruits would be
sold to other, wealthier clients, who might actually eat them.11
The double pineapple prints of Merian’s opening
sequence set the tone of foreign luxury and exotic rarity for
the Metamorphosis as a whole. The remainder of the vol-
ume’s fruit-bearing plants can be divided fairly easily into
two categories, based on their relative familiarity: those that
at the time were well known and regularly consumed in
Europe and those that were unknown or largely unfamil-
iar.12 In each case the commentary accompanying the
illustration reveals an interest in the fruit’s exotic attributes.
Merian tried to educate her readers about the unfamil-
iar plants by making comparisons between them and foods
that were produced and commonly consumed at home. Of

the batata, or sweet potato, Merian wrote that it appeared
lighter in color than a beet, tasted sweeter than a chestnut,
and could be cooked in the same manner as a carrot.13 The
foods that she mentions here (beets, chestnuts, carrots) for
the purpose of making the illustrated plant forms less
strange and more palatable (in the truest sense of the word)
were plentiful in the contemporary Dutch diet.14 Similarly,
when describing the prickly custard apple, Merian wrote
that it looked like a melon and tasted tarter than grapes.
The banana, unknown in Europe at the time, she described
as tasting “like the apples in Holland” and noted that it pro-
duced fruit that could be eaten either raw or cooked. And in
her commentary on the cassava plant, she stated that the
bread made from its roots tasted just like the bread made
from wheat that was served at nearly every meal in Holland.
For this image Merian also included a note about the snake
wrapped around the plant’s stalk; unlike her depiction of
the insects that lived and fed on its leaves, she added the
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Above: Levinus Vincent, Wondertooneel der Natuur, Frontispiece
to the catalog of his collection (1715).
american museum of natural history library
FALL 200 6
snake with eggs in its belly only “as decoration of the sheet,”
no doubt to heighten the cassava’s exoticism.
By the end of the seventeenth century, many of the
plants illustrated in the Metamorphosis had some familiar 47
aspects, having been cultivated by Europeans for decades;
GASTR O N O M I CA
yet they still retained foreign associations, and Merian
stressed these exotic references when describing them in
their Surinamese context. She told how the watermelon, by
1625 commonly planted in Europe as a minor garden crop,15
was used in native Surinamese remedies and explained that
the fruit of the cashew plant (by then grown in Europe but
not yet eaten there) was converted into wine by the locals.
She wrote a fairly long commentary on the chili plant, indi-
cating that its peppers, pickled by the Dutch and also used
to season fish and meat, were eaten on bread by the Indians

FALL 200 6
of Surinam. Merian recorded the ethnographic or anthropo-
logical uses of certain other spice plants as well, such as
annatto, whose red seeds were soaked in water to form a pig-
48 ment used by the Indians to paint their skin.
Merian’s commentaries also include horticultural infor-
GASTR O N O M I CA
mation, presumably aimed at readers who might be interested
in the cultivation of these plants that were both strange and
familiar. Proclaiming that the wild purple grape of Surinam
could be harvested after six months, she mused on how to
bring this varietal to Holland. Many illustrations reveal
visual information about the phases and methods of plant
growth. In the image of the cacao plant, for example, Merian
showed a cross-section of the pod that features several seeds.
By drawing two small developing pods jutting out from the
top of the central stalk, she pointed not only to the plant’s
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Above: Cassava plant, from Metamorphosis insectorum
Surinamensium by Maria Sibylla Merian (Hague Comitum: Apud
Petrum Gosse, 1726).
library of the arnold arboretum, harvard university, cambridge, ma
culinary use but also to its means of regeneration. A similar
style of representation appears in her depiction of the chili
plant. Ignored by previous Merian scholars, this motif seems
to reveal the artist’s interest in the “metamorphosis” of
plants as well as of insects.
Cabinets of Curiosities
Merian’s various approaches to the edible flora of Surinam
are emblematic of larger movements in seventeenth-century
Europe, especially in Holland. Her use of a Eurocentric
base of knowledge to label foreign objects “exotic” and
her way of creating distance between Europeans and non-
European “others” based on the observation of cultural
differences paralleled, perhaps even subconsciously, certain
strategies used by colonialists to justify their imperial aspira-
tions in Surinam and beyond. These ideas provided a
framework into which exotic elements could be folded into
more familiar territory (such as the cultivation of unfamiliar
plants in domestic horticultural gardens or, on a much vaster
scale, the subsuming of foreign lands into a European empire).
Back home in Europe, colonialists created symbolic visual
manifestations of their exploits, most notably in the Kunst-
und Wunder-kammern, or curiosity collections, of the period.16
Often built by merchants and government officials whose
wealth had been generated, at least in part, by colonial
trade, these collections of art objects and plant and animal
specimens consisted of European items as well as foreign
“souvenirs.” Frequently, the latter “exotic” objects were jux-
taposed with the more familiar ones. It was fashionable, for
instance, to place Chinese porcelain bowls alongside table-
ware from Fontainebleau-Avon. Together, they were meant
to display a patron’s power to assemble rare and precious
elements from around the globe.17
Many scholars have written about the inclusion of non-
European objects in these Kunstkammern, noting the parallels
between the foreign elements of these collections and the
general colonial outlook. Londa Schiebinger, a historian of
modern science, has written:
European naturalists collected specimens, sometimes specific facts
about that specimen, but not world views, cosmologies, or alternative
ways of ordering and understanding the world. They stockpiled speci-
mens in cabinets, put them behind glass in museums, accumulated
them in botanical gardens and princely menageries. They collected the
bounty of the natural world, but a bounty divested of traditional
names…[and] cultural meanings.18
Concerning botanical specimens in particular, the
social and cultural critic Mary Louise Pratt has argued that
“one by one the plant’s life forms were to be drawn out of
the tangled threads of their surroundings and rewoven into
European-based patterns of global unity and order. The
(lettered, male, European) eye that held the system could
familiarize (“naturalize”) new sites/sights immediately upon
contact, by incorporating them into the language of the sys-
tem.”19 This paradigm can also be applied to the incorporation
of new foods into the European diet of this period, such as
the fruits that Merian chose to illustrate in her prints. As
watermelon, chili peppers, and the like became more com-
mon in Dutch cuisine, they were gradually stripped of their
previous status as “exotic.” Their foreign aspects now hinged
on their distant origins or on their ethnographic uses (e.g.,
to treat the sick) and not on their once-novel flavors. We
can find parallels in current American gastronomy, in which
foods like sushi or Thai curries, still perceived as “exotic”
only a few decades ago, are now considered essentially
mainstream, at least for certain diners.
But the connections between Merian’s project and the
principles of the Kunstkammer are not only ideological. In
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her preface to the Metamorphosis, Merian acknowledged a
debt to several of Amsterdam’s leading citizens whose large
collections of animal, insect, and plant specimens she had
visited, fueling her curiosity about Surinamese flora and
fauna long before she and Dorothea made their journey.
These collectors included Nicolaes Witsen and his nephew
Jonas, both members of Amsterdam’s ruling elite, who
maintained close ties to Surinam and the sugar industry;
Frederick Ruysch, who, as professor of anatomy and botany
at the Amsterdam Athenaeum Illustre and keeper of the
institution’s medical garden, became an expert in the field
of specimen preservation; and Levinus Vincent, who had
amassed great wealth as an entrepreneur. Merian also knew
at least one of the great female collectors of the day, Agneta
Block, wife of a wealthy silk-trader who had amassed a wide
variety of insects, paintings, and sculptures as well as exotic
plants, which she showcased in an extensive garden that
included a tropical hothouse and an aviary for tropical birds.20
The breadth and scale of these Kunstkammern are por-
trayed in an engraving that served as the frontispiece to
the catalog of Levinus Vincent’s collection, first published
in 1706, with later editions in subsequent years. In the fore-
ground, one can see boxes containing preserved insects,
manuscript illustrations of plants and animals, and a figure
FALL 200 6
wearing an “exotic” plumed headdress and shell necklace,
his elbow resting on a globe. In the background are statues,
shelves divided into compartments to house larger specimens,
and drawers that presumably contained glass-covered insects 49
and butterflies pinned to wooden panels, as well as prints
GASTR O N O M I CA
and drawings of other naturalia.
This image of Vincent and his collections provides
visual evidence of how Merian’s volume was perceived and
used in its day. Not only did her book express certain views
and desires about exotic fruits, insects, and people—ideas
shared by the owners of these great collections—but its rep-
resentation of these strange plants and animals, a compilation
of many of Surinam’s exotic delights, made it a valuable
addition to any collection as an object in its own right. Going
beyond the traditional scope of simply depicting flora and
 fauna, Merian broadened the content and, consequently,
the significance of the Metamorphosis by including ethno-
graphic and horticultural information in her commentaries,
in which she positioned herself as an eyewitness observer to
the experiences and facts she recorded. It can be surmised
that she did this at least in part to widen her book’s appeal,
making it an attractive purchase not only for conventional
collectors but also for someone like Agneta Block, who was
primarily interested in her tropical garden. Indeed, almost
all of the owners of these cabinets of curiosities regarded
sight as the most important sense for gathering knowledge
and thus would have highly valued Merian’s empirical
observations.21
Public Reception
Merian’s correspondence from the years after her return from
Surinam indicates that collectors such as those mentioned
above were instrumental in financing the publication of the
Metamorphosis. In debt from the expense of her journey,
Merian was faced with the difficult choice of selling her
watercolors to a single buyer for a lump sum or trying to raise
enough money to create prints from the originals for indi-
vidual sale. In the end she chose to pursue the latter path,
producing engravings and devising a system of advanced
subscription.22
Her letters show that she courted subscribers by offering
them a special rate of fifteen Dutch guilders, reduced from
eighteen guilders, which would be the book’s postproduction
price. Engravings hand colored by Merian herself would
cost an additional thirty guilders for subscribers and nonsub-
scribers alike.23 In order to raise additional funds, she agreed
to produce watercolors of the objects and specimens in the
famed collection of Georg Eberhard Rumph, better known
FALL 200 6
as Rumphius; these were later turned into engravings for the
catalog of his collection, D’Amboinsche Rariteitkamer, pub-
lished in the same year as Merian’s Metamorphosis.24
50 Merian’s letters also reveal that to supplement her
income even further she sold the preserved insects and
GASTR O N O M I CA
small reptiles that she had brought back from Surinam and,
in subsequent years, she continued to import and sell new
specimens once her initial supply was depleted. In a note to
an unidentified addressee, she offered thirty-four creatures
in liquid that could be transported in large sugar jars from
the East and West Indies.25 This epistolary detail provides a
new twist on the old saying about catching flies with honey—
and additional evidence, perhaps, of the sticky web that
connected Merian and her work to the capitalist collectors
of this period.
Right: Willem Kalf, Still Life with Nautilus, 1663.
courtesy of museo thyssen-bornemisza, madrid
The exotic fruits in Merian’s work take on the attributes
of other valued collectibles in seventeenth-century Europe,
prized not only for their rarity or suggestion of distant places
but also for their ability to affirm the power and status of
those who could collect them. Merian’s pineapples espe-
cially speak to this lust for the exotic. Considering that her
volume was designed to be collected, it becomes even more
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evident that Merian did not arbitrarily choose to begin with
the pineapple sequence; rather, these plates were intended
to make an immediate appeal to wealthy would-be patrons
of her work, tantalizing them with the fruit’s rarity and with
the prospect of its ownership, if only in visual form.
Images of food as objects of admiration, especially when
juxtaposed with other exotic objects, undeniably call to mind
Dutch still-life paintings, such as those by Willem Kalf
(1619–1693), and certain aspects of Merian’s prints are remi-
niscent of this genre. In his Still Life with Nautilus, for
instance, Kalf limns a Chinese bowl, a silver charger, a
Turkish carpet, and a Nautilus cup, interspersed with tropi-
cal citrus fruits. It’s also true that, like Merian’s artworks,
Kalf’s were purchased by distinguished citizens and given a
prominent place in their collections. But the engravings in
the Metamorphosis are no more the direct descendants of
traditional period still lifes than they are the progeny of earlier
depictions of insect metamorphosis by Dutch naturalists,
who represented this transformative process matter-of-factly,
on plain white sheets, numbering the various stages “one”
through “six.” Neither glistening oil paintings of assembled
objects nor dry scientific diagrams, Merian’s creations are
worlds unto themselves, with fruits to be consumed, plants to
be grown, insects to be observed, and customs to be explored.
At the time that these prints were produced, their primary
audience, enticed by sweet dreams of sugar and of the wealth it
could bring, wanted to lay claim to these foreign worlds in both
a literal and figurative sense, through building colonies abroad
and collections at home. Today, we can read Merian’s prints—
the fruits of her labor, so to speak—as emblematic of the
larger forces that produced them, namely, colonialism, col-
lecting, and consumption in late seventeenth-century Europe.g
notes
1. Harvey and Sheldon Peck, orthodontists, as quoted in James Gorman, “Sweet
Toothlessness,” Discover (October 1980), 50ff. Reprinted in Simon Schama, The
Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 129.
2. See Matthew Edel, “The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the Seventeenth Century
and the Rise of the West Indian Competition,” Caribbean Studies ix (1969): no. 1,
24, 38. According to Edel the number of sugar refineries in Amsterdam grew from
one in 1586 to over sixty in 1660.
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 3. All but one of the sixty plates in the Metamorphosis were reproduced from
their original watercolors by two hired engravers; Merian engraved the remaining
one and hand colored all of the prints. After Merian’s death her daughter pro-
duced twelve new engravings and sold all of the plates to Johannes Oosterwyck,
who published two subsequent versions, one in 1719 and one in 1726. The illustra-
tions included in this article are from the 1726 version.
4. Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins (Cambridge, ma: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 140. Davis discusses in some detail the praise that Merian
received for her work. The first two volumes of the Raupenbuch appeared in 1679
and 1683, respectively. A third volume was completed with the help of Merian’s
daughters and published in 1717, the year of her death.
5. Founded by the French priest Jean de Labadie (1610–1674), the Labadist
settlement was a radically devout Protestant community in the Dutch province of
Friesland. Its members renounced pride, property, and worldly possessions and
believed that penitence, discipline, community prayer, and prophetic exercise
could help transform the “criminal self” into “the self made pure.” See Davis,
Women on the Margins, 141, 157–160.
6. One exception is William T. Stearn. See his “Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717)
as a Botanical Artist,” Taxon 31 (August 1982): no. 3, 529–534. Stearn’s interest lies
more in identifying and classifying the plant species, however, than in discussing
their social context.
7. The richest and most informative of these biographical accounts was written by
Natalie Zemon Davis (see note 4). In recent years, most notably in Maria Sibylla
Merian: Artist and Naturalist 1647–1717, exh. cat., Kurt Wettengl, ed. (Frankfurt:
Historisches Museum Frankfurt am Main, 1997), some attention has been given
to context. See specifically the catalog essay by Roelof Van Gelder, “Art
Commerce, Passion, and Science,” 137–149. Another essay, by Viktoria Schmidt-
Lisenhoff, argues that our contemporary understanding of Merian’s work has
been shaped by feminist discourse of the late twentieth century.
8. For Merian’s commentaries on the pineapple and other fruits, see Elisabeth
Rücker, Maria Sibylla Merian, 1647–1717. exh. cat. (Nuremburg: Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, 1967), 48–60. All translations from the German are mine.
9. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, The History of Food, Anthea Bell, trans.
(Cambridge, ma: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 677.
10. As described in Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 171. The fictional account
is De Tien Vermakelijkheden des Houwelijks, or The Ten Diversions of Marriage,
written by “Hippolytus de Vrye” [H. Sweerts], published in Amsterdam in 1678.
11. Hoag Levins, “Symbolism of the Pineapple,” www.levins.com/pineapple.html.
FALL 200 6
52
GASTR O N O M I CA
12. Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Conée Ornelas, eds., The Cambridge World
History of Food (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) is very helpful for
identifying which fruits were known in Europe at the time. See also Stearn,
“Maria Sibylla Merian,” 531.
13. Davis, Women on the Margins, 190.
14. See Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 170, for a discussion of staple foods in
the Dutch diet; see also “Food and Drink around the World: The Low Countries,”
in The Cambridge World History of Food, 1232–1236.
15. Regarding the cultivation of watermelons in Europe, see The Cambridge
World History of Food, 306.
16. For a detailed description of these curiosity collections and examples of their
contents, see Van Gelder, “Art, Commerce, Passion and Science,” 139–141.
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17. Th.H. Lunsingh Sheurleer, “Early Dutch Cabinets of Curiosities,” in The
Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Century Europe, Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985), 117–118. The author notes that a similar arrangement of this sort
could be seen at Rembrandt’s house in Amsterdam.
18. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 208.
19. Cited in Davis, Women on the Margins, 183–184.
20. Van Gelder, “Art, Commerce, Passion and Science,” 144–146.
21. See the discussion on knowledge, vision, and the “attentive eye” in the fields
of art and science at this time in Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 84. See also Van Gelder, “Art, Commerce,
Passion and Science,” 144, for a discussion of the significance placed on vision
and visibility in these collections.
22. Correspondence dated 1702, as published in Van Gelder, “Art, Commerce,
Passion and Science,” 142.
23. This information comes from a letter to Mr. Johann Georg Volckamer,
Medicine Doctor in Nürnberg, dated 1705. It is translated and reproduced in the
appendix of Wettengl, Maria Sibylla Merian, letter number 14.
24. Van Gelder, “Art, Commerce, Passion and Science,” 137.
25. Wettengl, appendix, letter number 8.