Beautiful Beasts

In a time of environmental crisis, in which humanity is called to rethink her relationship to nature and to all the animals living around, in, and with us, the way we imagine nature plays an important role. For to rethink the relationship between humans and other animals, picturing the world and the non-human creatures living in it becomes a crucial part of that exercise.

In our course, we set out on a journey to look at animal depictions – both from the past and the present – tracing different artistic traditions and visualizing technologies over more than three centuries. What struck us was the sheer abundance of images, their diversity, and their arresting beauty. Were these art, or science? Yet, as Caroline Jones and Peter Galison observed in their introduction to Picturing Science, Producing Art, “the much-vexed inquiry as to whether science and art are incommensurable realms of knowledge is misplaced” (Jones/ Galison 1998, 1). And thus, we rather asked what the relationship between the two was. In what context, to what purpose were the images made? Who participated in the production of visualized knowledge? Did aesthetic considerations weigh over scientific truth claims or the other way around? Who was the intended audience and who could afford the publications they were printed in? What changed over time, and how do we look at them today?

Starting with the scientific drawings and engravings natural historians made in the early modern and modern ages, we worked our way up to the present and its wildlife photography and digital imaging technology documenting today’s biodiversity to explore how these representational technologies changed over time. The early, hand-drawn examples we investigated revealed two elements in particular: First, they were made by highly skilled artists who had learned a very difficult trade, namely, to depict as accurately as possible the essential markers of a creature with the objective to support taxonomic endeavors. Second, since they were made for said purpose of identification and classification, other bodies of knowledge (that the observing artist-naturalist might even have picked up in the field or heard from their indigenous informants) did not get recorded. Variations and dimorphisms were rarely depicted as well, for these were aspects of natural life that did not meet the referencing, standardizing goals of many naturalist publications. Through the selection of type specimens, nature needed to be made “safe for science” (Daston/ Galison 1992, 85).

But within these developments, entirely new, even revolutionary manners of depicting nature were still introduced. This is where the achievements of individual, remarkable personalities come to the fore. Some of them were long forgotten but are now celebrated. The early eighteenth-century explorer-painter-naturalist  Maria Sibylla Merian , for instance, drew her stunning flora and fauna imagery as “organismal interactions” (Etheridge 2016, 58), with two or more creatures and plants in one frame, thus emphasizing the ecology and behavior of animals. This broke with the long-standing dominant tradition – which continued well into the nineteenth century – of isolating organisms from their environment and putting them into a comparative and classificatory order of related species.

We noted that especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the opposition between science and art became more pronounced and a leading preoccupation. Scientists aspired to create images removed from artistic subjectivity; and artists sought to free themselves from scientific-mechanical prerogatives. Within the realm of naturalist depictions, science and its objectivity claims seemed to “win” over artistic concerns. Increasingly, mid- to late nineteenth-century scientists’ aspirations to “non-interventionist” objectivity sought to replace the artist entirely and have a mechanical process (x-rays, photographs etc.) do the depiction, in an effort to remove mediation, to “let nature speak for itself” (Daston/ Galison 1992, 81). That this was an illusion, and that there is always mediation in the process of depiction, forcing the scientist/artist to make choices, became particularly clear when we ended our class on the issue of present-day wildlife photography.

In some ways, the goal of today’s nature depictions remains the same: to understand nature better. But other, ethical and political demands have shifted drastically. Asking what range of meanings – from symbolic to scientific – nature photographs in our image-saturated world evoke, we were left with no answer as to whether these images of beautiful beasts can convey the current situation of environmental decay and loss. In any case, what we discovered is that today’s community of citizen naturalists is alive and well, providing invaluable visual (and often also audio) testimonies of our fellow earthlings.

Literature:

• Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, The Image of Objectivity, Representations 40, Special Issue: Seeing Science (1992): 81-128.

• Kay Etheridge, The History and Influence of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Bird-Eating Tarantula. Circulating Images and the Production of Natural Knowledge. In Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood (eds.), Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750-1850 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 54-70.

• Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, Introduction. In ibid. (eds.), Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York, London: Routledge, 1998), 1-23.

Patrick Frehner

Ichthyology, ed. by William Jardine. The Naturalist's Library, 2nd issue, vol. 38. Edinburgh, 1852-1854 (Held at the Ernst Mayr Library via the  Biodiversity Heritage Library )

Surfing through the  Biodiversity Heritage Library’s photo album on Flickr ,  I got quite confused when I came across drawings of several fishes from the mid-19th century. They are part of a collection about American perches that was published in 1852 by Sir William Jardine in a series of natural history books called The Naturalist's Library. The original copper engravings in it were done by William Home Lizars, one of the best creators of natural depictions in the 19th century. All of the fishes were drawn as if a fisherman would proudly present their fresh catch. Some fishes were lying on the ground, often paired and thus one halfway covered by another. In the background one could see an idyllic lake, a river, or ocean sceneries, sometimes rounded off with sailing boats or huge waterfalls. The most confusing was, however, that some of the fish seemed to fly above the water, with no contact to their surroundings. These were clearly not the rare species with flying abilities, but still, these were prominently placed in the air by the artist.

Literature:

• Chianese, Robert Louis: Is Nature Photography too Beautiful?, in: American Scientist, Vol. 102, No.1 (2014).
• Etheridge, Kay: The History and Influence of Maria Sibylla Merians Bird-Eating Tarantula. In: Manning, Patrick et al: Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750-1850. University of Pittburgh Press, 2016.

Floriane Goncalves

Fauna Graece Sibthorpiano or Drawings of the Animals of Greece and the Levant, by Ferdinand Bauer, Oxford, 1787–1794 (Held at  Bodleian Libraries ); A Hand Book to the Birds of Great Britain, by Richard Bowdler Sharper, London, 1894-1897 (Held at  Naturalis Biodiversity Center , vie  Biodiversity Heritage Library ).

I want to question our perception and relationship to truth. Is what we see the reality? Is it possible to depict the truth if we consider it is what we see? Visual documents can be useful to freeze an image in time. However, in an era where social media make pictures travel fast and to everyone, everywhere (especially with fake news), it is sometimes hard to know what is real or not. I want to show how picture are not necessarily more objective and reliable than words. Just the angle of a picture and its frame can change the whole perception of it. I selected a few images depicting the same specie to compare them with each other to question what we can see.

First, I chose a specie before finding the documents, it is the Purple Heron. This bird is part of the Ardeida family, and its scientific name is Ardea Purpurea (Linnaeus, 1766). I chose this specie because it was first depicted in the 18th century and is still alive today and not even endangered. I found two illustrations in two different books in online archives, namely the  Digital Bodleian Library  and the  Biodiversity Heritage Library  (BHL).

To answer my question about depicting truth, I want to first compare the two drawings. This will allow me to talk about the complex relationship between art and science. Then, I will demonstrate how hard it is to picture the reality by comparing the drawings with photographic pictures. This second step will allow me to reflect on the question of human agency and subjectivity.

Ferdinand Bauer was an Austrian illustrator who traveled a lot and who drew over 1000 plants, 363 animals and 131 landscapes. This illustration is in volume 3, part of a series of books, and was produced between 1786 and 1794 when he visited Greece and other Mediterranean countries. We know that he drew by hand which suggest that he used pencils and color pencils, but we don’t have real specifics about his exact techniques. His work was important because he and his companions discovered new species (during their voyage) and by depicting them, these could be known and archived. 

R. B. Sharper was a British zoologist and ornithologist who worked for the British Museum of natural history. We have no record of him traveling and drawing. His work consisted in cataloging and classifying the specie, and describing them in the most specific way possible. It seems that he asked illustrators to produce the pictures for him, his 10 daughters also contributed by hand colouring the lithographic plates. His work was also important in the context of discovering new species. This illustration is in the third volume published in 1896. 

To conclude, I want to compare the illustrations with photographs of the same bird to see how accurate the illustrations are, and if they succeeded in depicting the reality.

The first thing that struck me is that the long front feathers and the head feathers that we could observe in the illustrations are not as prominent in this photograph. Especially the former are much thinner and barely visible. Two answers are possible. It can be because the size can change depending on the seasons or depending on the age or simply on the animal. As I mentioned before, there is a lot of diversity in nature. All the animals of one species are not necessarily identic. 

Yet, we can still observe all the main features of the purple Heron, notably the black stripes, but not as well as in the illustrations. It seems that the artists of earlier centuries chose to accentuate these main features, so it was easier to recognize the bird in the real world.

Since photography can also be considered art, how can it be objective? But is subjectivity always a bad thing? All these questions do not have a simple answer. However, we can establish that, despite some scientists’ efforts to overcome human fallacy with mechanical representations, subjectivity is part of the process of taking a picture: decisions are taken by humans. What is the subject of the picture, the frame, what do we want to show, colors, etc. All these criteria are aesthetic choices by the photographer to maybe make the observers think or have an emotion. For example, at present, there is a debate, with the environmental crisis, about how to depict the harsh reality of most species. Some critics note that most of the time pictures don’t show enough of the environment or destroyed habitat of an animal. But how can we depict that when we can’t see it with our own eyes. Pictures show what we see in a certain moment, they can’t always depict the reality of the animal because sometimes it goes unnoticed. 

Others have criticized that wildlife photography (and documentaries) is “too beautiful”, that it doesn’t show the reality of animals and their struggles. But the opposite can also be the case. Bleak or apocalyptic scenes might become an aesthetic style. Showing pain or the consequences of devastating events can be a genre and an artistic choice of the photographer as well. A way to try to be as objective as possible – if that is the goal – is to have a text explain the picture and the intentions behind it. But that still doesn’t stop us viewers to see other, new things that the author of the picture – hand-drawn or photographed – had maybe not intended.

Literature:

• CHIANESE, Robert Louis. “Is Nature Photography Too Beautiful?” American Scientist, vol. 102, no. 1, Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, 2014, pp. 64–67, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43707750.
• DASTON, Lorraine, and GALISON, Peter. “The Image of Objectivity.” Representations, no. 40, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 81–128,  https://doi.org/10.2307/2928741   .
• JONES, Caroline, and GALISON, Peter (eds.). Picturing Science, Producing Art, Routledge, 2014.

Hope Läubli

Unser Hausgeflügel. Ein ausführliches Handbuch über Zucht, Haltung und Pflege unseres Hausgeflügels. Die Taubenrassen, ed. by Burchard Blancke, A. Lavalle and Max Lietze, Berlin 1905. (Held at the Smithsonian Libraries via the  Biodiversity Heritage Library )

Pigeons… if they are white and carrying an olive branch we call them doves

Pigeons… if they are littering our city centres we call them feathered pests

Pigeons… but when we gave them a home and domesticated them we called them loyal, we called them pets...

Marie Muschalek

« Le Moloch » in : Histoire naturelle des singes, peints d’après nature, par J.B. Audebert [1797], republished and extended as Histoire naturelle des singes et des makis. Paris: Desrays, an VIII (1799-1800), fam. I, sect. 2, p. 3. [Held at Ernst Mayr Library, via the  Biodiversity Heritage Library ]