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Sam AlbertiDaniela BleichmarSteve CaffertyClemency FisherPalmira Fontes da CostaBarbara T. GatesCaroline GrigsonKathryn A. HoffmannKathryn JamesJulian JocelynMarco MassetiKaerin Nickelsen
This lecture commemorates Dr John Ramsbottom (1885–1974), Founder member and President of the Society from 1942-1972. It is given at one of the Socety’s International meetings.
The Codex Vindobonensis represents not only the most significant Byzantine manuscript of secular content, but also the oldest illuminated version of the writings of Dioscorides. For more than 1500 years this work concerning medicines and other treatments drawn from the plant, animal and mineral kingdoms formed the undisputed basis of knowledge/belief for doctors and pharmacists - as sacrosanct as the Bible to Christians. Equally great was the interest in the writings of Dioscorides, which survived in a confused mass of copies and translations, often accompanied by notes, commentaries and supplementary material. Apart from a few even earlier fragments, the Codex Vindobonensis is the oldest version of the almost complete text, written on parchment shortly before 512 and containing largely lifelike illustrations.
This codex is known by various titles - (1) Codex Aniciae Julianae named after its first owner, the Byzantine princess Juliana Anicia; (2) Codex Constantinopolitanus, Codex C or Codex Byzantinus, after Constantinople or Byzantium (later, after 1453, known as Istanbul), the city in which the manuscript originated and was kept for more than a thousand years; (3) Codex Vindobonensis, or the Vienna Dioscorides, after the place where the Codex has resided since 1569.
No other codex communicates to the reader a similar feeling for the mystery of time: the annotation “ginestre” from an eastern French dialect apparently stems form the years of the first fall of Constantinople in 1204, other notes in Greek date from the time of the Paleaologue emperors (after 1261), when the manuscript was preserved in the Monastery of Prodromu Petra. Further notes and synonyms in Arabic, Persian and Turkish make it clear that this work continued to be used even after the second fall of Constantinople in 1453. Later the manuscript was acquired by Mose ben Mose, who may have added the numerous Hebrew translations of the plant names. The son of a certain Hamon them sold the manuscript to Emperor Maximilian II. Subsequently it was brought to Vienna, where and found its permanent place in the Imperial Library. Before long, scholars were coming from all over Europe to study the library’s new acquisition. No other Byzantine codex has generated anything approaching the number of analyses, commentaries and evaluations.
In Vienna copies of many plant illustrations were made by Sambucus and wood cuts prepared for various herbals. Later, in c. 1762, Kollár compared the Codex Vindobonensis with the Codex Neapoletanus, while Jacquin arranged for the plant illustrations being engraved for a work on ancient and modern medicinal plants. For unknown reasons this project came to a standstill with only five sets of proofs surviving. One of them was lent to Sibthorp for his botanical and linguistical studies in the Levant and later used by Smith when writing the text for the famous Flora Graeca.
It was only in c. 1904 that a complete facsimile of the Codex Vindobonenesis came out. Its black and white lithographs opened new horizons in understanding the early phases of scientific illustration. A first fascimile in colour was published in the early 1970s, very recently made available also in reduced format, thus spreading even further the glory of this outstanding manuscript.
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University of Manchester
Nineteenth-century scientists represented natural objects not only with stunning two-dimensional images but also in three dimensions. Museums, laboratories and clinics housed a plethora of models in a range of media: glass, plaster, and especially wax, which latter material was especially suited to modelling the human form, whether externally or internally. Italy was undoubtedly the nerve centre of these ceroplastic arts, although the German states later developed rival traditions, especially in embryological modelling. Britain is rarely considered in the history of wax modelling, for the most part fairly: but in a small room in the basement of a south London hospital, a lone figure produced a series of spectacular anatomical models.
Joseph Towne began modelling as a teenager, and his precocious talent earned him the post of modeller at Guy’s Hospital in 1826, where he remained for half a century. He was adept at both sculpting and modelling, and his range of subjects was considerable. Beginning with elaborate anatomical models dissecting the head and body, he later developed zoological interests. His later career was devoted to the construction of dermatological models, or moulages. Contemporaries considered Towne’s collection to ‘stand unrivalled as works of art,’ comprising ‘one of the most complete and most minute representations of the body in existence’. Towne’s solitary craft process meant that his tacit knowledge was never transferred; his skills died with him. But his models survived, as pristine as ever, a lasting testament to a one-man British ceroplastic industry. Using Towne’s models as a case study, this paper will explore the role of three-dimensional illustrations in Victorian museums of nature, at the intersection of art and anatomy.
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Princeton University
This paper will outline Spanish natural history expeditions in the eighteenth century and provide examples of the images they produced, emphasizing the importance of illustrations as a way of identifying, seizing, translating, and transporting colonial nature
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Botany Department, Natural History Museum, London
Digitisation of natural history collections has become an increasingly important aspect of the work of Museums and similar institutions in recent years. Whilst pioneering work has been underway for several decades, the last 5 years have seen an explosive expansion in digitising collections and increasing their accessibility via the WWW.
In virtually all institutions world-wide the huge task of digitising collections has enforced protocols based on priorities. Some of the priorities employed are common within and across institutions, whilst others are unique to disciplines or institutions. The Natural History Museum has understandably, largely focused on historical type rich material within its collections.
This talk will look at some of the collections currently digitally available and will consider some of the important aspects of the rationale and methods of digitisation. Potential future developments within the field of digitisation will also be considered.
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Zoology Department, Liverpool Museum, UK
(No abstract available.)
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Assistant Professor Unit of History and Philosophy of Science, New University of Lisbon, Portugal,
This paper focuses on works that first described and illustrated some of the new plants and animals found in Africa and Asia by the Portuguese during the XVI century. Special relevance will be given to animals described and viewed as exotic by the Europeans, such as the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the panther. I intend to discuss not only the various representations of exotic plants and animals provided by different authors but also various media used in their depiction, such as manuscript and printed illustrations, cartography and tapestry.
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Alumni Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies, University of Delaware
The paper will examine the work of three Victorian women (time permitting): Louisa Anne Meredith, a British colonist living in Australia who wrote about the plants and animals of Tasmania; Eliza Brightwen, a popular late-centry British writer of animal anecdotes and domestic stories about a menagerie; and Arabella Buckley, Sir Charles Lyell’s secretary and an interpreter of Darwin for children and working-class audiences. Each of these women was capable of illustrating her own work, yet not all of them chose to do so. Meredith, who worked from the 1840s to the 1880s, illustrated all her own books, which were most often large folios with color illustrations. Brightwen, on the other hand, illustrated only one of her books entirely--but sometimes worked along with illustrators chosen by Unwin, her publisher. Her work came after the revolution in photo-reproduction and was done entirely in black and white and differences between her illustrations and those of others themselves make an illuminating study. Buckley rarely did her own illustrating, but seems to have closely supervised her illustrators. She, too, produced books in small formats, illustrated profusely in black and white.
My paper will compare these three writer/illustrators, drawing tentative conclusions about the role of women in Victorian natural history illustration, the development of the illustrated natural history text in the Victorian period, and the degree of control women had over illustrations for their own written texts. Its conclusions will be tentative only because the topic remains a shadowy area for exploration. There are few records to support assumptions and little previous research in the area.
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London
By comparing original paintings and drawings of known individual exotic animals in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with their subsequent reproductions in prints, handbills and illustrated books, one can trace the accumulation of information about their taxonomy, behaviour and introduction. In some instances the images were also used for satirical and commercial purposes. The present paper looks particularly at animals in the private menageries belonging to Queen Charlotte, John Hunter F.R.S., Lord Clive of India and Warren Hastings, as well as the animal dealers at the Exeter Change in London. It is illustrated with images created by such famous artists as George Stubbs and Thomas Bewick, together with the work of several less well-known artists and engravers.
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Professor, Dept. of Languages and Literatures of Europe and the Americas, University of Hawaii-Manoa, Honolulu, HI
A paper on illustrations of imaginary marvels (dragons, mermaids, vegetable lambs, goose trees) as well as illustrations of real natural marvels (hairy, horned or conjoined humans) in works of natural philosophy, museum collections, and other displays in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Through the illustration of marvel in treatises, collections, broadsheets, and pamphlets the paper looks at the roles of pleasure and vision in the collection and dissemination of knowledge about natural history in early modern Europe.
The paper begins in the margins where natural history texts layered over each other, borrowing images that melded truth and fantasy, and transmitting an impossible history. Texts that often proclaimed earlier texts to have been mistaken about dragons and mermaids still often decorated their own pages with images of new versions of the creatures, seen either by the author or other eminent authorities who could vouch for their authenticity. The problem of the gaze at marvels was compounded by the fact some of the marvels did not remain as engraved illustrations, but were also transformed into three-dimensional illustrations of wonder for curiosity cabinets and museums. Stuffed dragons, dried mermaids, and sutured monsters sat on shelves, were the subject of new engravings and found their way into catalogs, new texts, and letters. They made cabinets worthy of visits by traveling European scholars and elicited new theories of natural wonder.
Recent work on marvels (by Daston and Park, Findlen, Bondeson and others) has helped bring natural history marvels back into serious focus. This paper will add to that work by looking specifically at the borders where two-dimensional illustration and three-dimensional display intersected, and at the sites where natural history, medicine, the fairground, curiosity cabinets, and museums would remain intertwined for centuries in the suspect pleasures of a gaze gone beyond. Turned into visual proof, made to circulate in engravings, catalogs and texts, illustrated marvels were part of the new observational stances of science, medicine and history. Not simply the products of error, fraud, conscious counterfeiting or the complacent borrowing of engravings—although all of that comes into play—illustrated marvels help reveal the complex problems surrounding natural history knowledge and the exhibition of that knowledge in the early modern. They were part of a nascent “exhibitionary complex” that involved multiple cultural sites. Manipulating the gaze, securing patronage, creating fame for writers, collectors and their museums, and helping bring natural history texts and natural history pedagogy to wider audiences, engravings, illustrations and even the frauds of marvel are an important part of the history of natural history. They reveal the deep intersections of pleasure, fantasy, knowledge, and power in early modern natural history.
Illustrations of composite animals, plant/animal combinations, and human marvels shown during the presentation will be taken from Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses, Ulyssis Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia, Bartholomeus Ambrosinus’s Paralipomena accuratissma historiae omnium animalium, Lorenzo Legati’s Museo cospiano, Claude Duret’s Histoire Admirable des Plantes, Mandeville’s Travels, John Johnson’s Historia Naturalis, Edward Topsell’s Historie of Four-Footed Beasts, Joris Hoefnagel’s The Four Elements and others. Broadsheets, posters, and paintings are from Italy, France, England, and Austria.
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120 Edmonds Street, Edmonds, WA 98020, USA
When Dr. Richard Richardson (1663 – 1741), F. R. S., expressed his displeasure with an upcoming natural historical publication by the first Cambridge professor of botany, Richard Bradley (d. 1732), it was in customarily curmudgeonly style. “Bradley has published three other Decades of Succulent Plants; in all five. I subscribed for the three last; and against my orders he has dedicated one of them to me … but I am not likely to have them. He now writes a second weekly paper, with rambling Philosophical Observations, as he can pick them up, but mostly from the French Transactions.”[1]
That Bradley had not, in fact, dedicated his fifth ‘Decade’ to Richardson does not preclude the uncomfortable accuracy of Richardson’s statement. There were a great number of natural historical observations being published in early 18th century Britain, many of which—with a Sisyphean logic—were dedicated to potential patrons in hopes of raising money against the costs of publishing works of natural history. The tables and illustrations which enliven these publications also acted as a form of currency, in the patronage-driven economy of natural history in early modern Europe. Expensive to print, they could also work to inspire interest—and, with interest, reputation and financial support. Illustrations of natural history also served as advertisements for natural historians.
This paper offers an examination of the role of patronage in the publication of natural historical illustrations, as seen specifically in the work of James Petiver (1663/4 – 1718), London apothecary, F. R. S., and avid natural historical collector. Petiver was a prolific writer and editor of natural historical treatises in the early 18th century. His periodical publication, the Museii Petiveriani (1693 – 1703), highlights the publication of illustrations (and tables, and tables of illustrations), each dedicated to an individual patron. A study of Petiver’s illustrations—both their sources and their dedications—offers insight into the network of acquaintances, collectors, patrons, and practitioners through which natural history was conducted in the early modern period.
[1]Dawson Turner, ed., Extracts from the literary and scientific correspondence of Richard Richardson (Yarmouth, 1834). Cited in Frank N. Egerton, “Richard Bradley’s relationship with Sir Hans Sloane,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 25 (1970), p. 70.
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Glasgow, Scotland
The first illustrations of natural history from colour photographs as part of a book appeared in 1910, followed by Wildflowers as they grow, a series published by Cassell, and similar books. By 1914 they were numerous. Some examples will be described and views from the periodical Nature quoted.
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Dipartimento di Biologia Animale e Genetica “Leo Pardi” dell’Università di Firenze. Laboratori di Antropologia,Florence
Artistic representation is a form of language which gives us information about the appearance and external morphology of the object portrayed. The analysis of the iconographic element can provide valid complementary information for the study of palaeoenvironmental features where the possibility of drawing on other sources of information is limited, if not actually non-existent. In fact, as Fedele (1985) observed: “When the desire to reproduce the animal has produced representations of naturalistic quality, the figure effectively becomes, for the zooarchaeologist, an efficacious palaeofaunistic datum”. This may be the case in the study not only of prehistoric and proto-historic human cultures but also in the historic.
Other artistic productions, on the other hand, reveal a different perception of the naturalistic subjects, which appear to have been evoked by artists who were not sufficiently familiar with the scene which the commissioner wished them to portray.
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History & Philosophy of Science, University of Bern, Switzerland
At first glance botanical drawings of the 18th century might be interpreted as naturalistic portraits of living plants, drawn by individual artists according to their own style and taste. A detailed investigation of more than 200 botanical illustrations drawn in the period from 1700 to 1830 revealed an entirely different story. The pictures were not even intended to render the outward appearance of living plants, but were to communicate typical features of plant species. To meet this objective a number of representational conventions had to be observed, in order to make sure to be correctly understood. Copying elements of previously published drawings and integrating them into new pictures was found to be a widespread technique. But this is not to say that later draughtsmen were lazy or lacked creativity. Only carefully selected elements were taken over, and even those were improved in terms of their accuracy and their appropriateness to the new context. This procedure was an important strategy of 18th century botanists to uphold the standards of the genre in terms of pictorial representation and content, while at the same time presenting a picture, that would meet their own requirements better than already existing depictions.
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Royal Collections, Windsor
The ‘Paper Museum’ of our title is the ‘Museo Cartaceo’ of Cassiano dal Pozzo, patron, collector, scientist and antiquarian, born near Turin in 1588, died in Rome in 1657, whose collection was left at his death to his younger brother, Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo, who continued to add to it. The Paper Museum, consisting of around 7,000 drawings, and probably as many prints, passed via the Albani family to King George III in the mid 18th century, and became part of the British Royal Collection. The major part of it is still in Royal Library at Windsor Castle.
Cassiano dal Pozzo was elected to Europe’s first scientific society, the Accademia dei Lincei, of which Galileo was the most famous member, and he became secretary to Cardinal Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII. He and his brother amassed a collection of paintings, and other art works, a library, a museum of antiquities, animal artefacts and curiosities, and they kept a collection of live birds in the courtyard of their Roman palace. Most notably they created their ‘museum on paper’ or visual encyclopaedia – a collection of drawings and prints concerning every branch of knowledge of the man-made and natural worlds.
Very little of this Paper Museum was published by Cassiano, although the collection was visited by artists, scholars, collectors and men of letters. Once in the Royal Collection, the Paper Museum was excluded from the catalogues of the Old Master drawings published by curators of the art collections, because of both the obscurity of much of the subject matter and the difficulty of identifying the artists who had made the drawings. In 1986, however, a committee was set up with the aim of publishing the Paper Museum in its entirety for the first time, in the form of a fully illustrated multi-volume catalogue raisonné, divided into two series: antiquities and architecture, and natural history. Six volumes have so far been published; another three are currently in production with over twenty more to come.
The present speakers are the joint authors of the volume to be devoted to the ornithological drawings (and Henrietta McBurney is also Assistant General Editor of the whole series). They present their collaborative experience as a case study of the tasks of reconstruction facing the project as a whole.
First there is the task of reconstructing the extent, contents and order of the original Paper Museum, one of the most difficult tasks because of the dispersal of the contents over the years, and the lack of inventories or descriptions of the contents made by the different owners. Clues have had to be found here and there, and what has amounted almost to detective work is still being undertaken. Examples: how and where dispersed drawings have been found.
Secondly there is the problem for both series of finding specialists able to identify the subject-matter. In the case of the natural history drawings, even if specialists are found, the marrying of scientific and art historical expertise presents a challenge. Communication between the two disciplines can be difficult because both the descriptive language and way of looking at material are very different. (In the catalogue of ornithological drawings, the problems are fortunately less than is normally the case!)
The matter of identification is not always straightforward. Examples: the fossil wood corpus; a puzzling ‘experimental study’; sponges, corals or fungi; extinct, invented or real birds. A further dimension of expertise is needed in the interpretation of the subject. Questions need to be asked such as: how accurate are the drawings done ‘from the life’; is there evidence of a taxonomic or classificatory order; what contribution is made by the discorsi or accounts written to accompany some of the drawings? Examples from the birds: anatomy of the barn owl ear; syrinx of the white pelican; from the plants: use of the microscope.
Not all the Paper Museum drawings were drawn directly from nature or from the objects themselves. Some were derived from other images, such as other sets of drawings or manuscripts or from illustrations in books. Part of the reconstruction process therefore involves identification of sources, sometimes leading to connections with other unidentified or unpublished groups of drawings. Examples from the birds: Jacopo Ligozzi’s paradise whydah, versions done for the Medici Grand Duke and for Aldrovandi and manuscript copies in Bologna and Natural History Museum, London; Giovanni da Udine: drawings for, or copies from fresco schemes and versions in the Uffizi, Paper Museum and Chatsworth. This leads on to more art historical problem of identifying artists. Example: Giovanna Garzoni, artist of fruit, fishes, and perhaps birds?
Another task concerns examining the influence of the Paper Museum images on later natural history illustration. Unlike Aldrovandi’s comparable collection, much of which was published as woodcuts in books during and after his lifetime, the fact that the greater part of Cassiano’s collection was never published meant the majority of the images remained unknown to later natural history illustrators. Exceptions were the drawings of citrus fruit, published in Ferrari’s Hesperides (1646) and the group of drawings of birds that formed the models for the etched plates in Olina’s Uccelliera or Aviary (1622). By contrast these images had a significant influence on later botanical and ornithological illustration. Examples: Olina’s plates being used in publications from Jonston’s Historia Naturalis de Avibus (1650) and Ray and Willughby’s Ornithologia (1676) to Buc’hoz, Le Traité des Oiseaux de Volière (1774); Linnaeus also using Olina, especially for those birds not seen in Sweden. Such examples suggest that, had more of the Paper Museum images been accessible through publications, the course of later 17th and 18th-century natural history illustration might have been different.
Various tasks remain in the recreation of this collection with which the speakers would like to invite collaboration: help with identifications; looking out for dispersed drawings; ideas re marketing the books and possible sources of funding. Copies of the published volumes, prospectuses, and profiles of future volumes will be available at the conference.
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Passion for Plants: botanical illustration by women artists
Keywords: botanical illustration - women - biographies - history - nineteenth century
This poster examines the contribution that women artists have made to the field of botanical illustration. The narrative is illustrated by reference to the lives of artists such as Jane Loudon, Sarah Drake and Maria Sibylla Merian, ranging from the seventeenth century to the present day. The motives of these women are considered and could include financial necessity, scientific curiosity or to allay boredom. The poster also examines the social restrictions and prejudice that many of these women had to overcome. The main emphasis is on women whose work can be found in the collection of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales
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Drawings of the La Specola wax models in Florence
The La Specola collection of wax models from the 1700’s includes a series of tempera color drawings done by various artists at the same time the waxes were produced.
The majority of the drawings, about 800 in all, are of human anatomy with a few of comparative animal anatomies. These illustrations, each accompanied by explanatory sheets, were conceived as a teaching aid to the waxes themselves.
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Dipartimento di Biologia Animale e Genetica “Leo Pardi” dell’Università di Firenze,
Checklist of the mammals portrayed in the “Grotta degli Animali” of the Villa of Castello, Florence (Italy): a Medici stone menagerie.
The “Grotta degli Animali” of the Medici Villa of Castello, Florence (Italy) is a typical invention of Florentine Mannerism applied to landscape gardening., and it is a place which was at once both artificial and natural. This grotto houses a fabulous range of life-size mammals in polychrome marble created by Cosimo Fancelli around 1555, possibly on a model by Baccio Bandinelli. On high, perched among the rocks, were several Giambologna’s bronze statues of birds, cast shortly after 1567. This paper attempts, for the first time, to give a correct taxonomic attribution to the mammalian species which have been portrayed within, bearing in mind however the possible influence of a precedent and persistent iconographic tradition, as well as the probable inspiration from mythological and legendary sources,
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H.M.J.Underhill,1855-1920,Antiquarian and Grocer, ‘Notes and Captures’,Oxford 1870-1880;drawings and watercolours from his natural history notebooks’
The focus of my research is on the formal and informal links between amateur and professionals and the contributions they made to the development of the study of British prehistory during the mid to late the nineteenth century. Their interests at this time were eclectic; many studied both natural history and archaeology during the same expeditions.
Using the City and University of Oxford as a case study and valuable archaeological site for archives, I shall investigate the formation and membership of local ‘scientific’ societies. I am investigating the buried archives of British Local History Societies and examining unpublished sketchbooks, field notes diaries and letters. The thread I follow through this research is my case study H.M.J.Underhill (1855-1920), ‘antiquarian and grocer’ (N.R.A.)
Underhill was a significant contributor in Oxford to natural history and local intellectual societies. He was a talented artist, trained as a schoolboy by the Victorian painter William Riviere, father of the more well-known, Briton, an ‘animalier’. Underhill came from an old Oxford family of liberal dissenters which may explain why he did not attend the University in Oxford (which did not admit non-Anglicans until the late 1870’s) and spent his life running the family shop. ‘Suppliers of High Quality Provisions to the Gentlemen of the University’. (Local handbill, 1887)
Underhill’s early work was in microscopy; I have located his sketchbooks and field notes which indicate that from the age of 16 he was producing the most exquisite and accurate watercolours of ‘spiders’ eyes,’ butterfly wings and microscopic pond life. The value and accuracy of these have recently been validated by George McGavin, Curator of Entomology at Oxford University Museum of Natural History. He was a reader and contributor to ‘Hardwicke’s Science Gossip’ from the 1870’s.
Between 1880-1897 whilst an active member of The Ashmolean Natural History Society, Underhill created over 600 hand-painted coloured lantern slides. In the field of natural history, archaeology and folktales.
At present, I am working on where and when he delivered his lectures. To local Natural History Societies and those further afield. An examination of the extent of Underhill’s work provides a microcosm of the world of an amateur and autodidact who circulated within the milieu of growing academic professionalism during the late 19t.h century. I have been fortunate to locate much of his work, which I am discussing in my Ph.D.and I subsequently plan to publish a biography and catalogue of his achievements.
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“Der Naturselbstdruck” (a special kind of nature printing) –a Viennese invention
The director of the “Vereinigten Naturalien Cabinete” in Vienna, Carl Anton Ritter von Schreibers (1775-1852), published 1820 the first inorganic nature print in “Beyträge zur Geschichte und Kenntniß meteorischer Stein-und Metalmassen; und der Erscheinungen, welche deren Niederfallen zu begleiten pflegen” - the “Meteordruck” an impression of an iron meteor.
In the mid 19th century, the director of the “k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei” Alois Auer Ritter von Welsbach (1813-1869) and his collaborators invented a form of nature printing he called “Naturselbstdruck” which was done by pressing (extremely high pressure) the object (animals, plants, fossils,etc..) between a lead plate and a copper plate, leaving an impression of the object in lead. Not unlike the copper engraving, different colors were applied to the embossed lead plate. Since the lead imprint was too soft for frequent use, it was often transferred by stereotype or electrotype to a copper plate.
Auer believed that costly herbaria will soon find their end, because plants in book-form would be cheaper and available for everyone. But Auer was mistaken the books, featuring thousands of “ Naturselbstdrucke”, he published together with Constantin von Ettinghausen (1826-1897) and Alois Pokorny (1826-1886), proofed to be so extremely expensive and difficult to make that it drove the “k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei” nearly into bankruptcy.
Hundreds of “Naturselbstdrucke” in Sepia as well as in color can be found in the Department Archive and history of science at Natural history museum in Vienna
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Rare ichthyological images from prehistory. A poster illustrating and discussing the species depicted in cave art,
Art from the Palaeolithic period of prehistory can be between 10,000 and 40,000 or more years old. Images of fish from this period are rare. Current references to the species represented usually quote salmon or trout. For the first time, this poster paper attempts to show that other species are, in fact, being depicted, rather than salmon or trout.
Keywords: Palaeolithic, art, fish, species identification
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Illustrations for Scopoli’s Deliciae: drawings for an exacting author.
In 1785 the Italian naturalist Giovanni Antonio Scopoli, professor of Botany and Chemistry at the University of Pavia, started an ambitious program: the description and illustration of plants, animals and minerals found in Insubria, the historical area of North Italy comprised between Lake Maggiore and Lake Garda. The book, originally intended as a periodical publication, was subsidized by various subscribers, to whom the engraved plates were dedicated.
Several painters and engravers were employed with various results, but unfortunately the publication was left unfinished after the third issue appeared, due to the death of Scopoli in 1788.
Thanks to written documents (marginal notes, letters and pamphlets), we are able to know how meticulous and exacting Scopoli was as an author, especially criticizing the way his artists had poorly rendered the scientific details of the painted subjects.
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