A quick note for the weekend. The Vatican Observatory has posted a brief book review of a children’s book about Maria Sibylla Merian, The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science by Joyce Sidman (HMH Books for Young Readers; Illustrated edition, 2018). Unfortunately, it contains two sentences that awoke the HISTSCI_HULK from his summer slumbers:
An artist at a time when women weren’t allowed to be.
A scientist before there were scientists.
Although in a minority, women were very much allowed to be artists, most of them were, like Merian, daughters of professional artists. Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) was part of the part of the Swiss/German Merian family of engravers and artists. She was a daughter of the engraver and printer-publisher Matthäus Merian der Ältere (1593–1650) and was trained to paint by her stepfather Jacob Marrel (1613–1681) a professional still life painter.
Portrait of Maria Sibylla Merian by her stepfather Jacob Marrel, 1679 Source: Wikimedia commons Her husband was another of Marrel’s apprentices, Johann Andreas Graff (1637–1701). She was by no means the only female artist in that period. There were, for example, the Dutch painters Margaretha de Heer (1603–1665), and Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), daughter of the botanist and anatomist, Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731).
Merian was not a scientist, the term would be anachronistic if applied to her, but she was a acknowledged natural historian and they had been around since antiquity.