The visualization of unknown animals. Aesthetics of natural history in Perrault's Description anatomique, Merian's Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium and Réaumur's History of insects

Abstract

The visualization of animals in order to categorize their position in the great chain of being was one of the primary interests of natural history in early modern times. According to contemporary opinion, the greatest challenge lay in the precise depiction of animals unknown and those not visible to the naked eye. The focus here will be on a graphic from Claude Perrault's Description anatomique of 1669, the plates and writings of Maria Sibylla Merian from around 1700 and the remarks and pictorial plates from the work of René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, published in the first half of the eighteenth century. These case studies are used to illustrate the way in which natural historians of the early modern period, in their modes of representation, employed an ‘aesthetic of epistemological interest’ in order to transmit the knowledge of animals. Picturing life in the early modern age meant making the simultaneity of various stages, actually only perceived in a temporal sequence, available at a glance. In such a way, knowledge of unknown and invisible animals was conveyed along with that of the naturalist procedures that produced this knowledge.