Full Description
The Dutch painter and naturalist Otto Marseus van Schrieck (c. 1619/20-1678) became famous for an unusual iconography that mixed characteristics of landscape, animal painting, natural history illustration, and still life: the sottobosco paintings. These artworks, which he developed during his voyage to Italy around 1650, represent reptiles, amphibians, and insects in dark forests. To increase the realistic representations of butterflies and moths, he pressed the wings of dead specimens onto the paintings to transfer their original colours. The technique of printing butterfly wings, named lepidochromy in this book, was already being used in the sixteenth century and has been documented as a means of conserving and classifying lepidopterans from the eighteenth through twentieth century.
With a strong focus on the techniques and materials involved in making butterfly imprints, this book introduces readers for the first time to the development, uses, and meanings of lepidochromy in the oeuvre of Otto Marseus van Schrieck at the crossroads of art and natural history.
Contents
Acknowledgements, Introduction, Restoring Lost Knowledge, State of Research, Theoretical Framework, An Interdisciplinary Methodology, Corpus of Objects, Outline, Part I The Lepidochromy Technique 1.Seeing and Making Lepidochromes 1.1 Lepidochromes in Oil Painting: What to Look at and What to See 1.2 The Lepidochromy Recipes: Printing Butterfly Wings on Paper 1.3 The Lepidochromy Technique in Oil Painting 2.The Terminologies and Inheritance of Lepidochromy 2.1 Naming the Lepidochromes 2.2 The Legacy of Other Techniques Part II Otto Marseus van Schrieck and the Lepidochromy Technique in Early Modern Art Theories and Natural History 3.The Relationship between Lepidochromy in the Sottoboschi and Seventeenth-Century Art Theories 3.1 The Meanings of Painting Butterflies 3.2 Representing Nature after and with Life 3.3 Transcending the musca depicta 4.The Relationships between Lepidochromy in the Sottoboschi and Seventeenth-Century Natural History 4.1 Empirical Research and Seventeenth-Century Knowledge about Insects 4.2 Preserving Decaying Materials in Collections 4.3 Lepidochromes as Images Made naer het leven, Conclusion, Directions for Future Research, Annex I: Transcriptions of the Lepidochromy Recipes, Recipe 1: Anonymous 1731 Recipe 2: Barrow 1735 Recipe 3: Edwards 1747 Recipe 4: Edwards and Durand 1748 Recipe 5: Edwards and Seligmann 1755 Recipe 6: Von Arndt 1777 Recipe 7: Rozier 1777 Recipe 8: Ernst and Engramelle 1779 Recipe 9: Köster 1793 Recipe 10: Latreille 1804 Recipe 11: Naumann 1815 Recipe 12: Godart 1821 Recipe 13: Suckow 1830 Recipe 14: Landbeck 1843 Recipe 15: Mühlecker 1845 Recipe 16: Zirkler 1847 Recipe 17: Naumann 1848 Recipe 18: Castillon 1858 Recipe 19: Berge 1863 Recipe 20: Poulin 1876 Recipe 21: Anonymous 1876 Recipe 22: Depuiset 1877 Recipe 23: Burée 1878 Recipe 24: A.M.C. 1879 Recipe 25: Milani and Garbini 1885 Recipe 26: Anonymous 1887 Recipe 27: Anonymous 1889 Recipe 28: Poulin 1899 Recipe 29: Maindron 1903 Recipe 30: Burgos 1918 Recipe 31: Samson 1935 QR-Code for Online Materials: Annexes I, II and III, Bibliography, Primary Sources, Secondary Sources, Plates (colour), Index.
