Darwin (#8) tied a wire to a leaf and marked its tip on glass at intervals, so the dots drew the movement. Hooke (#5) drew what only a lens could show.
Do Darwin's rig on a windowsill: a pane of glass, a fixed mark, a thread on a seedling leaf. Mark its position every hour for a day, join the dots, and draw the leaf beside the trace. Which tells you more, the leaf or the line?
By Raz Rotenberg, made with AI
Merian's plates (#1) were books, but the Royal Collection holds luxury sheets of them on vellum, like "Ripe Pineapple with Dido Longwing Butterfly" (item #58). The Trust's note says she inked parts of her etched plate and pressed vellum against it while wet, so mostly the insects transferred, and the rest was painted by hand, probably with her daughters' help. Because she moved the butterflies between copies, no two sheets share a composition. …
Georg Dionysius Ehret's "Characters of flowers" (#50, V&A) is a sheet 55 cm tall that does two jobs at once: dissected flower parts, each with its note beside it, and in one corner a pair of drawn pages that overlap as if pinned there, carrying the whole plant. Ehret drew it, etched it and published it himself. …
Elizabeth Blackwell (#31, via Nicky Monroe at the RHS Lindley Library) drew each plant for A Curious Herbal from live specimens in the Apothecaries' Garden, and put several views and growth stages of it into a single picture. Merian's plate (#1) does the same with a plant and an insect's life cycle: the stages sit side by side though they happened weeks apart. …
Made with OpenCurate.