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Science and Image
Nature 396, 223 (19 November 1998) | doi:10.1038/24287
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Merian's metamorphoses
Martin Kemp1
Abstract
Nurtured from an early age in the art of still-life painting and naturalistic illustration, the courageous seventeenth-century artist Maria Sibylla Merian allied her vision and her skills to convey the complex life-cycles of insects.
For a 52-year-old painter who specialized in illustrating plants and insects to make a self-financed voyage to Surinam in 1699 to document the metamorphosis of exotic butterflies and moths is remarkable enough. For a woman, accompanied only by her 21-year-old daughter, it represents one of the most heroic acts in the history of the natural sciences.
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