Art

Amazing Rare Things
Until Sep 28
- Critics' Choice
The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Gate, Buckingham Palace Rd, London, SW1A 1AA
Maria Sibylla Merian, 'Guava tree with ants, spiders and hummingbird'
By Ossian Ward

Posted: Tue Mar 25
You can almost hear the hushed tones of David Attenborough walking you round this exhibition: ‘And here, in the depths of the Queen’s lair, we find exhilarating examples of animal and plant species never encountered before in the history of our planet…’ If you take the audio tour of ‘Amazing Rare Things’ at the Queen’s Gallery, you will indeed be accompanied by the silky sounds of Sir David, who co-curated this fine show, which might alternatively have been titled ‘Curly, Pretty Things’, or ‘Repulsive, Bizarro Things’.

The art of natural history is usually one of sheer mimesis; an illustration bent on exactitude and scientific study. There’s no margin for error, flight of fancy or, so I thought, much interest. Botanists and green-fingered gardeners get off on this kind of thing, not me. However, the early practitioners of horticultural and anatomical drawings were prone to exaggeration and even fantasy.

Leonardo da Vinci comes first in this display and reveals a naivety in his studies of cats and lions by attempting to draw a dragon based on a feline likeness. As Attenborough points out in his catalogue essay, many wildlife scholars and talented scribes came before Leonardo, but none were inquisitive enough to dissect animals and relate them to humans. However, restricted access to fresh cadavers meant that his comparisons of a bear’s foot and a cow’s uterus to human equivalents passed into the grey area of hypothesis and guess work.

The collection of Italian nature buff Cassiano dal Pozzo comes next, featuring careful pencil exams of gems, stones, seeds and fruits that formed part of his lifelong project to ensnare every known species in a ‘Paper Museum’. While the brief aside into how Galileo’s invention of the microscope revolutionised detail in plant studies after 1624 is of some note, it’s the crazily deformed melon, broccoli and lemon that warrant real attention. Francis Bacon urged naturalists to collect ‘deviating instances, errors or monstrous objects’, and dal Pozzo was no exception, proving that seemingly rational scientific men were as guilty of promoting the freakish and the curious as an unscrupulous travelling circus. Some secret cruelty must surely explain the 1626 painting of an oddly upright three-toed sloth; whose legs would not have supported him in this way and whose teeth wouldn’t have been so comically jagged or threateningly bared.

The British botanists also ‘sexed up’ their two-dimensional herbariums or florilegiums, by posing an incongruous howler monkey or a giant lobster next to drawings of a local honeysuckle or a common or garden bunch of grapes. This was in reaction to the initial encounters with exotic specimens being introduced from the New World but such intrusions would reach surreal proportions in the compositions of Maria Sibylla Merian and Mark Catesby.

Despite having little or no flair in her draughtsmanship, the German illustrator and entomologist Merian brought back compelling visions of giant butterflies, spiders and boa constrictors from her travels in Indonesia and the Indias. Caterpillars morph and change on the same sheet and food chains play themselves out as gruesomely as in any filmed footage from nature shock-docs. While spiders don’t really kill hummingbirds and leafcutter ants don’t attack other insects as Merian’s decidedly creepy crawlies do, there’s an underlying Darwinian survival of the fittest and overtones of the Garden of Eden to enjoy, instead of boring old verisimilitude.

Catesby’s unique trick was in superimposing his creatures on sprays of plant backgrounds. Science drops away while contemplating his bull bison caught in a hastily drawn twig and the head of a flamingo framed by an underwater coral branch. Far from simply pointing out their flaws, these digressions from the natural order made these illustrators into fine artists, each one of them replicating the popular myths of their day and continuing the searching drive of Leonardo in their own ways.

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1 comment

Posted by JOHNNY BONKERS on 02 Jul 2008 15:22
" LEAVE WAR IN HISTORY, AND KNIVES IN BREAD. " jb 2/7/08

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Details
The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Gate, Buckingham Palace Rd, London, SW1A 1AA
, UK

Geo: 51.501010, -0.141563
020 7766 7301
Category: Art museums & institutions
Times: Daily 10am-5.30pm, last admission 4.30pm. Entry by timed ticket
Tube: Victoria