In which I am amazed by rare things

Sometimes works of the past can reach out across the centuries and speak directly with a timelessness and universality that their creators never dreamt they’d inspire.

Still life Old natural history drawings continue to resonate

Yesterday I attended an RSA Fellows evening at the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace. There, we were treated to a private viewing of the superb exhibition Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery, which was assembled by David Attenborough and the Royal Collection curators. (The exhibition is on until 21 September, so if you live in or near London I would highly recommend taking a look. And if you don’t, the accompanying book is lavishly illustrated and well worth the modest price.)

The exhibition was pitched to capture the excitement of enquiry at a time when so much of this planet’s flora and fauna was still unknown to civilization, and spans the 15th through 18th centuries. Many of the drawings and paintings seemed to me as lucid and vital as if they had been created only last week, glowing behind their protective glass like a portal through time and space. In some cases, the species depicted have lapsed into extinction, so the strange connection felt even more imperative.

Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches were an obvious attraction for my inner geek. The Queen owns an astonishing six hundred of his drawings, thanks to the acquisitive instincts of Royal Society founder Charles II, and a few dozen of his best were on display. That anyone could have wrought such fine details using a piece of sharpened red chalk is almost as remarkable as the state of their current preservation. I was in another universe, arrested before oak leaves and filigreed acorns bursting off the page, blackberries swelling on bramble begging to be picked, casual feline poses immediately recognizable to any cat owner. Snapshots from half a millennia ago. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond Leonardo’s shrewd inspection, a drilling down into the essence of life; he could make even the hindquarters of a horse or the dissection of a bear’s paw into a work of art.

Although Leonardo was obviously intended as the headlining act, I think for me, German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) stole the show. Fascinated with insects and spiders all her life, she went to Surinam in 1699 to document the weird and wonderful species to be found there – a remarkable feat for anyone, let alone a woman at that time. In addition to the published product of this venture, _ Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium_, she produced deluxe poster-sized watercolors on vellum of many of her compositions (one of which is pictured on the book cover in the image above). For compositions these are: not sketched as seen in the wild, but rendered as idealized tableau of plant and animals in complex and wondrous interactions. For Merian, beauty seemed to encompass death, and death, beauty. I stood entranced before caiman devouring false coral snakes, giant water bugs overpowering tree frogs, a hairy tarantula bringing down a hummingbird, all in deceptively serene Garden of Eden-style backdrops of passion flowers, water hyacinths, pomegranate trees and cassava roots.

The exhibition made me wonder what damage modern technology has done to our appreciation of nature. Of course the camera can render beauty, and remarkably well, but what the naturalists in this exhibition were trying to achieve seems far more than a precise scientific record of their subjects. Yes, they are painstakingly and anatomically correct, but the manner of their presentation – the artistic lens applied, in colors, composition and arrangement – seems to impart an emotion that even the most skilled camera operator would be unable to muster if restricted to real life. And if, like me, you respond to nature as much emotionally as scientifically, this distinction can make a big difference.