|
Article Excerpt
When I began teaching an introductory course on the biology of marine organisms for marine-science majors, it was with the conviction that these first-year students must be exposed not only to the scientific core of their discipline, but also to its relationship to the broader liberal arts and how these in turn have viewed the oceans and marine life. Such used to be the norm. For example, in 1872 John Ruskin, while the professor of fine art at Oxford University, viewed it as his responsibility to provide an appreciation of art to those who did not intend to practice it, as part of a liberal education that included the sciences. (1) But a mid-twentieth-century editorial, "Education for Science" in Endeavour, indicated how the growth and specialization of science, together with the increasing expense of higher education, already had dimmed this vision since the Victorian era: " A return by modern men of science to the more liberal training and outlook of former days might be to their advantage, and the advantage of their work." (2)
Undergraduate students majoring in marine science at my university must take courses in molecular and cellular biology, ecology, chemistry, physics, calculus, statistics, and environmental policy as well as in marine biology, geology, and oceanography. This leaves them less time to explore the humanities in depth, beyond the shallows of their general education requirements. They are not alone in their educational shoaling, for students majoring in the humanities scarcely plumb the sciences--only two courses are required of them here. This minimum has had unforeseen consequences. According to Guy Davenport, "Ignorance of natural history has become an aesthetic problem in reading the arts." (3) The respective neglect of each of these broad disciplines by students of the other comes despite the fact that the oceans are replete with literary, musical, and artistic allusion, and marine zoology in particular has a rich history, being at one time the most philosophical of the sciences. (4) My goal for this introductory course, then is to put marine biology into its wider aesthetic and historical context, using this material to reinforce various marine-biological facts and concepts by associating them with memorable visual images or literary or musical passages. (5) Providing an unanticipated artistic experience might stimulate both groups of students to explore these uncharted waters on their own, guided by what Prince Albert I of Monaco, an oceanographer and navigator, recognized as " the two directive forces of civilization: Art and Science." (6)
The marine scientist, artist, and curator Maurizio Wurtz quotes Leonardo da Vinci: "Painters don't imitate nature by copying the visible, but thanks to their understanding and analysis of the structure of the body, express it to the point of capturing the invisible breath of life." (7) This statement captures the duality of the quest for understanding the natural world, a theme most succinctly stated by Davenport: "The vision by which we discover the hidden in nature is sometimes called science, sometimes art." (8) Therefore, by considering the works of marine biologists who are also artists, and of artists whose work draws on their direct and sympathetic experience with marine life, the students might come to see that these are not disparate pursuits.
Because my introduction of students to the panoply of marine life is first of all a biology course, the lecture topics are arranged phylogenetically--according to the evolutionary relatedness of organisms--not chronologically or conceptually. Biological illustration is an obvious source of images, but I try to draw as often from fine-arts portrayals of the organisms to provide that unexpected artistic moment. Where possible I include literary and musical references, but the imagery is necessarily often asynchronous and disparate: corals and coral reefs, for example, are evoked by a first-century pharmacopeia by Dioscorides, a sixteenth-century allegorical painting by Jacopo Zucchi, a seventeenth-century play by William Shakespeare, a sensitive eighteenth-century description in Matthew Flinders's logbook, a nineteenth-century orchestral song by Edward Elgar, a twentieth-century plein air sketch by Henri Matisse, and a twenty first-century collectively crocheted construction. preparing lecture materials benefits from a familiarity with the history of biological illustration and the visual culture of science, but I do not treat these in my introductory science course or this essay; the extant literature is voluminous. This essay, restricted to visual art, proceeds largely chronologically, occasionally with relevant taxonomic digressions.
* * *
Although like many elements of science it dates to Aristotle, and images of marine organisms extend back even further, into prehistory, modern marine biology has its underpinnings in the Enlightenment, when Europeans began the scientific study and classification of organisms. Natural history became an accepted branch of natural philosophy, with the goal, for some, of understanding everything about individual species. Following the popularity of seventeenth-century illustrations "drawn from nature," naturalist-illustrators originally sought to explain and communicate information about form and relationships. (9) Scientific drawings, woodcuts, and engravings eventually achieved a sophistication of expression that long remained superior to photography for simultaneously conveying macroscopic form and minute detail, typically in monochrome, where the goal was less aesthetic than didactic. This was especially so because the illustrations were tied to text. The application of naturalistic color beginning in the mid-eighteenth century as a "union of laboratory science with aesthetic experimentation" arguably added an aesthetic dimension, but the goal of imparting this chromatic information remained primarily instructive, as part of a wider Enlightenment educational emphasis on "[s]tocking the imagination with countless images." (10) Wide dissemination of the intrinsic beauty of marine organisms took off in the early nineteenth century when advances in the techniques of color printing allowed the inclusion of chromolithographs in not only scientific but also popular books, and was heightened during the Victorian era that saw an unprecedented involvement in amateur science by laypersons. Such popularization reached its zenith with Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen de Natur (Art Forms in Nature), which was seriously published between 1899 and 1904 and in reprinting remains a rich repository of images for a course in marine biology. (11) Many of Haeckel's images, if not their source, are familiar to students and pervade popular culture.
Philosophers, artists, writers, and the general public followed naturalists down to the strand and beyond as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, when the sea and its inhabitants (for centuries shunned as monstrous aberrations such as Leviathan, the Kraken, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "thousand thousand slimy things") increasingly became objects of popular fascination and scientific study. Such inquiry inspired artists and engendered romantic and philosophical meditation; Goethe, for instance, writes of spending an enjoyable afternoon at Venice observing littoral invertebrates. (12) This newfound nineteenth-century interest in marine invertebrates sprang from speculations about the transmutation of species (evolution), pointing to these "lower animals" as crucial to understanding the origin of so-called higher animals, such as humans. (13)
The wild diversity of invertebrate body forms often defied biological classification, and detailed illustration followed close observation. Naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often were competent illustrators and even sensitive artists. In 1823, Anna Atkins illustrated her father's translation of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's conchology, General of Shells, with a series of exquisite pencil drawings, each appearing stark and alone on its page or with another view of the same specimen, unembellished by environmental context, in the emerging norm of taxonomic illustration. The drawings were faithfully mimetic, as demanded by the times for their purpose, but they hinted of the artist's aesthetic sensibility that would go beyond the "simple description" of biological subjects. (14)
This sensibility was manifested twenty years later in Atkins's volumes of cyanotypes--"photogenic drawings"--of marine macroalgae (seaweeds). These were made using the process invented by a family friend and neighbor, Sir John Herschel, in which the subject was placed on paper that had been photosensitized with ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, yielding a negative image on a Prussian-blue field when exposed to sunlight. Thus the artfully...
|
