Twee tulpen met plant uit de kruisbloemenfamilie La Sesarea Tulpa Aurora (1637)
木兰纲
Twee tulpen met plant uit de kruisbloemenfamilie La Sesarea Tulpa Aurora (1637)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- square 0.79 : 1
First Look
凡画山水，意在笔先。
—— 唐·王维《山水论》
In painting, the intention precedes the brush.
Nearly square: all four corners carry something. See how they are placed. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there. The pose leans left: the upper half carries 9 points further left than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. The Chinese name 木兰纲 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 7.0% of the sheet, foliage 2.1%, the cast red with a second note of yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Insect plates show the host plant and all four stages at once — egg, larva, pupa, adult — with wing venation, scales and antennal segments accounted for: the most technical branch of natural-history art.No colour group is recorded. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
Composition
The sheet is square. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 16% of the sheet, centred near the centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
Before 1700 most botanical figures came from woodcut: thick, hard lines in relief, colour brushed on afterwards. There is evidence on the back too: the plate mark pressed into the paper, the slight relief of the pigment, lines worn shallow in a later printing. If you mean to copy it: take its skeleton, its margins and the order of its colours; the burin's hatching is the language of copper — suggest it with pencil density, do not imitate it stroke for stroke.
Poetic Resonance
飞蝶鸣鸠俱得意，东风应笑我闲愁。
—— 宋·陆游《二月四日作》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the bird itself becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
In China the butterfly is dream and lovers, the cicada purity, the firefly a lamp for reading; in Europe the insect began as specimen before it became symbol. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
Season and Place
Set by life stage: butterflies in spring and summer, moths into autumn, beetles from May to July. Four stages on one sheet span a whole year. Merian's Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) first showed insect stages with their host plants — the result of raising caterpillars in the Surinam forest with her daughters. The year 1613 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The bud and the ripe fruit on one branch tell the season; the name in the title often tells the journey.
The Book and the Hand
“Jacob Marrel” carries only Jacob Marrel's name. From drawing to plate the sheet passed through several hands — the engraver aimed at accuracy, the colourist at speed, and between them lies each plate's unevenness.
What to Take Away
If you keep one line, keep Guo Xi's: from afar its momentum, up close its texture. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1613.
About this plate
Twee tulpen met plant uit de kruisbloemenfamilie La Sesarea Tulpa Aurora (1637) is plate 84, from Jacob Marrel, drawn by Jacob Marrel. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: German, 1613-1681.
