Twee tulpen met schelp, vlinder, spin en lieveheersbeestje (1637)
木兰纲
Twee tulpen met schelp, vlinder, spin en lieveheersbeestje (1637)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- square 0.80 : 1
First Look
六法者何？一、气韵生动是也；二、骨法用笔是也；三、应物象形是也；四、随类赋彩是也；五、经营位置是也；六、传移模写是也。
—— 南齐·谢赫《古画品录》
The six laws: spirit resonance alive; bone-method in the brush; matching form; colour by kind; planning the placing; copying the masters.
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 11 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 4.6% of the sheet, foliage 5.6%, the cast red with a second note of crimson. 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 18% of the sheet, centred below 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. Decide first whether it was printed or painted; only then discuss whether it is beautiful. 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
遗令奉君王，嚬蛾强一妆。
—— 唐·刘方平《铜雀妓》
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. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
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. A plate is collective work: drawer, engraver and colourist were different hands, and the unnamed ones decided how good it looks.
What to Take Away
If you keep one line, keep Guo Xi's: from afar its momentum, up close its texture. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1613 gave a whole day to a single flower.
About this plate
Twee tulpen met schelp, vlinder, spin en lieveheersbeestje (1637) is plate 21, 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.
