Banane (1719)
Banane (1719)
Banane (1719)
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- upright 1.32 : 1
First Look
江馆清秋，晨起看竹，烟光日影露气，皆浮动于疏枝密叶之间。
—— 清·郑板桥《题画竹》
On an autumn morning at the river lodge I looked at the bamboo: mist, sunlight, dew, all drifting among the sparse and dense leaves.
The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles in the upper half. Let the plant stand before you look for detail. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find where the orange is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch. The pose leans right: the upper half carries 13 points further right than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 21.3% of the sheet, foliage 13.2%, the cast red with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Tropical plants defy temperate habits: heavy, saturated flowers with strong scent, leathery or dissected leaves, stems that climb, swell, or reduce to spines. Filed under orange — an amber orange, built in washes from a pale ground. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
Composition
The sheet is tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 39% of the sheet, centred near the centre — the herbarium way, drawn to be read whole.
Line and Colour
Eighteenth-century plates are mostly copper engraving: hatched lines for shadow, then hand-colouring by another hand. 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
海客谈瀛洲，烟涛微茫信难求。
—— 唐·李白《梦游天姥吟留别》
Seafarers talk of Yingzhou, lost in mist and waves, truly hard to find.
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the orange the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
In China these plants carry no classical symbolism; their meaning is newness — new worlds, new species, new trade routes. They show natural history's expanding edge. This plate leans orange, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
Season and Place
The tropics have no four seasons, only wet and dry. Central and South America, Southeast Asia, India, Ceylon. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists either sailed with the ships or drew from living specimens under glass. The year 1719 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Read the locality and the flowering season both with a discount: one is hearsay, the other a ten-day peak.
The Book and the Hand
“Dissertatio de generatione et metamorphosibus insectorum Surinamensium” carries only Maria Sibylla Merian'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
Carry three rules away: whole before detail; line before colour; picture before book. The flower of that year is dust, yet its image on paper has outlived every living cousin.
About this plate
Banane (1719) is plate 49, from Dissertatio de generatione et metamorphosibus insectorum Surinamensium, drawn by Maria Sibylla Merian. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Amstelaedami, Apud Joannem Oosterwyk, 1719.
