Zeester (Asteroidea) Zee Sterre Stella Marina Etoile de Mer (1596-1610)
Ten ways of seeing
- upright 1.57 : 1
First Look
夫象物必在于形似，形似须全其骨气。
—— 唐·张彦远《历代名画记》
Likeness is the threshold; bone-and-breath is the point.
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 the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there.
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
Chrysanthemums are herbaceous with deeply lobed, downy leaves. Each 'flower' is a head — ray florets around the rim, disc florets in the centre, hundreds of small flowers in one.No colour group is recorded. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
Composition
Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. Old plates set the plant slightly off centre, with unequal margins — that small imbalance is what keeps it alive.
Line and Colour
Before 1700 most botanical figures came from woodcut: thick, hard lines in relief, colour brushed on afterwards. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions. 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
霜林落后山争出，野菊开时酒正浓。
—— 宋·欧阳修《怀嵩楼新开南轩与郡僚小饮》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
In China, seclusion and long life — and, after Tao Yuanming, the will to go home; in Japan, imperial authority. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
Season and Place
Deep autumn, around the Double Ninth in the ninth month — after the first frost, when everything else is gone. Native to China, adopted in Japan as the imperial crest, carried to Europe by the Dutch in the seventeenth century and remade by Victorian breeders. The year 1596 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
“Historia Naturalis van Rudolf” carries only Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt'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.
