Insectopedia (20 page)

Yet these were complex impulses. While Moffett, Hoefnagel, and Aldrovandi were extending the reach of piety to insects, they were also developing an observational practice that, as the art historian Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann writes, was leading to “the investigation of matter and of the processes of the natural world considered
as ends in themselves.
”
⁸
And Hoefnagel was also perfecting a complementary painting practice, which would establish him as a crucial figure in the development of the secular still life. Like others in his circle of Netherlandish humanists, Hoefnagel appears to have embraced Neostoicism, political
moderation, and confessional indifference, making a self-conscious stand against intolerance at a time of the religious violence that saw his home city of Antwerp sacked by Spanish soldiers, his merchant family dispersed, and he himself consigned to a peripatetic future that would lead to Munich, Frankfurt, Prague, and finally Venice.

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine Hoefnagel in modern terms as a secular scientific illustrator. His work was governed by an ethic that drew deeply on the religious, albeit one motivated by an ecumenical striving for a peaceful resolution of the post-Reformation divisions in the Christian church.
⁹
Indeed, Hoefnagel provided most of his paintings in
The Four Elements
with biblical aphorisms lauding divine providence and design. However, this piety is also not easily translated into present-day terms. Firm distinctions among sacred, secular, and what might now count as the domain of the occult were by no means settled.
¹⁰
These were critical decades in the formation of modern modes of investigation, yet they were also decades in which esoteric traditions flourished among European intellectuals and in which revelation of the deep systematic ordering of the world was a guiding principle of natural philosophy and the arts it generated. Early-modern scholars deployed occult experiment, numerology, the symbolics of emblems, and a broad range of other forms of magic to close the gap between “the observation of appearance and the intuition of an underlying reality” and thus make nature’s secrets visible.
¹¹

The difference of insects—so small, so alien in appearance, so prodigious in their reproductive capacities—was profound and troubling. It placed them as simultaneously natural, that is, unexceptional and God-given,
and
on the borders of the inexplicable. Perhaps this paradoxical nature helps explain why insects became such popular objects of inquiry at this time, and perhaps it also explains why studies of them in this period reveal so many of the tensions present in natural philosophical practice. Consider, for example, Francis Bacon’s deeply Aristotelian account of “vivification”—reproduction—in
Sylva sylvarum
(1627), the collection of natural history observations on which he was working at the time of his death. Bacon, widely—if perhaps too easily—regarded as the founder of empirical philosophy, devotes much of the seventh section of his book to insects, “
Creatures bred of
Putrefaction,” because, as he
says, echoing Moffett, “the
Nature
of
Things
is commonly better perceived, in small, than in Great.”

The “
Contemplation …
[of insects] hath many
Excellent Fruits
,” writes Bacon:

He has little interest in insects in themselves. Their value lies in what they reveal about higher creatures. Even in this short passage, his detachment from the object of study is radically at odds with Hoefnagel’s intimacy. Yet the tension that insects manifest between difference and sameness in their status as microcosms of nature writ large allows Bacon to generalize as to the character of fundamental physiological processes common to all beings. This willingness to take insects seriously as objects of study while reinforcing their pejorative association with waste and imperfection (in the Aristotelian sense of spontaneous generation) indicates the obstacles faced by Moffett, Hoefnagel, and their insect-loving colleagues. The struggle would continue right through the eighteenth century, dogging the first generations of professional entomologists, Enlightenment savants such as Jan Swammerdam and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, who, despite their scientific eminence, faced ridicule for the disproportion between the status of their scholarly attention and that of its humble object.
¹³

Moffett’s strategy in these circumstances was the appeal to wonder through facticity, the heaping of fact upon fact, anecdote upon anecdote, observation upon observation, example upon example, impressing through the weight of evidence, understanding that the empirical was the source of the wondrous rather than, as Bacon might have preferred, its antidote. Again and again, in language of striking everydayness, Moffett expresses his astonishment at the marvels of the insect world. In a characteristic moment (and just before advising the use of a hand lens), he makes what must have seemed an incredible assertion, at least to those unfamiliar with Pliny, and he does so through a vocabulary of
homespun analogy that emphasizes that the ubiquity of his subjects is also part of their miraculousness. “Thou shalt finde in the body of Bees,” he writes with obvious excitement, “a little bottle which is the receptacle of Honey sucked from flowers, and their legs loaded with Bitumen which sticks fast to make wax.”
¹⁴

Like Moffett’s, Hoefnagel’s insects are at one and the same time familiar and unprecedented. The more time I spend with
Ignis
, the clearer it becomes that he focused all his substantial powers on turning these creatures into beings that are, quite literally, wonderful. Under his hand, beetles, moths, crickets, ants, butterflies, dragonflies, a mosquito, three mosquito hawks, a rather hairy black caterpillar, a ladybug, many bees, numerous spiders (of varying size and appearance), and even some wood lice are transformed into subjects and agents of the late-Renaissance capacity for wonder, a very particular emotional sense, a “cognitive passion” in which feeling and knowing were combined and cultivated.
¹⁵
This sixteenth-century wonder was a type of faculty, the possession of which was itself the mark of the cultivated person.

The historians Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park have described wonders—that is, the objects that provoked the response of wonder—as “the aristocracy of natural phenomena.” The identification and collection of wondrous objects in cabinets of curiosity were central to the self-definition of the European cultural elite.
¹⁶
Within a few decades, objects once wondrous would become vulgar and undesirable, too gaudy and too unreliably emotional to satisfy the rising imperatives of rational discrimination.
¹⁷
But in Hoefnagel’s day, people sought out wonders in objects of all kinds that tied the transcendent to the earthly, and they found them as readily in nature as in those exceptional human-made imitations (like Hoefnagel’s insects) that revealed the bonds between people and the natural world with which they were so deeply entwined. Through the incitement of wonder, wondrous objects led to philosophical reflection and from there to true knowledge, a point that could be underlined by direct citation from Aristotle.
¹⁸

At first, Hoefnagel’s images tugged at me with what I took to be their tenderness, so sensitively wrought, so decorative. But once I recovered from my gasp as the page fell open, I began to wonder—in that rather disconnected, secular, modern way—if that response wasn’t merely a
product of my schooling in the contemporary aesthetics of biodiversity and its associated ethic of conservation and protection. Hoefnagel, I began to recognize, was doing something else. He was demanding that I not only see, look at, and observe the insects but that I do so with entirely new eyes, that I meet difference and dwell in it, that I discover grounds for empathy in the encounter with these beings’ biological and social marginality. I began to understand that he wanted me eye to eye with these insects, as close as could be, in direct and transformative confrontation.

As its title makes clear,
The Four Elements
presents the animals of the world in four groups. Each group is in its own volume, each is tied to its particular element, and each element is filled with symbolic meaning. Hoefnagel grounds the quadrupeds and reptiles on earth, submerges the fish and mollusks in water, frees the birds and amphibians to the air, and from the outset
—Ignis
is the first volume—signals his intention to surprise by associating fire,
ignis
, not with the salamander (which was believed to pass through flames unscathed) but with the “
animalia rationalia et insecta
,” a new category all his own that brings insects together with human prodigies, two forms of the marginal and marvelous.

Though with less fidelity than Bacon, Hoefnagel, too, reached back to Aristotle for his zoology. But perhaps this is a misleading way of putting it, given how widespread was the enmeshing of early-modern European natural philosophy in Aristotelian thought.
¹⁹
Central elements of Aristotle’s biology persisted in Europe with little challenge through the mid-eighteenth century and beyond, long after the dismantling of the structural cosmology with which Aristotelianism is centrally identified. And specifically in terms of emerging entomology, it would be impossible to overestimate the significance of the observations and taxonomies developed by Aristotle in
Historia animalium
(
History of Animals
),
De partibus animalium
(
On Parts of Animals
), and
De generatione animalium
(
On the Generation of Animals
), continued by his student Theophrastus in his work on plant-insect interactions, and collected and extended by
Pliny in book XII of
Naturalis historia
(
Natural History
). With the introduction of the taxonomic class he called the
entoma—
animals with notches or segments—Aristotle was the first to make systematic attempts to group and describe the insects.
²⁰
Prior to that, only those insects considered dangerous or useful—principally in medical terms—had figured as objects of natural historical attention.

Aristotle derived his classificatory characters from observed morphology, adding layers of differentiating features to build up the higher taxa.
²¹
Yet unlike Linnaeus, whose attention to distinguishing characteristics was rigorously morphological, Aristotle looked to the soul of the animal—that is, to its vital functions—rather than to its body, for defining characters. And although he did dichotomize on occasion—into winged and wingless insects, for example—he sought distinction on the principle of unique constellations of features rather than in binary oppositions. Moreover, his taxonomy and the entire ontology from which it derived were underwritten by the cosmological conviction that nature was motivated by a teleology embodied in an ascending hierarchy of perfection, at the terrestrial summit of which, predictably enough, was the human male. As G.E.R. Lloyd succinctly explains, the edifice presupposed a close relationship among an animal’s humoral qualities, its mode of reproduction, and its degree of perfection. “Aristotle,” Lloyd writes, “differentiates groups of animals by their faculties of sensation, their means of locomotion, their methods of reproduction. These capacities are, in his view, closely correlated with certain primary qualities, the heat, coldness, dryness and wetness of the animal. Thus the viviparous animals, the ovoviviparous ones, the two main divisions of ovipara (those that produce perfect, and those that have imperfect, eggs) and the larvae-producing animals are arranged in a descending order of ‘perfection,’ where the hotter, and wetter, the animal the more perfect it is.”
²²

Cold and dry, the
entoma
form one of the four genera of bloodless animals. Some of them are winged; all have more than four feet; all possess sight, smell, and taste; some have hearing. Most significantly, as Lloyd indicates, the
entoma
reproduce by spontaneous generation, the most imperfect of the four methods that Aristotle identifies. Houseflies, for example, arise from manure, as do fleas; lice originate in flesh; worms grow from old snow; moths come from dry and dusty wool; others emerge
from dew, mud, wood, plants, and animal hair. The examples demonstrate Aristotle’s close observation—without the benefit of lenses—and the application of a somewhat dogmatic theoretical apparatus. These little animals have sex, as he witnesses, but the offspring are always an inferior, more imperfect organism: the progeny of flies and of butterflies, for example, are tiny worms.
²³
And without evolution, there can be no improvement, no upward progress from excrement to ether. In every respect, then, Aristotle’s insects (with the exception of the highly regarded bees) are as far from perfection as is possible for animal beings.
²⁴

Ignis
was in rebellion against this Aristotelian order. Where earlier artists had focused on the most emblematic of the insects—the stag beetle, the bee, the grasshopper—or had worked local species into illuminated texts to commemorate pilgrimages, Hoefnagel used
Ignis
to revise their standing as a class.
²⁵
By granting them such prominence and cohesion and by implicitly maintaining equivalence across the group—lavishing as much attention on the pestilential mosquito and the prosaic wood louse as on the industrious bee—Hoefnagel insisted on the value of all the creatures known to him as
insecta.