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- Born
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Date: 30 Mar 1705
- Died
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Date: 27 Mar 1759
[add to 'influenced by Merian':
(Ogilvie:) 'Rösel... completed his education in the Nuremberg Academy. By the end of his studies he was well aware of debates about the nature of art, the active imitation of nature by the artist, and the effects of art on its audience [that were current at the time], and he must have considered those debates as he organized the Insect Entertainment.
The results of his reflection can be seen in the divergence between Rösel and his immediate inspiration, Merian's work on Suriname. Both artists intended their engravings to be studied along with the accompanying text, and they understood that their readers would move actively between word and image. But they made different choices about the proper balance between the two. Merian chose a format without too much text. As she put it in her letter to the reader, she kept her descriptions short so they could be set opposite the illustrations... As a result, they occupy at most a folio page... text and image could be placed opposite each other, with engraved images bound facing the folio text...
Rösel, on the other hand, accompanied each engraving with a quarto sheet of text. These sheets were originally published separately with the accompanying illustration, and Rösel's printer, Johann Joseph Fleischmann, fit the text to the sheets, either filling up blank with ornamental flourishes or switching to smaller type in the last few pages of a sheet in order to fit in the entire text... the engravings were to be tipped into a blank leaf so that they could be folded out and examined while reading the text.
This format allowed Rösel to describe species at length while having the image constantly before the reader's eyes. And Rösel, unlike Merian, included in his engravings numbers or letters that were keyed to the text. Modeled after the keys that were common in works of anatomy and natural history, these cross-references linked the images closely to the accompanying descriptions. Read and examined together, image and text formed the complete "insect entertainment," which might in turn inspire readers to seek out and observe the insects themselves.' (83-84)
'Merian showed relatively little interest in beetles... though Merian's hand-coloured engravings, based on original watercolours, were well suited to depict the splendour of certain [of them]...
Rösel, on the other hand, was fascinated by beetles. A substantial part of the second volume of the Insecten-Belustigung was taken up by beetles'. (87)
'As he continued [the series], Rösel partially abandoned his decision, following Merian, to portray insects in their actual size.' (94)
'From one perspective, Rösel's Insect Entertainment can be read... as part of the history of science; in particular, the history of natural history and entomology before their professionalization. In that framework, the contrast between Merian's lush, carefully composed engravings and Rösel's sober illustrations appears to mark a shift toward the modern scientific illustration... We should be wary, though, of imposing the modern notion of "science" on these investigators of nature' (95)]
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Born
30 Mar 1705
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Died
27 Mar 1759
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CreatedAugust Rösel von Rosenhof, Monatlich herausgegebene Insecten-Belustigung (Nuremberg, 1746-1761).
From 1741 to 1762
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Influenced byMaria Sibylla Merian
Description:In his article 'The Pleasure of Describing', Brian Ogilvie notes that 'In the fall of 1727, on a journey to Amsterdam, he fell ill in Hamburg; during his convalescence, he happened upon a copy of Maria Sibylla Merian's folio volume The Metamorphasis of the Insects of Surinam. As Rösel later told the story, Merian's stunning, hand-coloured engravings filled him with a desire to devote himself to studying and illustrating the insect world. Like other conversion narratives, Rösel's story of sudden enlightenment is open to question... Rösel hiself wrote [in his Insect Entertainment] that "from my youth I found enjoyment in insects, and paid close attention to the differences between caterpillars." Merian's book may ony have catalyzed a decision that was long in the making, but its effects were clear: Rösel gave up his voyage to Amsterdam and returned instead to Nuremberg, where he settled on his plan to produce the Insect Entertainment.' (79)
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Related toBrian Ogilvie, 'The Pleasure of Describing: Art and Science in August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof's Monthly Insect Entertainment', in Thorsen et. al., Animals on Display (2013), pp. 77-100.
Description:Ogilvie describes Rösel as a 'Neuremberg miniature painter' (77), relating his background as follows: 'Scion of a noble Austrian family, the Rösels von Rosenhof, who had emigrated to Franconia during the Reformation and then fallen on hard times, Rösel had been trained as an artist by his cousin and then worked as a miniature painter and engraver before obtaining a position as a court painter in Copenhagen.' (78-79)
'Rösel... worked closely with scholarly experts on insects. He attended lectures in German by the Altdorf professor Michael Adelbulner (1702-79), and he discussed his work frequently with Georg Leonhard Huth (1705-1761), a Nuremberg physician and naturalist. Huth translated passages from Réaumur and other authors for Rösel, who could not read French. Rösel also read works by other German insect students: above all, [Friedrich Christian] Lesser's Insecto-Theologia and the series on German insects by Johann Leonhard Frisch.' (81)
'Rösel certainly took his natural theology seriously. Though he never learned Latin or attended university, he studied William Derham's (1657-1735) Physico-Theology by attending Adelbulner's German-language lectures on the book.' (92)
