For a long time science was conducted in the field notebook – with pencils and watercolours – as well as with the microscope.
14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, 17 November 2024 – Salamanca. To draw an object is to understand it. I leave the house with Faber-Castell pencils, a case of Staedtler felt pens and a hard-backed notebook in my jacket pocket. The pencil line forms quickly and shakily. It’s cold. Hardship can determine style: disjointed, austere, or brief – all virtues which one would want to have also for writing. The world moves on quickly and one wants to keep something of it. Snails, spiders, branches, puddles, voices.
To categorise is to capture; to draw is to hunt. “Regrets: not having continued to draw”, wrote George Steiner, “with charcoal, pastels and ink, in order to illustrate some of my own books. The hand can speak truths and happinesses that language is incapable of articulating”.
For a long time science was conducted in the field notebook – with pencils and watercolours – as well as with the microscope. The German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, whose work is as electrifying as the books of Darwin or Humboldt, is the best example. Better known as an artist than as a zoologist, his prints of jellyfish, radiolarias and cephalopods still make you dizzy. They make you dizzy because they seem to be alive and moving beyond the page.
Better known as an artist than as a zoologist, his prints of jellyfish, radiolarias and cephalopods still make you dizzy
Haeckel called his subjects enigmas of the universe, wonders of life, artforms of nature. Tentacles, spirals, membranes, strange multicoloured clusters, translucent, viscous and retractable. He dreamt of defining a complete morphology of these organisms. After immersing himself off the beaches of Naples and Sicily and investigating the composition of the Mediterranean waters, he painted some 1,000 images. He moved from art to biology and from biology to theology. He claimed to have defined God as a gaseous vertebrate.
Art, science and writing have one necessity in common: imagination. The scientist Carlo Rovelli says that science is, above all else, a visionary activity, and as such it requires sensitivity. Severo Sarduy, however, warns that: “it is possible that, when confronted with science, a writer is never much more than a wannabe”.
Antonio Parra was, to put it like that, our Haeckel, the man who united science and imagination. Born in Portugal in 1739, he arrived in Cuba as part of an infantry regiment after the English had taken Havana. He settled, left the army, and married a creole girl. In 1787 he submitted for publication one (and perhaps the most celebrated) of the 300 Cuban books that still survive from the eighteenth century, and which someone has called ’our incunables’.
’A Description of Different Types of Natural History, Most of them Marine Life’, with 75 copper engraved plates – in colour in some editions – was the first ever scientific work written on the island. If the military engravings of Dominic Serres and Philip Orsbridge mark a new way of seeing Cuba, or at least Havana, then with his Book of Fishes we have a visual discovery of its nature. The eighteenth century, Lezama explains, “shows us the character of Cuba”.
Science was born on the island through thought, drawing and the desire for exploration. Parra doesn’t write a scientific work, but a catalogue, a guide for his cabinet of curiosities. What curiosities? “The multitude of remarkable works of nature that abound on the island of Cuba and in the seas that surround it – in the the three kingdoms of animal, vegetable and mineral – all inspired in me, from the very first moment I set foot there, a great desire to put together a collection”.
With a “remarkable respect” for his adoptive country, Parra, enraptured, describes the nature of the tropics
With a “remarkable respect” for his adoptive country, Parra, enraptured, describes the nature of the tropics. He preserved and varnished specimens of the creatures that interested him, like Haeckel, the most – fish and marine creatures. He was, he says, praised for this work by some of his friends and this gave him encouragement. After a year the collection had grown significantly, and, despite a “scarcity of engravers”, Parra got his son to illustrate the book. The boy posessed, says the father with some irony, “a somewhat superficial style of drawing”, but he was nevertheless up to the job. He may perhaps have had some help, because the 75 plates are not the work of a beginner.
This improvised naturalist explained all of this to no less than the King of Spain himself, to whom he sent various pieces from his collection. With little preamble, the creatures begin to line up: some of his descriptions are poetical, others are almost tender – one fish has “two little arms, from which come two fins, like hands”. Another “eats with some suspicion”. The devil fish has stilettos in the form of horns, “whose use we don’t yet understand”.
There are [amongst others] wreckfish, bonefish, swordfish, hawkshead turtles, loggerhead turtles, furry and toothy crabs, teleost fish, prickly prawns, the mother of all snails: a kind of beehive that engenders an infinite number of molluscs, and a worm that’s a nightmare worthy of the planet Solaris…
Parra ended up being ignored by the King, who denied him Spanish citizenship. He had collected tropical seeds for sowing in Madrid and Aranjuez and had become a celebrity in illustrious circles on the peninsular, but even in the eyes of his admirers he was little more than a mere empiricist, an improviser, a mere artisan of curiosities. No more, as Sarduy would say, than a wannabe.
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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