Albertus Seba and the Didelphis Marsupialis Terror

The Guardian's website is running a slideshow of Albertus Seba's painstaking colour-plate portrayals of animal and insect life, in honour of publisher Taschen's release of his drawings. And if old-fashioned illustrations of people and cooking implements and so on can be peculiar, sometimes animal sketches can be even more so.

***

There are odd insects curling or butterflies glowing out of strange corners or perched squarely at the table's edge of still-lifes, there is Albrecht Dürer's famous armoured rhinoceros, there are Audubon's exotic birds and jungles; and then there are the arrays of mollusks, squid, etc., which are neatly or fancifully ranged on one of Seba's pages.

Hérisson, From: Wikimedia Commons, by Valérie75

Seba was born in East Frisia and died in Amsterdam, so Wikipedia states, and chronologically his life spanned the late 17th and early 18th centuries. He asked for his subjects from sailors and ship surgeons while he toiled as a pharmacist, which may be what made his spirits leathery enough to collect and draw a pickled human fetus — on Slide 5 in the show and, of course, thoroughly sinister-looking though (or, because) hauntingly cheerful.

His rendering of the Southern common opossum (Didelphis marsupialis) frankly inspires great admiration for the bravery of the inhabitants of meridional America, since it looks like a vicious rat inhabitant of the New York underground with the soul of the homicidal, jumpy little dinosaurs which slew a man in one of the Jurassic Park sequels, crossed with a viper. It may be gnawing at a fruit at present, but its intended main course is us.

The birds look happy, and the elephant fetus and the mouse suspended through a paperlike panel presumably thanks to rigor mortis are not without their serenity, and the sprightly legs and tesselated wings of the dragonflies indicate at least anthropomorphized gaiety; but altogether I think one could not have entered the private quarters of Seba's home or pharmacy without real or imagined little legs scurrying and tingling up and down one's spine.

These engravings are from the Thesaurus, which he published in multiple volumes starting 1734, and which is currently on view at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands.

*

Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities [Guardian] (May 9, 2011)
Relevant Wikipedia Article on Albertus Seba (Accessed May 11, Berlin Time)