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Development in relief. The Swiss modeller Josef Benedikt Kuriger brought the Soemmerring engravings into wax relief and so showed human development as well as growth more clearly than the Florentine models. Copies in wax and clay were sold in the German lands via newspaper advertisements and at exhibitions and trade fairs to medical practitioners, researchers, collectors and institutions. This relief in burnt clay (26.7 x 18.5 cm) showing eleven of the embryos was made in Schaffhausen by the factory of Jakob Ziegler-Pellis, some time after 1828.
Medizinhistorisches Museum, Universität Zürich.
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The reception of Soemmerring’s Icones. Doctors with access to Soemmerring’s expensive plates generally appreciated their originality, usefulness and beauty. We have little evidence of lay reception, but the Countess of Kesselstadt, who saw the drawings before publication, remarked that ‘she had already had many children, but had never imagined their development [Werden] like this’. These images mark a crucial step in the gradual appearance of the developing human embryo and the slow disappearance of other forms that women had once produced. But they are by no means the end of the story. Though the work was not superseded for many decades, by the 1830s specialists were complaining that many of Soemmerring’s specimens were abnormal and that he had approached his material as a descriptive anatomist and not a comparative embryologist.
Picturing development
Why did Soemmerring depart from earlier views to begin to picture human embryonic development for the first time?
Soemmerring was a successor to older anatomical traditions of collecting and comparing, but his images went a step further. Part of the explanation may lie in his cautious sympathy for the new epigenesis, and part in the intense contemporary interest in the course and duration of pregnancy. Soemmerring himself highlighted aesthetics: in thrall to the old prejudice of judging beauty by adult standards, even artists had failed to recognize the different criteria appropriate to each age. Yet, he argued, do we not find a rosebud as beautiful in its own way as a rose?
Judging many aborted specimens ‘like fruits malformed or eaten by worms’ which fall early from the tree, Soemmerring selected as norms those he considered most perfect for their age. Even these could not be depicted as they appeared. Using his experience and judgement, Soemmerring had the artist Christian Koeck remove imperfections in order to represent the essential form. In contrast to Hunter’s naturalism, Soemmerring aligned himself with the idealism then widespread among German anatomists.
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Soemmerring’s embryos compared to Hunter’s. Soemmerring did not fully explain how he ordered the series, but like Hunter, he used age, or size if the age was not known. Soemmerring intended his plates to complement Hunter’s: together they would make a complete series from the start of pregnancy to the end. Since the two series actually overlap, we can compare them. Soemmerring’s figures vi (8 weeks) and vii (9 weeks) correspond in age with the embryos on Hunter’s plate 33. Soemmerring arranged the embryos in left-to-right rows of progressively changing form and increasing size. Hunter, by contrast, placed the two figures of the oldest embryo on top, followed by four figures of two younger specimens. And, while Soemmerring’s focus is obviously on the embryo, Hunter is more interested in the growth and development of the membranes: in four out of six images, we do not even glimpse the embryo.
The first and second row of plate 1, drawn by Christian Koeck and engraved by the Klauber brothers, from Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, Icones embryonum humanorum, Frankfurt am Main: Varrentrapp and Wenner, 1799.
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
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Soemmerring’s embryos compared to Hunter’s, 1799
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| Drawing apparatus for idealist anatomy. Soemmerring’s idealist anatomy was committed simultaneously to exacting standards of visual accuracy and intervention to achieve perfection. His predecessors, the anatomist Bernhard Siegfried Albinus and the artist Jan Wandelaar, had abandoned perspective in favour of contraptions that helped them draw a perfect skeleton in proportion. Soemmerring and Koeck, who was skilled in the use of ruler and compasses, similarly looked beyond mechanical and chemical damage to the specimens’ ideal forms. This modern reconstruction explains the drawing system Wandelaar used to overcome the problem of perspective: if the artist moved away from the skeleton he could not see the details; if he moved closer, he could observe them but at sharp angles. So Wandelaar invented a system of grids. The picture shows the first stage of a drawing process. A large grid made of 7.3 x 7.3 cm squares divided the skeleton into easily traceable segments that could be drawn from 40 feet away.
Bill Easter Fairweather, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.
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Drawing apparatus for idealist anatomy (reconstruction)
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