The artist Maria Sibylla Mcrian, daughter of the celebrated Swiss engraver Matthaus Merian the Elder, is regarded as the founder of German entomology, the scientific study of insects. Natural science is indebted to her for researching into the metamorphosis of the butterfly and other insects. In hundreds of watercolours and drawings she documented insect life in all its stages and published her first results in 1679 in a volume of engravings, the so-called Caterpillar book ("Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandluiig"), which was followed by two more volumes.
For all that Merian, with her love for insects, infringed the female mores of her day which permitted botanizing for women as virtuous behaviour but not the dealing with "unclean vermin", she was nonetheless very much a woman of her time. She placed her work in a religious context and expressly eschewed scholarly posturing. For her, representing nature was a form of worship as her documents and pictures were to convey to readers how God. in her view, was present even in the smallest creatures. Belonging to a celebrated family of artists probably made it easier for Maria Sibylla Merian to venture so far from the beaten track. She divorced her husband, joined a religious sect, moved to Amsterdam, a hub of commerce and trade, and conducted scholarly research on insects, at first in her immediate surroundings and later on a distant continent.