Albert Seba
Albert Seba (also Albertus Seba ; born May 12, 1665 in Etzel near Friedeburg in East Friesland , † May 3, 1736 in Amsterdam ) was a German- Dutch pharmacist and famous collector of natural goods . As editor of the “Thesaurus”, an extensive book with representations and descriptions of all objects in his collection , he was one of the forerunners of the great encyclopedists of the 18th century Denis Diderot and Jean Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert .
Youth and education
Albert Seba was the son of the farmer Johann Wilken Seba and his wife Grete Albers. His village school teacher recognized the boy's unusual talent and gave him additional lessons in Latin and the natural sciences , which Seba was particularly interested in. He began his apprenticeship as a pharmacist at the age of 19 in the nearby Neustadtgödens , an East Frisian settlement of Dutch Mennonites , where he also learned their language. After a year of basic training, he moved to Groningen and after a further year to the Amsterdam pharmacist Cornelis van der Veer, where he became apprentice pharmacist after another year of apprenticeship. He then worked for three years each in Amsterdam, Nuremberg and Strasbourg . Back in Amsterdam, he passed his pharmacist exam on June 11, 1697.
Professional practice
In June 1698, Seba married the daughter of a colleague, Anna Loopes. The couple had four daughters over the next twelve years. In February 1700, the pharmacist bought a spacious house near the harbor on Haarlemerdijk for his shop and his growing family as well as for journeymen and apprentices who were employed by him. Today the street is called Haarlemmerstraat, house number 110 has remained unchanged from the outside. With his company, which he called "De Duitsche Apotheek" (The German Pharmacy), Seba was very soon successful and accordingly wealthy. He used sent the possibilities of the port city of Amsterdam, founded in addition to the traditional store selling a wholesale and foreign trade with drugs and eventually even supplied the court of the Russian Tsar in St Petersburg . His fortune enabled him to donate a richly decorated baptismal font and two paintings to the church of his home parish . Today a place with a memorial stone in Etzel commemorates Albertus Seba. He died in 1736 of the aftermath of renal colic and was buried in the cemetery of the Westerkerk in Amsterdam .
Collecting
Seba began to compile a collection of "natural objects" at an early age , including primarily prepared animals and plants, but also minerals. Amsterdam was a metropolis of overseas trade and therefore particularly suitable for putting together such a collection. Often ships with goods from distant regions of the world arrived, Seba imported exotic herbs and powder. His extensive clientele included numerous seafarers, whose illnesses and states of exhaustion he treated after months of voyage, often before they had even disembarked. He asked about interesting objects that they had brought with them as curiosities - stuffed animals or animals soaked in alcohol, clams or butterflies, roots and fruits ... which he then bought or which he used to pay for his medical aid. Some comments in the “Thesaurus” suggest that Seba has contacts overseas - e. B. from Sri Lanka , Virginia or Greenland - corresponded and received certain copies from them. He exchanged duplicates with other collectors or, thanks to his own business acumen, sold them for a profit.
In this way, a collection was created in a relatively short time, whose reputation reached far beyond the borders of Amsterdam. In earlier centuries, collections of remarkable objects had been a hobby of the aristocracy ; in addition to weapons, works of art and handicrafts , these “ chambers of wonder ” gradually contained rarities of natural origin. In the second half of the 16th century , wealthy citizens began to afford such curiosity cabinets. To later generations, the combination of such diverse and disordered objects seemed strange, its purpose difficult to understand. At the time of their emergence, in a world that was rapidly and steadily becoming more complex, these microcosms at least allowed a look at the variety of phenomena, opened up the first possibilities to make comparative observations and to recognize connections. Around 1700 these collections were gradually given a new, scientific orientation. In this transitional phase, Seba started its natural produce collection.
He also presented a seven-headed snake - a rather convincing fake made by seafarers out of coral - as a concession to sensationalism - but in general he put his collection together very carefully and systematically. Animals and plants were no longer randomly put together, but sorted according to their external appearance. From the comparative analysis, the question arose about the respective function, about the way of life of animals and plants - a previously unfamiliar perspective. Maria Sibylla Merian , who had traveled to Suriname in 1699 to observe and draw insects there , had recently shown the way to this new way of looking at things. On the copperplate engravings in her book “ Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium ” she depicted the animals in their natural environment, with their forage plants and in the various stages of their life cycle.
In 1716, Seba was able to sell his collection to the Russian Tsar Peter I , to whose court he had been delivering extensive shipments of medicines for several years. The tsar endeavored to open his empire, which was backward in many respects, to the west and undertook information trips to Western European countries. Seba had heard that the Tsar was visiting Holland and wanted to buy some things there for his own cabinet of curiosities. He sent the Tsar's personal physician, Robert Erskine (1674–1718), a detailed list of his exhibits in advance. The Tsar bought the entire collection, some of which can still be seen today in the St. Petersburg Hermitage . Seba immediately used the very high sales proceeds of 15,000 guilders to build up a new collection. Unlike before, he no longer parted with individual pieces before he had found a roughly equivalent specimen; interested buyers had to be patient and then received the less attractive property. The soon very extensive collection caused a sensation among scientists across Europe. Peter the Great viewed the new collection in his apartment. The collector conducted extensive correspondence with like-minded people. Seba became a member of the Academy of Bologna (1722), on May 24, 1727 with the academic surname Xenocrates of the German Academia Naturae Curiosorum - Leopoldina ( matriculation no. 398 ) and the " Royal Society " in London (1728). Essays by him have been published in the writings of these institutions.
A general problem with the storage of organic objects has been to make them durable. The corresponding methods were borrowed from other disciplines, such as medicine, and developed further. A botanist friend of Seba, Frederik Ruysch , had developed a technique for preserving human corpses in such a way that they appeared to be alive. He kept his procedure a secret, but it is more than likely that Seba learned about it and was able to apply it to his preparations. He himself invented and published a method to skeletonize leaves through accelerated aging and to make their finest structures visible.
The thesaurus
Around 1730 Albertus Seba decided to present his collection in book form and publish it. On October 30, 1731, he and the agents of two publishing houses who wanted to publish the work in cooperation, signed the contract for the expensive project. After that, Seba had to provide a third of the funds, the rest of the production costs were raised by subscription - those who paid in advance received a discount of 30% on the subsequent sales price.
As a result, at least 13 draftsmen and engravers worked for years on the execution of the 446 large-format panels. The names of some of the famous engravers were: Houbraken (from whom the portrait of Sebas in the “Thesaurus” comes), Tanjé , de Bakker, van der Laan, Punt. Templates from other collectors were also used for the drawings. Other naturalists are also said to have been involved in the texts; the names Hieronymus David Gaub (1705–1780), Pieter van Musschenbroek , Louis de Jaucourt and Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet are mentioned . Originally the plates were only published as black and white prints. The aesthetically appealing color scheme, which is important for understanding, was added later - apparently the buyers had to have them made by specialist colorists at their own expense.
The “Thesaurus” (Greek / Latin: the treasure . Common name for scientific compilations) finally comprised four leather-bound volumes in the format folio large (size 2 °), each 48 cm high and 32 cm wide. The first two volumes appeared as Latin-Dutch and Latin- French editions in 1734 and 1735, the others not until 1758 and 1765, long after Seba's death. His heirs had to dissolve the unprecedented collection of natural objects that he had left behind and auction it off in 1752 to finance the publication of the last volumes. The first volume shows images of Seba's specially prepared leaves on several pages, followed by plants and animals from America and Asia. The second volume mainly describes snakes, plus some plants and other animals - for decoration and to illustrate the snakes' habitat. Volume three contains marine animals: fish, clams, starfish , octopus, and sea urchins . Volume four contains insects on almost 100 panels, plus a few pages with minerals and fossils .
Although the natural sciences, especially zoology and mineralogy , developed by leaps and bounds in the 18th century, knowledge was still patchy. Albertus Seba's “thesaurus” also lacked methodological consistency. Regular representative of an animal genus , random mutations and not existing forms - such as flying cats - were of equal importance. The highly developed aesthetics of the color tables sometimes fell victim to scientific accuracy. Animals and plants from very different regions appeared in joint compositions. On the other hand, widespread errors were refuted: instead of the legendary basilisk , half rooster, half dragon and endowed with a deadly look, there was now a description of the real basilisk , a genus from the iguanas family . All in all, the “Thesaurus” was an extraordinary achievement. As an early standard work in biology, it was part of the holdings of all university libraries. The biodiversity of the earth had never been shown so comprehensively, many scientists used the work for their work. The Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) had contact with Seba during his stay in Holland. In his fundamental work “Systema Naturae” he referred a total of 284 times to Seba's “Thesaurus”.
Works
- (The “Thesaurus”): Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio, et iconibus artificiosissimis expressio, per universam physices historiam… Ex toto terrarum orbe collegit, digessit, descripsit et depgendam curavit Albertus Seba Etzela Ostfrisius… digital copy
- (About cinnamon and its pharmaceutical uses): An account of the Cinnamon tree in Ceylon and its several sorts, communicated by the Chief Inspector of the Cinnamon Trade and Manufacture in that Island to Albertus Seba, a noted druggist at Amsterdam… Digitalisat
- The anatomical preparation of Vegetables… digitized
- Historia exoticorum quorundam medicamentorum simplicium ...
Trivia
On the ship's transport of the natural history collection to St. Petersburg, the pure alcohol in the animal preparations was partly misused as drinking alcohol. Several exhibits spoiled and had to be reordered.
Seba sent a copy of his splendid thesaurus to his family in Etzel. There they found an unexpected use for it: the separated pages were used to wallpaper room walls.
Some drawings of his work was on the cover of the maxi-single from the same star of German pop - duo Ich + Ich displayed.
literature
- Albertus Seba: The natural history cabinet. Complete edition of the colored plates 1734-1765 . Taschen, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-4794-1 .
- Erhard Ahlrichs : Albertus Seba. (Monograph by the famous pharmacist and natural resource collector from East Frisia), East Frisian Landscape (East Frisian Family Studies, Book 6), Aurich 1986, ISBN 3-925365-08-7 ; 48 p.m. Fig.
- Erhard Ahlrichs: Seba, Albertus (available as PDF) . In: Biographical Lexicon for East Frisia.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Driessen-Van het Reve, JJ (2006) De art camera van Peter de Grote. De Hollandse inbreng, reconstrueerd uit brieven van Albert Seba en Johann Daniel Schumacher uit de jaren 1711-1752, p. 111-113; 337 (english summary)
- ^ Etzel story. February 3, 2005, archived from the original on September 5, 2013 ; accessed on May 12, 2014 .
- ↑ I + I - From the same star. discogs.com, accessed May 30, 2014 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Albert Seba in the catalog of the German National Library
- M. Boeseman: The Vicissitudes and Dispersal of Albertus Seba's Zoological Spedimens (English)
- Taschen Books: Cabinet of Natural Curiosities
- KV Jur'ev: Albertus Seba and his role in the development of herpetology. Full German translation from: Trudy. Zoologičeskij institute. Akademija nauk SSSR. Leningrad, 101 (1981): Fauna i ekologija amfibij i reptilij palearktičeskoj azii, pp. 109 - 120. - 1/25 - Translation No. 628 of the translation office of the Stuttgart University Library, translated by Ottmar Pertschi.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Seba, Albert |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Seba, Albertus (full name); Xenocrates |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-Dutch pharmacist and naturist collector |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 12, 1665 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Etzel near Friedeburg , East Frisia |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 3, 1736 |
| Place of death | Amsterdam |