Maria Clara Eimmart

Maria Clara Eimmart , married Müller (born May 27, 1676 in Nuremberg ; † October 29, 1707 ibid) was a Nuremberg artist , engraver and astronomer .

Life

Maria Clara Eimmart was born in 1676 as the daughter of Georg Christoph Eimmart (1638–1705) and the weighing master daughter Maria Walther (1644–1722). She was the only surviving child of her parents, a brother born in 1669 had died after only three months. When her father set up his observatory at the Vestnertorbastei in Nuremberg in autumn 1678 , she was two years old. After the observatory had to close due to the war, operations of the observatory were resumed at the latest in April 1689 when a solar eclipse was observed shortly before Maria Clara's thirteenth birthday. It was probably during this time that Eimmart began to actively assist her father at the observatory until she finally developed into an independent astronomical observer.

“The fact that Matheseo's noble studies must have been extremely popular here in Nuremberg before then cannot be taken from the large number of sun-clocks that can be found painted on most houses everywhere; but also from the even larger number of all sorts of small instrumentorum ... which I saw and did so much that I almost doubt whether I can find each other so much in all of Germany than alone here in Nuremberg. "

- Maria Clara Eimmart : in her letter to Johann Jacob Scheuchzer of January 23, 1697

Her father, who had studied mathematics and astronomy in particular after an artistic training , taught her not only astronomy, but also mathematics, languages ​​- especially Latin and French - as well as painting , drawing and etching .

The social and bourgeois-family environment shaped by artists, publishers, art dealers and booksellers will certainly have had a beneficial effect on the development of their talents. From 1670 to 1681, for example, Maria Sibylla Merian lived in Nuremberg with her husband Johann Andreas Graff and their two daughters Johanna Helena and Dorothea Maria. Merian ran a "maiden company" here , teaching young women how to paint and embroider flowers. Even if Eimmart was only five years old when Merian left Nuremberg, she will have felt the influence of Merian's work in the period that followed. The artistic activity of her eighteen-year-old cousin Susanna Maria von Sandrart - Sandrart's mother Regina Christina Eimmart (1636–1708) was a sister of Georg Christoph Eimmart - should have had an immediate impact on Maria Clara Eimmart. Susanna Maria von Sandrart was a recognized graphic artist who made numerous engravings and illustrations, and was thus able to earn a living after the death of her husband.

After Eimmart's father died in 1705, the observatory was taken over by the city of Nuremberg. At the beginning of the following year, on January 20, 1706, Eimmart married the astronomer Johann Heinrich Müller (1671–1731). Müller was his father's assistant between 1687 and 1692 before starting his studies in Altdorf in 1692 . In 1704 Müller returned to Nuremberg and in 1705 was appointed by the city both as a professor at the Nuremberg high school Aegydianum and as the new director of the observatory. Shortly after the birth of her son, who does not even survived, died Maria Clara Eimmart 1707 in childbirth .

Correspondence with Johann Jacob Scheuchzer

In May 1695 Johann Jacob Scheuchzer (1672–1733) stayed with the Eimmarts in Nuremberg, from which an exchange of letters between Maria Clara Eimmart and Scheuchzer developed, of which five letters Eimmart to Scheuchzer are known and are kept at the Zurich Central Library.

"The protection of the highest grace be your medicine.
The pledge of love that is to show itself, that
cannot infallibly pass a whole year.
And this is what I want to write in a hurry. "

- Maria Clara Eimmart : from the wedding poem for Scheuchzer in her letter of November 20, 1697

Astronomical observations and drawings

Maria Clara Eimmart made around 250 drawings of the moon between 1693 and 1698, which were intended to serve as a cartographic representation of the moon and serve as preliminary work for the creation of a separate moon map. She also observed the total solar eclipse on May 12, 1706 and made two paintings. They were considered lost for a long time until one of them was rediscovered in the Berlin State Library. Most of her sketches of the moon lie with her father's estate in St. Petersburg. Some of her astronomical paintings have been preserved in the Bologna observatory.

Picture gallery

• Astronomical drawings by Maria Clara Eimmart
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  Moon phase

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  Second moon phase

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  Full moon

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  Phase of Mercury phases, observed by Johannes Hevelius

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  Venus phases

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  Mars observations

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  Jupiter observations

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  Saturn observations

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  Comets

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  Side moon and side sun

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  Astronomical illustrations

literature

• Hans Gaab: On the 300th anniversary of the death of Maria Clara Eimmart (1676–1707). In: Regiomontanusbote . 20, 4/2007, pp. 7-19.
• Hans Gaab: Maria Clara Eimmart. A Nuremberg astronomer. In: Nadja Bennewitz, Gaby Franger: History of women in Middle Franconia. Everyday life, people and places. Ars vivendi, Cadolzburg 2003, pp. 145–152.
• Ronald Stoyan : The Nuremberg moon cards. Part 1: The map of the moon by Georg Christoph Eimmart (1638–1705) and Maria Clara Eimmart (1676–1707). In: Regiomontanusbote. 14, 1/2001, pp. 29-39.
• Karl Christian Bruhns :  Eimmart, Georg Christoph . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1877, p. 758.
• Siegmund Günther :  Müller, Johann Heinrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1885, pp. 583-585.
• Adolf Wißner:  Georg Christoph Eimmart. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 394 ( digitized version ).
• Eimmart, Georg Christoph the Elder J. and Eimmart, Maria Clara in: Manfred H. Grieb: Nürnberger Künstlerlexikon - visual artists, artisans, scholars, collectors, cultural workers and patrons from the 12th to the middle of the 20th century Munich 2007, pp. 327-330.
• Regina surrounding area: Maria Clara Eimmart (1676-1707). In: Gudrun Wolfschmidt (Hrsg.): Astronomie in Franken - From the beginnings to modern astrophysics. Proceedings of the conference of the working group on the history of astronomy in the Astronomical Society 2014. Hamburg 2015, pp. 208–221.

Web links

Commons : Maria Clara Eimmart  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Nuremberg Astronomical Society : Maria Clara Eimmart, the only female astronomer in Nuremberg of any importance

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Quoted from Hans Gaab: Maria Clara Eimmart. In: History of Women in Middle Franconia 2003, page 145.
2. ↑ The letters are published in: Quarterly publication of the Natural Research Society in Zurich. Volume 18 (1873), pp. 292-296. ( Digitized version )
3. ↑ Quoted from Hans Gaab: Maria Clara Eimmart. In: History of Women in Middle Franconia 2003, page 152.
4. ↑ Markus Heinz: Ms. Müller and the "dark corners" of the map department. (PDF) In: Library magazine 2/17 - messages from the state libraries in Berlin and Munich. Klaus Ceynowa, Barbara Schneider-Kempf, June 2017, pp. 69-70 , accessed on October 23, 2019 .