American Scientist

The first natural history book devoted to insects was English naturalist Thomas Moffett’s Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum (Theater of Insects, or Lesser Living Creatures). Largely complete by 1590, but not published until 1634, this landmark of Renaissance natural history combines personal observations and folklore with copious paraphrases of ancient and medieval texts. The chapter on bees begins:

Of all Insects, Bees are the principal and are chiefly to be admired, being the only creature of that kinde, framed for the nourishment of Man; but the rest are procreated either to be useful in physick [medicine], or for delight of the eyes, the pleasure of the ears, or the compleating and ornament of the body.

The next 41 folios describe the names, forms, behaviors, organization, propagation, and material outputs (such as honey and wax) of bees. Moffett’s tome illustrates a common contemporary attitude: that nature was created to serve human beings by providing labor and useful substances such as food and medicine, but also beauty and delight. At the same time, nature was believed to reveal the power and majesty of its Creator.

At the center of natural history are plants, animals, and minerals—things that Moffett and other early modern writers often called, collectively, naturalia (as opposed to artificialia, products of human creation). As European powers expanded their reach across the globe through colonialism and trade, port cities such as Antwerp were flooded with new plants, animals, minerals, and other natural materials to be cataloged, collected, and treasured. Artists such as Flemish father and son Joris and Jacob Hoefnagel, Bohemian draftsman and etcher Wenceslaus Hollar, and Flemish painter Jan van Kessel the Elder worked at the nexus of these endeavors. Their drawings, prints, and paintings not only documented and disseminated knowledge, but also became collectible wonders themselves. The works of these artists and the scholars of their time provide a window into the culture and practice of natural history in Europe during the late 16th and 17th centuries.

Blending Art and Science

As a literary genre, natural history goes back to the investigations of Aristotle and Theophrastus in the 4th century BCE, and to the encyclopedic Naturalis historia of Pliny the Elder in the 1st century CE. As a distinct discipline practiced by a growing community of naturalists who were devoted to investigating, cataloging, describing, and classifying animals, plants, and minerals, natural history took shape primarily between the late 15th and late 16th centuries. It emerged out of three distinct but related impulses: the reform of materia medica (substances used to produce compound medicines), a desire to better understand ancient texts about the natural world, and a growing interest in curiosities and wonders in what has been called “the age of the marvelous.”

The first and second of these impulses involved university-educated physicians and humanist scholars. In medieval and early modern Europe, medicines were made by apothecaries. By the late 15th century, Italian physicians studying ancient texts came to realize that the names used by ancient writers to describe plants and other materia medica were no longer the names used in their own day. To better understand those names—in part with the goal of imposing their own oversight on pharmacy—the physicians began to systematically compare the descriptions of plants in ancient texts with the plants that grew around them, noting the differences between ancient and modern names and correcting what they called the “errors” of medieval apothecaries. As medical botany became part of medical school curricula in the 16th century, students learned that close empirical observation of natural objects should be part of their education.

Many ancient texts addressed various aspects of the natural world, but their descriptions of nature were often brief and vague, and sometimes contradictory. To better understand those texts, humanist scholars such as Swiss physician and naturalist Conrad Gessner compiled encyclopedias, gathering all the information they could and supplementing ancient texts with medieval works and contemporary observations. Their works took a broad ambit, including not only what we would consider natural history proper, but also agriculture, medicine, and cultural history.

These scholarly endeavors by physicians and humanists took place within a wider movement that has been called green culture: a growing interest in nature, particularly curiosities and wonders that revealed God’s creative power and nature’s relationship with art. Simultaneously, the growing colonial and commercial networks linking Europe to Asia, Africa, and the Americas brought countless curiosities to Amsterdam, Seville, and other cities. It became fashionable to collect unusual, odd, wondrous, and beautiful objects—objects often violently wrenched from their cultural and ecological contexts. Renaissance European naturalists took elements from all these movements, and elsewhere, to build a discipline that is still recognizable today.

Naturalia and artificialia were often combined in the contents of cabinets of curiosity. These collections were more than natural history museums in the making. Their juxtaposition of art and nature usually included objects that combined both—a cup made of a nautilus shell, or an ostrich egg set in an elaborate gold and silver stand. The creators of these collections saw them as a way to contemplate the works of God, to marvel at the extremes of nature (by placing a wren’s egg next to that of an ostrich, for example), and to fashion themselves as discerning collectors.

Similarly, menageries, aviaries, and gardens became places for the study and contemplation of nature. Gardens allowed naturalists to observe plants and small creatures without going into the field. Renaissance researchers started to assemble herbaria: collections of dried plants sewn or glued to sheets of paper on which they recorded the plants’ names, the places where they were found, and notes about their characteristics. Herbaria often included common, nondescript plants alongside rare or showy ones, underscoring the primary goal of early modern natural history: providing a comprehensive catalog of nature.

Alongside their collections of naturalia and their herbaria, early modern naturalists amassed reams of paper, parchment, and vellum. They wrote down their observations, kept records of garden plantings, compiled inventories of their curiosities, and sent each other letters and packages. Postal services were new in the 16th century. Although the mail was slow, expensive, and unreliable by modern standards, it allowed naturalists to exchange information and small, lightweight objects such as seeds and insects on a regular basis.

Naturalists of this era also made, commissioned, or acquired thousands of pictures of naturalia—paper museums to match their physical cabinets of curiosities. Some naturalists were themselves artists; others commissioned images or hired artists on long-term contracts. Although their quality varies, most of these images were competently executed by trained artists in a style that historian Florike Egmond in his 2016 book Eye for Detail characterized as “high-definition naturalism in the service of the study of nature”: individual objects seen from the side against a blank background, with emphasis on the parts and details that would allow a viewer to identify the species depicted.

These texts and images formed the basis of books that began to fill the libraries of naturalists and collectors. These publications didn’t just disseminate knowledge, they also solicited new descriptions and images. Scholars such as Gessner used print to appeal for more information from readers, which would then make its way into later publications.

Having started with materia medica, naturalists then turned to mammals, birds, and fishes. It was not until the later 16th century that naturalists turned their attention to “little beasts.”

Enter the Insect

The word insect does not appear in English or in other European vernaculars until the 16th century. It was originally a technical word in Latin: Insectum, meaning incised, is a translation of the Greek word entomon, used by Aristotle. When chronicler Raphael Holinshed sought to render the word in English in his 1577 description of the British Isles, he called them cut waisted—a literal translation that is particularly apt for the bees, wasps, and hornets that he had in mind. By the 1580s, English authors had started to use the word insect, but usually with a gloss indicating what it meant. We can see such a gloss in Moffett’s title, Theater of Insects, or Lesser Living Creatures. Physician and translator Philemon Holland may have been the first English writer to use insect as if readers would know its meaning in his 1601 translation of Pliny’s Naturalis historia. Similar developments took place in French, Italian, German, Dutch, and other vernaculars.

Before they were categorized as insects, bees, ants, wasps, beetles, crayfish, and the like were categorized as “little beasts,” “little worms,” and even “little birds.” The most salient thing about them was their small size. Before the late 16th century, insects, situated at the margins of human perception, tended to be lumped together in broad groups.

This new category was more capacious than the modern taxonomic understanding of insects. It included not only beetles, butterflies, and other hexapods, but also spiders, mites, centipedes, millipedes, and even sometimes lizards, salamanders, and the like. English botanist and gardener John Tradescant the Younger grouped “insects and serpents” in the 1656 catalog of his father’s collection. By the 18th century, the term was largely restricted to invertebrates with hard exteriors, and it was only in the 19th century that arachnids, myriapods, isopods, and other arthropods were taxonomically separated from the insects.

Early modern artists and naturalists looked closely at insects and paid attention to their anatomy and characteristics. They marveled at their beauty and intricacy.

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It is worth noting the interest that Hoefnagel, Hollar, Van Kessel, and other early modern artists and naturalists paid to insects. They looked closely at them, often with magnifying lenses, and paid attention to their anatomy and characteristics. They marveled at their beauty and intricacy. Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, who amassed the largest collection of naturalia in Europe, took a keen interest in insects and published the first book devoted entirely to them, a weighty folio of over 800 pages. Early modern students of insects often referenced a passage from book 11 of Pliny’s Naturalis historia:

We make a wonder at the monstrous and mightie shoulders of Elephants. . . . Wee marveile at the strong and stiffe necks of Bulls. . . . We keepe a woondring at the ravenings of Tygres, and the shag manes of Lions: and yet in comparison of these Insects, there is nothing wherein Nature and her whole power is more seene, neither sheweth she her might more than in the least creatures of all.

Early modern thinkers gave this sentiment a Christian gloss: In works of natural theology and “physico-theology,” they argued that the intricate structures and instincts of insects revealed God’s majesty and that their variety showed God’s creative power.

In practice, naturalists studied insects in much the same way they did other creatures. In his 1602 De animalibus insectis (On Insect Animals), Aldrovandi described his approach. In summer and autumn, he would visit the countryside and ask locals, sometimes for a fee, to bring him the insects they knew, name them, and describe their habitats and behaviors. He brought an artist and one or more secretaries to depict the creatures and record information about them. Thus, his collection included the insects themselves, hundreds of drawings and paintings of them, and copious first- and secondhand information. In the book, Aldrovandi complemented those observations, where possible, with lore compiled from ancient, medieval, and contemporary writers.

Because insects were small and often easy to preserve after death, it was relatively straightforward to build a collection of them. They could be pressed and glued to the pages of a book, pinned to the bottom of a box, or, if they were relatively flat, like butterflies and moths, encased between thin sheets of mica. Like seeds and dried plants, preserved insects were also relatively easy to ship, allowing collectors to exchange or lend them for study.

By the first third of the 17th century, some artists and naturalists were raising insects from eggs or larvae. In the 1630s, Netherlandish artist Johannes Goedaert began collecting caterpillars and their food plants, raising them in jars in his house, and observing and painting their metamorphoses into pupae and adults. Dutch biologist Johannes Swammerdam used his observations of metamorphosis to classify insects in his 1669 work Historia generalis insectorum (General History of Insects). These studies marked the beginning of our modern understanding of insect metamorphosis, which gradually put an end to the earlier belief that insects were “imperfect” creatures that resulted from spontaneous generation, not sexual reproduction. Knowledge of insect reproduction and metamorphosis was also aided by the invention of the microscope, which revealed the intricate anatomy of the tiniest fleas and mites.

Most of our evidence about the techniques and material culture of early insect collections comes from the late 17th century, when insect collecting was popular enough that naturalists began to provide instructions on how to catch, kill, and preserve them. Dutch physician and entomologist Stephan Blankaart’s 1688 publication Schou-burg der rupsen, wormen, maden, en vliegende dierkens daar uit voorkomende (Theater of Caterpillars, Worms, Maggots, and the Flying Animals That Come Forth from Them) included tips on making a net, raising butterflies and moths from caterpillars, killing insects with a hot pin, and preserving them in round or oval boxes. He specified that the boxes should be pretreated with turpentine, which should be reapplied three or four times a year to keep mites away. It seems likely that Blankaart’s published advice was the product of a century of insect collectors’ lore passed on informally in meetings and correspondence.

The study of insects in the early modern period laid the groundwork for our current understanding of biodiversity. Natural histories of beasts, birds, and fishes showed the variety of creatures in the world, but still on a human scale. Insects were different. In 1691, English naturalist John Ray estimated that there were at least 10,000 species of insects in the world. The following year he doubled the number. We now think that Ray was off by two orders of magnitude, but, compared with the several hundred animals named and described by ancient, medieval, and early modern authors, the number of insect species known and estimated at the time was one final astounding aspect of early modern insect studies.

This excerpt is adapted from the accompanying publication of the exhibition Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (May 18–November 2, 2025), published by the National Gallery of Art in association with Princeton University Press.