All the Boston science news that's fit to blog. And then some. A group blog from Rob Pinsonneault and Corie Lok.
Raise your hand if you know the identity of the flower in the above picture.
If you didn’t sleep through your college botany class like I did, you may have said banana – and you would be right (Musa paradisiaca, subspecies sapientum, to be precise).
Now raise your hand if you know what the flower in the picture is made of.
No, not plant, but glass.
When I first stepped into the glass flowers exhibit room at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History, I thought I had walked into the wrong exhibit. This looked like some sort of ecology room with little flowers pinned everywhere. I was there for the glass… Oh wait. And just like that, I was in awe.
The mind-blowing level of detail in the collection of glass flowers is truly disorienting. Created by the father and son team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka in the 19th century, the ~3000 piece collection was commissioned by the founder of Harvard’s Botanical Museum for teaching purposes. At the time (and to this day) the models were an invaluable tool in showing students what exotic plants looked like, inside and out, in the absence of adequate photography and sample preservation techniques. The Blaschka’s adapted traditional jewelry-making techniques to manufacture the glass flowers based on real specimens, the origin and year of collection of which is marked next to each display.
Their mastery of glass working techniques, not to mention their attention to detail, was such that they fashioned individual glass hairs to stick out from roots and weeds, and imbued leaves with texture ranging from turgid and vibrant to crinkly and weak.
Occasionally, the glass was painted to perfectly match the original plant. Other times, the artists would blend glass to their own stringent color specifications.
Glass blocks on the table thought to have been used in the making of the glass flowers.
Alongside each perfect glass copy of a plant, lie glass cross-sections and magnifications of the plant’s various parts, allowing for a lesson in comparative plant anatomy and yet another reason to exhale – a little too loudly – “cool!”
Prior to receiving the commission from the Botanical Museum, the Blaschkas honed their skills making glass eyes and models of marine invertebrates.
Up close, the eyes were so real as to be uncomfortable to look at. My favorite one (because I had to pick a favorite fake eye) is the slightly bloodshot one in the center.
The glass work exhibit was only a small part of the Natural History Museum, but one I spent the most time in. It was unlike anything else I had ever seen before. All these years later, the Blaschkas’ observations and representations of nature are striking. That, and they are just really cool.
Last updated: Tuesday, 03 Feb 2009 - 05:34 UTC
© 2009 Nature Publishing Group
Wow Anna – how incredible! I really want to see that myself some time. Do you know whether the marine invertebrates are exhibited somewhere as well?
P.S. I tried not to sleep through my botany classes, but am pretty sure we didn’t look at banana flowers.. more the locally growing stuff ;)
Wow! That’s so awesome!
Wow. I guess the exhibition won’t be coming to Helsinki soon. :-(
Is that a permanent exhibition? I’d love to see it if I’m in Boston anytime soon.
Wow is the only word. I’m still not sure I believe you. I had no idea glass could be so versatile a material.
Cool! I am glad you guys liked the flowers. I was blown away. I posted more pictures of the glass flowers and the rest of the museum here.
Frank – The flowers are indeed on permanent display, so you can see them whenever.
Bob – I don’t imagine they are going to move or travel in the near future… or ever. They are, as you can imagine, exceedingly fragile. Museum staff is working on maintaining and restoring them, but it’s a battle.
Steffi – The marine invertebrates are not a permanent part of the exhibit – according to Wikipedia, the invertebrates are also on display at Cornell University, Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, Boston Museum of Science and at the National Museum of Ireland.
Anna, if you are interested in glass art, especially glass flowers, may I suggest checking out an exhibit by Dale Chihuly. He is a wonderful artist who does both museum exhibits and installations in parks and gardens. He did an exhibit at the Bronx Botanical Garden in 2006 that was fabulous.
Agree, Chihuly is good. I’ve seen his work in the V&A in London (Victoria & Albert Museum) and at Cold Spring Harbor
I saw an exhibition of Chihuly at Kew, summer ’05. Took loads of photos.
Dumped the photos onto my external HD. Two days later—just before I was going to back them all up to CD—the drive died.
I still have the disk, in case I ever have a spare grand to spend on data recovery.
I could have seen Chihuly in California this summer, but it was more expensive than the regular museum ticket, and I was in a hurry (my travels allow no time to rest – I had to run through the museum as it was) so I didn’t go to that specific exhibit. I went to 5 museums in 3 days or so. It’s not that I don’t like art, it’s that there is too much of it and I want to see it all, but that’s not possible!