Final Thoughts

For all this column’s previous musings on the Blaschkas’ “Oaten Pipes Hydroid,” something still puzzles. Developed from Allman’s illustration, the Hydroid’s two enlargement models are fairly close interpretations. But let’s look closely at the drawing of the "Hydroid" itself: Despite the glass figure’s elimination of much of Tubularia indivisa’s formal chaos, the animal in Allman’s plate writhes in sinuous curves. It branches into tiny buds; its heads turn in all directions. But the Hydroid suggests not a twisting arbor but a rigid bouquet: puzzling considering the Blaschkas’ otherwise faithful adherence to Allman’s plate.

Of course, the origins of this decision lie partly in economic necessity—slightly bent wires are quicker to produce than a curvilinear mass. As demand for their products increased, the Blaschkas began assembling animals more efficiently. Nevertheless, this utilitarian explanation feels insufficient. In Allman’s plate, most of the Hydroid heads lack sporosacs—and from the minority of heads that have them, they often dangle in a group of three. Allman’s enlargement, too, features a triplet chain. In the Blaschka Hydroid however, sporosacs fall in glittering pairs from nearly every flower, a multiplication of symmetry that required tedious, repetitive work to achieve. Even their microscopic model features two links and not three. This excess of twinning suggests some hidden intention on the part of the Blaschkas. Why this insistence on symmetry? For answers, we turn again to the legacy of the microscope.

An impassioned creationist and the founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Louis Agassiz purchased 350 Blaschka models for his museum after it opened in 1860. At this time, the study of the natural world had not yet sundered its ties to theology. Then-University President Charles Eliot wrote in 1886 that “the life principle or soul of that organism for which science has no better name than God, pervades and informs it so absolutely that there is no separating God from nature, or religion from science, or things sacred from things secular.” Squinting through the lens of a microscope, scientists received visual revelations.

The Blaschkas maintained a close and admiring correspondence with naturalist Ernst Haeckel, an eminent proponent of this doctrine. Haeckel studied marine invertebrates and protozoa; he believed in “crystal souls” and, according to historian David Brody, published volume after volume of works on sea life “studded with elaborately symmetrical groupings... finicky, jewel-box arrangements.” His lithographs rendered a natural world that was lavish and orderly, a totalitarian baroque that translated organic chaos into extravagantly stylized geometry. The microscopist’s illustrations argued that beneath the anarchy of life, there lay a methodical spiritual harmony. In a letter to Haeckel, Leopold Blaschka thanked him for his intellectual contributions to the glass models, writing that “[y]our kind attitude enables me, indeed, to execute my catalog more perfectly.” I believe that the symmetric design of the Hydroid reveals Haeckel’s spiritual influence.

Nearly all the literature on the Blaschka sea creatures discusses them in aggregate: As detailed substitutes for living specimens, the models conveyed biological information more handily than did illustrations. Explained as such, the collection constitutes little more than a footnote in the annals of zoological history. But the Hydroid hides a richer story, challenging the uncomplicated ‘scientific’ character of the model. Like all art, this Blaschka piece is a product of creative interpretation, and it takes significant liberties with its subject for both expressive and economic ends. Additionally, its historical context heavily stressed both the model’s ornamental status and the spirituality of all creation, both inflections invisible to the current period’s eye. In making these points, my goal was not to demonstrate that the Blaschka models are more ‘artistic’ than ‘objective.’ Rather, I argue that the peculiar character of 19th century natural history, which integrated under one name the aesthetic, rational, and spiritual, allowed the Hydroid to straddle a crossroads long vanished today—operating as the gorgeous representative of an altogether different notion of scientific truth.