Of fish and flowers

The Harvard Museum of Natural History has a remarkable display of glass botanical models by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. These true-to-nature models of flowers, fruits, leaf systems, seed pods, and entire plants are unlike anything you might see elsewhere, and it hardly seems possible that they could all be made of glass. (It would apparently be impossible for them to be created today, because nobody can replicate the Blaschkas’ techniques.)

There’s currently a small special exhibition at the museum of glass models of marine invertebrates created by the Blaschkas. We went a week ago, on a Sunday morning when admission and street parking are free. I now know far more about the varied appearance of sea slugs that I’ll never encounter in the wild. I’ve been trying to figure out why the special exhibition was less interesting than the glass flowers, aside from having far fewer models and all the models being small, and I think familiarity with the subject matter is a big factor. There were some beautiful sea creature models, but their faithful execution in glass was not impressive because I don’t know how faithful the models were. I’ve had a similar reaction to the still life paintings at open studios, where the only ones I’ve really appreciated were the ones that still had the actual arrangements displayed at the studio along with the paintings. Perhaps that’s also why I’ve never found portrait galleries all that engaging—since they are hardly ever portraits of people I know—and part of why so many more people enjoy Madame Toussaud’s wax models of celebrities. We can’t say that something is true to life without a reference, and personally, we spend more time tending our garden than we do deep-sea diving.