Where Transience

Meets Eternity

The crystal creatures of

Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka

Among the many strange organisms evolution has created in the course of time, jellyfish are some of the most bizarre. Since primeval times they have floated through the oceans, immensely stable as a genus, but ephemeral in their individual shape in the form of discs, mushrooms, bells or cubes; complicated structures of jelly, held together by wafer-thin cell membranes that are only one fiftieth of a millimetre thick; ethereally delicate, but at times sophisticated killers due to their highly effective toxins; creatures without bones, without a heart, without a brain, without blood, more mysterious than life itself.

For the zoologist the jellyfish – or the medusa, as it was called in the 19th century – isn’t a complete animal, but only one of multiple stages of the animal’s development, comparable to the stages of a butterfly. The Cnidaria are so extraordinary, that with their thousands of species they form their own phylum. However, maybe the most intangible thing is their fleetingness. In the water a floating creature of unfathomable poetry – the enchantment disappears instantly when they are pulled out of their element. There is hardly anything more desolate than the pallid, dirty remnants of a dead jellyfish on the beach. A body weighing a few kilograms is reduced to a few grams of material, when you extract all of the liquid from it.

Rudolf Blaschka’s business card with two of the last remaining pieces of broken glass from the old Blaschka workshop in Dresden

Blaschka House Society Dresden

On the other hand anyone who knows with what rapturous enthusiasm the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, for example, studied the marine organisms in the second half of the 19th century, how he named an exquisitely magnificent disc jellyfish after his wife Anne, née Sethe, Desmonema annasethe and had it created as an elaborate ceiling ornament in his »Villa Medusa«, gets an idea of the fascination these delicate organisms can generate. Especially at that time, just as the diversity of marine life was gradually being discovered – and just as a Bohemian artisan named Leopold Blaschka began to copy the first marine creatures. Out of a material from which nobody had made scientific models up to then and which seemed to be further removed from the marine invertebrates actual bodies than any other material: glass.

For glass is a very special substance. Viewed crystallographically, glass is a solidified liquid. In some respects it is the opposite of a crystal, because as the glass cools down quickly the atoms do not have time to align themselves and to form a regular crystal lattice. Therefore it has a random structure which is most clearly noticeable when it breaks: Straight edges never form, but always irregularly curved »conchiform« fracture planes. However these are hard as steel: a piece of broken glass can be used to scratch a knife blade rather than vice versa.

Anybody who has watched glassblowers working knows in what specific manner this material can be formed. While working with glass, more so than with most other materials, rhythm and sense of timing play a special role. Glass is extremely malleable when melted; but it cools very quickly and is then instantly hard and brittle. This rapid flux between the states of absolute plasticity on the one hand and non-workability on the other hand creates the appeal and complexity when working with glass.

And precisely this multiple hybrid nature of glass, its oscillating between malleability and brittleness, between fragility and hardness, between regularity and irregularity, corresponds wonderfully with the mysterious diversity and inscrutability of the animals of the sea. These strange creatures, where matter is partly organised in an almost freakish manner, can only be depicted satisfyingly with glass. Whether gelatinous billowing corpuses or meter-long, razor-thin, stinging tentacles, whether basic searching tentacles or the most pointed calcite spikes, whether a bell-shaped, taut jellyfish umbrella or a muscular slug’s foot – they all find a valid expression through this material, in the diversity of these spotted and plucked, plunged and hinted at, pulled and curved forms. Not to mention the optical properties of their corpuses, their glow, their iridescence, their faint shimmer. Glass is therefore the perfect material to imitate these corpuses. It was merely a question of somebody having the idea to do it.

Every so often it is argued that experts today cannot explain how the Blaschkas managed to create many of the models at the time. What makes the works of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka essentially unique for all time are their perfection and abundance, the sum of their impact, and this develops from the interaction of several factors:

– tremendous technical craftsmanship with perfectionist standards;

– an overwhelming will to create;

– and finally the willingness to continuously study their craft.

As far as technical skills are concerned, these already ran abundantly in Leopold Blaschka’s family. He knew everything there is to know about glass and glass manufacturing and furthermore a fair amount about a couple of other materials. His grandfather had owned a glassworks and a sawmill; his father was a glassblower, a gem cutter and a mechanic; and he not only taught his son all these skills, but also fostered his artistic talent and his interest in the natural sciences. The young Leopold Blaschka, born in 1822 in Aicha in Northern Bohemia, today Český Dub, was therefore an extensively nurtured talent, the likes of which are often found in the enlightened middle classes of an old region rich in handicrafts and cultural heritage. And he wasn’t to be the last in line of this dynasty: he passed on his knowledge, increased by his life experience, to his son Rudolf, born in 1857, and who started as an apprentice in his workshop at the age of 13.

Entry in an old inventory list about a broken model

Institute of Zoology, Humboldt-University Berlin

Technical skills alone would not however have been sufficient to create this large variety of models. The Blaschkas’ will to create was enormous and they pulled out every stop imaginable to create the desired forms – whereby they did not limit themselves to traditional glass making techniques, but also employed unorthodox methods. They ground and dyed, lacquered and enamelled, drilled and perforated the glass; they glued pieces on and mounted the models in different ways, they supported delicate structures with wire or strings and placed coloured paper in hollow spaces to depict interior structures. And they continuously expanded their assortment. If the production of marine creatures was, in the beginning, one of several business areas next to glass eyes, laboratory equipment and jewellery, they concentrated on it more and more with growing success. In 1871 the catalogue included 271 models and advertised them as scientific equipment as well as living room ornaments; by 1878 production had already grown to 600 models, and by now there was only talk of science.

The third element that remains is the aptitude for learning. The determination of Leopold and – more so – of Rudolf to acquire biological, zoological and oceanographic expertise on their own initiative was astonishing. While at first they relied on scientific publications and information from experts when producing the crystal creatures, they increasingly acquired knowledge of their own. They corresponded with the professors who ordered their models about anatomical and developmental details and used every opportunity to find out about progress in research. They began to study the actual marine organisms, during excursions, with the help of specimens preserved in alcohol and by setting up aquariums in which they themselves raised the creatures. They studied the specialist literature; Rudolf in particular spent a lot of time in libraries and was accepted as a corresponding member of the Society of Natural History ISIS in Dresden in 1880 – not bad for a self-taught person. Around 1886 their professional reputation was so good that their models were accepted by the museums and collections as reflecting the current standards of scientific research. The amateurs had become authorities.

But a fourth factor remains that defines the uniqueness of the Blaschkas’ body of work: its historical context. Today such work, at least in this combination of craft and science, would no longer be possible. Such concentration on one subject is maybe possible for a scientist or an artist, but not for people who move somewhere in between. The service would simply not be affordable, and the competition of other media would not allow such a limitation. However, it was a very special moment in time in natural history, when Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka’s crystal creatures entered the world and became famous: it was the moment when the natural sciences began to comprehend the significance of the seas for life on earth.

Blaschka Collection in the Natural History Museum, Humboldt-University Berlin

Until around the middle of the 19th century the deep sea was an undiscovered world, just as far away as the endless expanse of space. Next to nothing was known about it; the prevailing opinion was that no life existed there. This subsequently began to change quickly and drastically. Especially the expedition of the HMS Challenger of 1872 to 1876 increased the knowledge of the sea dramatically – and began at the same time to spread the notion that they had only just begun, very tentatively, to scratch the surface of this vast amount of knowledge.

Thus the public’s enthusiasm at the time was twofold: they marvelled at the technical perfection and sheer beauty of the crystal creatures; and they were astonished at what kinds of animals haunted the distant deep sea.

The fascination for the beauty of nature and the amazement at its complexity are from the very beginning part of the natural scientist’s process of understanding. The French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré described the relationship like this: »The scholar does not study nature, because it is something useful; but rather he studies it, because he likes it, and he likes it, because nature is so beautiful.« Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka would probably have agreed with Poincaré wholeheartedly. Nonetheless for them beauty was not an end in itself. And maybe their creatures seem so real because their primary goal was not beauty, but truth.

That the preoccupation with nature can achieve aesthetically pleasing results was nothing new even then. Many of the painters who helped to secure the scientific yield of the big expeditions between the 17th and 19th century – first and foremost the Austrian Ferdinand Bauer, whose botanical drawings astound to the present day with their precision and aesthetical impact – were absolute experts. Also the insect pictures of Maria Sibylla Merian one century before had set the standards through their scientific content and virtuosity. And even Ernst Haeckel, the Blaschkas’ admired role model, immortalised himself with his »Kunstformen der Natur« (»Art Forms of Nature«) in the hall of fame of scientific artists.

Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, however, tower over this illustrious company through the way in which they translated natural phenomena into sensual representations – dazzling, enigmatic, unique. In such a way as if they themselves were bizarre organisms, whose foreignness cannot be fathomed completely.

Martin Rasper