7 Snail Art

Snail art needs defining. I don’t mean the seemingly random silvery paths left by snails before the rain washes them away, or the patterns created on glass when their teeth have scraped away adherent algae. Both are beautiful in their own way. I mean something man-made, where the inspiration is the snail itself, and I include in this category items of jewellery, paintings and illustrations involving snails, shell decoration, sculpture and even buildings and architectural features.

Some of the earliest examples of personal adornment involve snail shells. The wear marks on shells of the sea snail Nassarius kraussianus found in Blombos Cave in South Africa indicate they were strung on a necklace. This early example of a ‘string of beads’ dates back some 75,000 years, and there are even earlier examples of perforated shells held in museums that indicate early man’s ability to understand and appreciate the beauty of these natural objects. Chris Henshilwood, director of the Blombos Cave project, says this about snail jewellery:

The shells provide powerful evidence of modern thought and the earliest storage of information outside the human brain. The wearing of a necklace indicates symbolically organised behaviour suggesting that the people who made them 75,000 years ago were able to communicate using a detailed and precise language. Once symbolically mediated behaviour was adopted by our ancestors, it meant communication strategies rapidly shifted, leading to the transmission of individual and widely shared cultural values, traits that typify our own behaviour.1

Shell necklaces made of snails form traditional dress in Papua, New Guinea.

Just about every culture in the world has made use of snail shells for artistic purposes. Mention was made earlier of the extensive use of cowries for self-adornment. The shells of other small marine snails were fashioned into crowns by the Solomon Islanders and in North America the native Americans used shells extensively as decoration. Likewise, they were used in the Minoan civilization for decorating floors, rooms and drinking vessels, and independently by the Aztecs and Mayans. In Borneo small mud snails were sewn onto skirts, while in the Philippines sections of cone shells were threaded on sashes and worn by men on special occasions. Larger, heavier shells like the Turban, Turbo marmoratus, were polished and carved to enhance their beauty or fashioned into utilitarian objects like spoons. The shells of these larger marine snails were also sought by goldsmiths and during the sixteenth century were fashioned into exotic vessels such as drinking cups. Turban shells were also popular because they could be polished to expose their mother-of-pearl lining. In the eighteenth century Italian carvers, notably those in Naples, began using shells to make brooches. Cowries and snails of the family Cassidae, other-wise known as helmet-shells, proved easy to carve and made interesting cameos, popular in Victorian times. Cameo brooches of the period commonly featured the profile of a lady’s head, while many a Victorian home had displayed on a mantelpiece a tiger cowrie with the Lord’s Prayer carved on its surface.² Today glass-blowers continue to produce items based on the snail and its shell, sometimes emphasizing colour, sometimes the spiral configuration of the shell and occasionally the distinctive horns of the animal.

A modern bracelet made from snail shells.

The Lord’s Prayer engraved on the surface of this tiger cowrie.

Representations of snails appear in mosaics as far back as Roman times. The floor in the basilica at Aquileia, for example, shows a basket containing snails. Their significance is unclear though snails, as hibernating animals, were important symbolically, representing death and resurrection. Another mosaic, forming part of the apse of the basilica of San Clemente in Rome, features a snail pursued by a bird. Snails appear occasionally as marginal illustrations in medieval texts like the Macclesfield Psalter,3 but to see more carefully executed representations of snails we have to wait until the sixteenth century and refer to books primarily devoted to flower illustrations. One example is the Mira calligraphiae monumenta (Model Book of Calligraphy) of Emperor Rudolph II, who held court in Prague. Here, the snails illustrated are recognizably of the genus Cepaea.⁴ Dutch allegorical paintings often feature the shells of exotic sea snails, an example being Harmen Steenwyck’s Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life, now in the National Gallery in London. Still-life paintings of the seventeenth century often include snails too, not always as their centrepiece, but as an integral part of a still-life composition. If you visit the collection of seventeenth-century Dutch flower paintings at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge you will see life-size paintings of snails crawling amongst the flowers and fruit. Again, if you walk into the Tradescant Room at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, your attention is immediately drawn to a canvas featuring John Tradescant the Younger and his friend Zythepsa of Lambeth, whose collection of exotic sea shells features prominently in the picture. For sheer numbers of snail shells however, Jan van Kessel’s seventeenth-century painting Still Life of Shells and Flowers is without equal. Among the hundreds of marine shells on display, just a few snail bodies can be seen protruding from their shells. In each case they are of the land variety.

Detail from a 12th-century mosaic in San Clemente, Rome, showing a snail being pursued by a bird.

Thomas de Critz, Portrait of John Tradescant the Younger with Roger Friend and a Collection of Exotic Shells, 1645, oil on canvas. The Tradescants father and son were keen collectors of exotic sea shells, and their holdings formed the basis of the Ashmolean collection.

Printing and illustrating books about snails, particularly their shells, was an expensive business. Despite this, in the course of the eighteenth century many were produced in England and on the Continent. Peter Dance, in a survey of illustrated conchological books, mentions several.5 One, by German engraver Franz Regenfuss, called Choix de coquillages, was produced with the financial assistance of the Dutch royal family and appeared in 1758, the year Linnaeus brought out his Systema Naturae. Like Seba’s illustrations of shells in the pages of his massive Thesaurus, the exotic specimens in Regenfuss’s book were arranged as if on display in a cabinet.⁶ The same concern for tasteful arrangement is evident in a book of shells based on the collection of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Testacea Musei Caesarei Vindobonensis, housed in the Natural History Museum in Vienna.⁷

There is a wealth of snails in Jan van Kessel’s 1654 oil Still Life of Shells and Flowers; notice the one emerging from its shell in the centre of the picture.

As well as being a notable collector of shells, Albertus Seba was fond of arranging them in patterns and creating faces, as seen in this 1734 ‘Cabinet of Natural Curiosities’.

The marble cone shell in Rembrandt’s 1650 etching The Shell is a mirror image of the actual cone shell (Conus marmoreus).

Mention has been made in an earlier chapter of the carefully executed shell illustrations in Lister’s Historia Conchyliorum, in Great Britain.8 Another Englishman, George Humphrey, caused Emanuel Mendes da Costa to produce a book of hand-coloured shell engravings called Elements of Conchology. What is unusual about this work is that it was completed in prison after da Costa had walked off with the funds of the Royal Society, where he had held office.⁹

It was not uncommon for the engraved images of snail shells to be shown with their spirals reversed. Such is the case in Rembrandt’s etching of Conus marmoreus. Woodblock printing, engraving on metal plates and lithography produces a mirror image of the object to be illustrated. This means the engraver has to reverse what he puts on the metal plate to produce an image of the snail with its spiral correctly displayed. Curiously, in the case of snail shells, this wasn’t done. Was it simply that the illustrator believed that reversal didn’t matter, or was it perhaps a convention adopted by engravers at that time? It is a problem that exercised Stephen Jay Gould in an essay, ‘Left Snails and Right Minds’, and one that produced a considerable response from his readers.10 Unfortunately, no firm conclusion has ever been reached, though convention is behind the European tradition of displaying shells with the apex pointing down so that they resemble spinning tops.

As more and more species of marine and land snails were discovered world-wide, the numbers of illustrations increased proportionately. A copy of the Universal Conchologist by Thomas Martyn, for example, had 160 plates of shells distributed between four folio volumes.¹¹ Smaller, less exotic species of snail, many from freshwater, also began to appear in books, often drawn in exacting detail like beautiful miniatures on the page.

While capturing the snail on the page, using its shell as a form of decoration was gaining ground in Europe. Shells of all sorts, like those that covered the walls of Wunderkammern in Renaissance times, were sought to adorn the walls of grottoes. Ear shells, conches, top shells, indeed any suitably convoluted or coloured snail shell, both uni-valve and bi-valve, were used along with spar, corals and quartz as decoration and it was in England in particular that the passion for shell grottoes established itself. The oldest surviving grotto in England was built by Isaac de Caus around 1630 for Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford, at Woburn. It forms part of the ground floor of the house and consists of a vaulted hall open on one side. The grotto room has a fountain and figurative mosaics made chiefly from ear shells with their inner nacre exposed. Another grotto of comparable age exists in Skipton Castle in Yorkshire.

The attraction of sea shells as decoration is explained in the pages of Barbara Jones’s book Follies and Grottoes:

Nothing about a shell is quite as it appears to be at first glance; tiger shells look sharply black and white, but the stripes and spots are never truly regular, ultimately unresolvable, and never quite black or quite clear, but swimming slightly as in the tides of some solid sea. There is no edge to, and no possibility of matching, the soft or rosy pinks that flush within so many shells; the colour retreats to the heart of the spiral as we look or sinks below the indefinite surface, soft and warm to the eye, hard and cool beneath the finger, matt and gleaming, at once chalk and china.12

As the fashion took hold, huge numbers of sea shells, ranging from exotic examples from the West Indies to more common varieties found on our coasts, were imported. Susanna, Viscountess Fane, was reputed to have spent a sum three times the value of her house on her grotto, while Arthur Chichester, the third Earl of Donegal, was particularly criticized for his profligacy in acquiring shells, thousands of which were never used. As Naomi Miller points out, as gardens changed in the course of the century, so too did grottoes.¹³ From walls densely covered with shells, grottoes assumed a more natural appearance, often bleak and cavernous and evoking a sense of ‘delightful horror’. Snail shells were still used, but more selectively. Thomas Goldney, a Quaker merchant, constructed a cave encrusted with exotic species from the West Indies and Africa as well as native species in Clifton. It had a wilder, more naturalistic appearance than the ones at Woburn and Skipton. Still more grottoes were designed to show off their owners’ collections of sea shells. At Goodwood Park, in West Sussex, in the 1700s Sarah Lennox, Duchess of Richmond, and her daughters spent seven years creating a Georgian pavilion lined with thousands of shells and pieces of mirrored glass. Everything except the floor, the fireplace and the skirting was constructed from sea shells, placed with care and precision to give an unusual effect.

By the end of the eighteenth century a grotto composed of ear shells, top shells and mussels had become a selling feature for a country house, analogous to a conservatory or swimming pool today. Not just grottoes, but household items such as vanity cases, caskets and snuff boxes were smothered in the shells of small snails, giving rise to a style known as Rocaille. By the nineteenth century shell-work had spread to places of entertainment. Shells were used to decorate gardens, teashops and conservatories and in the manufacture of gifts such as sailor’s valentines. Here the shells of small marine snails were arranged as a mosaic, on a paper base, in octagonal wooden boxes and sold to sailors on voyages to the West Indies as a gift for their loved ones back home. Included in the design was a message, or token of love. Their production became a cottage industry on the Caribbean island of Barbados.14

A typical Sailor’s Valentine housed in its octagonal box.

Kitao Shigenasa, carved wooden netsuke of a snail on a tub.

Having become so popular, the fashion for grottoes and shell-work was destined to wane and as Tim Knox, architectural historian of the National Trust, observed: ‘the fashion for grottoes passed, except for tiny and crude echoes in suburban back gardens or cheap sideshows in seaside resorts’.¹⁵ Where grottoes did survive, they mostly slid into disrepair. Shell figurines, brooches, snail-encrusted picture frames and crucifixes have become a legacy of an age when the snail shell reigned supreme as an ornamental item. There remain a few hopeful signs. A new shell grotto was created at the Menagerie at Horton, not far from the old one at Woburn, in 1996 under the direction of Christopher Hobbs. Here, in a cellar, a world of glistening ormers, mother-of-pearl and snail-encrusted mirrors was created together with a fountain, a marble Orpheus and a three-headed dog with a tail spiked with auger shells. Cherkley Court, former home of the newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, opened its doors to the public and with it went on display a new shell grotto designed by Belinda Eade. Shells imported from Japan, Australasia and the South Pacific successfully created a variety of textures, from smooth to craggy, in a vault below the staircase leading from house to garden. Eade has taken for her inspiration the Greek myth of Arethusa, a nymph who was transformed into a fountain.16 With Robert Myers incorporating shell and pebble grotto niches into his award-winning garden at Chelsea in 2007, and the success of Blott Kerr-Wilson in her imaginative use of shells in decorating buildings here and abroad, a revival of interest in this type of snail art may well be under way.

The traditional spiral shape of the snail shell has influenced both designers and architects. From hats to earrings to items of pottery there is something intrinsically satisfying about the logarithmic spiral. A trip to Rome will quickly convince anyone in doubt of its strong influence on architecture. Spiral features abound, from staircases to rolled volutes at the top of Ionic columns. Borromini, the great Baroque church architect, is believed to have been inspired by one of his own shells when he designed the spiral lantern tower above the dome of the chapel of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. No fountain in the city appears complete without tritons blowing jets of water from conch shells. It is said that Leonardo himself was inspired to design the spiral staircase at Blois by looking at a snail, and in Spain such staircases are actually known as escalera de caracol (snail staircases). Some believe that the Japanese drew inspiration from snail shells when designing their temples and pagodas. That is certainly true of Frank Lloyd Wright when he conceived the spiral ramp, a distinguishing feature of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The design is strongly reminiscent of the upturned shell of Thatcheria mirabilis. The same spiral motif can be seen in the Spiral Minaret of the Great Mosque in Samarra. Described as the ‘Malwiya snail’, this remarkable construction in mud and brick was built by Caliph al-Mutawakil in the ninth century. It is 164 feet high and was described by a traveller in 1636 as ‘a twirling periwinkle’. Sadly, its top was damaged in the Iraq war.

It is thought that the Japanese wonder shell (Thatcheria mirabilis) inspired Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York.

What remains of the 9th-century spiral minaret can still be seen at the Great Mosque in Samarra, Iraq.

The spiral stair of a lighthouse resembles the coiling of a snail.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘Snail’, lithographed for Jules Renard’s 1899 Histoires Naturelles, ‘Immobile in the cold season, his giraffe-like neck withdrawn, the snail sits like a bump on a log’.

Vladimir Tatlin, one of the founders of the movement known as Constructivism, which originated in Moscow just after the First World War, designed a monument based on a double spiral with a strong resemblance to a snail. Using steel and glass, it would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower had it been built. The structure, a monument to the Third International, only ever existed as a model; it proved too expensive to build.

A concern with spirals wasn’t just the preoccupation of a few architects. Sculptors too tried their hands at experimenting with the spiral form. For Louise Bourgeois the spiral was ‘an attempt at controlling the chaos’. The Lair (1962) is distinctly snail-like, offering on the one hand protection and a place to hide and, on the other, signalling a trap into which the unwary may be lured. For the Canadian John Macnab the snail shell is an expression of order and beauty, but the ultimate in spiral abstraction is to be found in the famous picture by Matisse of The Snail. Started towards the end of his life as a series of drawings of a garden snail, it became transformed into a spiral of coloured paper cutouts mounted on canvas. Matisse himself said of the creative process: ‘I first of all drew the snail from nature holding it . . . I became aware of an unrolling . . . I found an image in my mind purified of the shell . . . Then, I took the scissors.’17

In the series of numbers that describes the spiral shape of the snail shell, each term is the sum of the two preceding terms. The ratio of each term to the one before gradually converges to a limit called Golden Mean. The same ratio is also known as the Divine Proportion. Doubtless this explains why the snail’s shell has been such a source of inspiration to artists world-wide, why it has become a symbolic object and why it is so extensively copied and used as decorative motif.