3-091-782 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Ear of wheat and Corn Cockle with Metamorphoses of the Five-Spot Ladybird and Blowfly, after 1683. Corncockles grow in wheat fields, and in her drawing from the second volume of the caterpillar book (1683) Maria Sibylla Merian accordingly combined the flower with an ear of wheat. On the plants she staged the metamorphoses of a ladybird and a blowfly. Between them are the larva and pupa of the fly seen on the lowermost leaf of the corn cockle. Merian had found the larva when dissecting a dead mouse. She did not depict the mouse, however, because such a motif would have been an unpleasant sight, as she wrote in the text accompanying this plate of the Caterpillar Book.