There is a nice article from the Huffington Post: This 17th Century Scientific Illustrator Loved Butterflies Before It Was Cool, by Priscilla Frank. Merian is of interest to us as the painter of the most famous image of the white witch. The fact that the immature stages shown are not plausible (explanation on images page) is her error (or artistic license?). But the article emphasizes the bigger picture (so to speak), the very fact of metamorphosis, not well understood at the time.
I happened across an image posted by Robert Siegel (Stanford University) indicating Florida as the observation location (Feb 2003). Robert corrected this: actually collected in Trinidad (recorded as FL as he traveled through there). Not a surprising locale; I also find a post for a white witch collected in Trinidad July 2009. Trinidad is just 11 km from Venezuela.
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AuthorDavid Cappaert Archives
December 2019
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