Look Closer: This Lizard Tells a Story

Maria Sibylla Merian’s pioneering nature painting captured animals as they were.

The Morgan Library & Museum. 2001.10. Purchased on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Fund 1978.

Black Tegu Lizard (Tupinambis teguixin), Maria Sibylla Merian, circa 1705–15. Pen and black ink, watercolor and opaque watercolor, on vellum.

In 1699, Maria Sibylla Merian and her daughter Dorothea set sail from Amsterdam for Suriname. Merian was 52 years old, a successful artist and pioneering entomologist, whose book on caterpillars had demonstrated their stages of transformation from egg to butterfly. Her nearly two years in South America resulted in a volume on the metamorphosis of Surinamese insects that made her Europe’s preeminent female biologist for a time. The book also provided some of the most captivating images in natural history.

Earlier artists had depicted various specimens, in isolation and usually dead, but Merian tells stories about life. Butterflies appear alongside their caterpillars and chrysalises; ants crawl up and down the leaves they’ve decimated; flying cockroaches besiege a pineapple. By showing an animal in its natural context and in multiple forms, Merian pioneered an approach that we now take for granted. Her work introduced many new creatures to European readers, and was later a vital resource for the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus in designating species.

In Suriname, she and Dorothea brought that same observational precision and curiosity to bear on mammals, amphibians, and reptiles, such as the meter-long tegu lizard. The tegu lifespan is too extended for Merian to have fully observed it from egg to senescence. But she composed an image that manages to convey the lizard’s scale (it barely fits on the page) and speed (caught mid-motion), along with minute details of its appearance (every scale has its own shape and pattern). Anatomical accuracy did not preclude a fabulous S-shaped calligraphic flourish of tail, a bit of squiggly biological extravagance that invites us to wonder at the real world.

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This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Black Tegu Lizard.”