The parietal tables of Rudolf Leuckart

The collection of illustrations of the Animal Biology section of the Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences is made up of two large blocks of works: the illustrations on Zoology (Zoologische Wandtafeln), edited by Theodor Fischer in Cassel and illustrated at the end of the 1800s by R. Leuckart and H. Nitsche, and the “native” tables, made by local designers during the last century; the latter of which are, however, not exhibited.

The first collection is certainly the most prestigious and consists of 91 illustrations made between 1877 and 1892, mainly by Rudolf Leuckart, but also by Hinrich Nitsche. The entire collection was edited by Theodor Fischer in Cassel (today Kassel, in central-western Germany). The main illustrator of the collection was Karl Georg Friedrich Rudolf Leuckart, born in Helmstedt in 1822, an illustrious parasitologist (his studies on the Taenia genus are well known), as well as a lecturer for many years at the University of Leipzig (Leipzig).

The complete collection consisted of 101 illustrations (of which 54 signed by Leuckart alone and 47 by Leuckart and Nitsche). Each parietal table is obtained by chromolithography, with printing in four sections, subsequently joined on a canvas support and individually retouched.
The tables are accompanied by an explanatory catalog (Leuckart & Nitsche, 1877) which describes in detail the content, generally in three languages ​​(German, French and English), only for some the explanatory text is written only in German. The catalog shows the tables in the order in which they were published and not in the systematic order, therefore even their numbering (with Roman numerals) does not follow this order.

In the tables of Leuckart and collaborators, the scientific aspect is emphasized and emphasized above all, sometimes even at the expense of the purely aesthetic one, but this still allows us to appreciate the exceptional precision in the anatomical and morphological representation, especially if we consider the optical instruments. available in the mid-19th century. Furthermore, to appreciate the great impact of the use of colors that allows a vision of different and superimposed planes in a single illustration. Unfortunately, in general, there is no reference to the habitat in which the animals represented live.

As pointed out by Mazzolini, Leuckart's wall tables were also a means of spreading his classification scheme of animals. For example, he was responsible for the subdivision of the Metazoa into the six phyla Coelenterata, Echinodermata, Anellida, Arthropoda, Mollusca and Vertebrata (Mazzolini, 1997). As underlined by the website of the Museum of Natural History in Milan: "The tables also offer the possibility of retracing part of the history of biology and of considering the changes that have occurred within a century: in them, for example, many animals, with very different body structures, are grouped into the Vermes type: within a few decades this heterogeneous group was completely abandoned in favor of more valid taxonomic categories such as the phyla of the Nemertea, Anellida, Platelminta etc. "

(edited by Giorgio Sabella and Fabio Massimo Viglianisi)