Teaching Entomology through Images: Insect Representation in Wallcharts between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

The presentation focuses on how insects have been represented and taught in schools and universities between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often in relation to matters like public health, economic botany or agriculture. As argued by Massimiano Bucchi (1998), the “golden age” for such a genre of didactic communication is to be located between 1870 and 1920. In this period several different kinds of wallcharts were produced, printed, and sold in large quantities thanks to the improvement in lithography: from the collection published by the German Rudolf Leuckart and Hinrich Nitsche (1877-1892) to the collection edited by the French Rémy Perrier & Cépède (1880-1930). Insects were present in many of these collections with peculiar visual languages and styles of representation. In many universities handmade wallcharts were also prepared by students and professors. It was the case of the anonymous collection realized by the zoologists of the University of Padova at the beginning of the twentieth century (https://phaidra.cab.unipd.it/detail_object/o:12794), which tells us a lot about the importance of visual representation in zoological education and knowledge-making of the time. It reveals how subjects were chosen and how to represent insects by looking at the major printed collections, which marked a standard in the field. Looking at both history of science and history of education, this presentation aims at highlighting the different ways in which insects have been represented and used in science education as popular visual educational tools and tries to understand the circulation of some “favourite” motives.