Neue Ergebnisse aus den Forschungen zur Geschichte der Familie Rösel-Kleemann sowie zu den Musterblättern und zur Illumination der „Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium“

Von Prof. Dr. Manfred Niekisch, Frankfurt/Main

Zusammenfassung

Durch die Auswertung von Kirchen- und Grabstättenbüchern konnten weitere Informationen zu den Lebensgeschichten von August Johann Rösel und seiner Frau Elisabeth Maria Rosa, so auch die Umstände ihrer Eheschließung, rekonstruiert sowie die Anzahl ihrer Kinder geklärt werden. Auch zur Familiengeschichte von Elisabeth Maria wurden Daten gesammelt. Für acht der neun Kinder konnten die Tauf- und Beerdigungsdaten gefunden werden. Ihre Vornamen erhielten sie teilweise nach Familienangehörigen und Freunden. Über das Ordensbuch des Nürnberger MopsenCapituls, in dem Rösel Mitglied war, ergeben sich weitere Hinweise auf Rösels soziale Verbindungen, so zu den Malern Harrich und von der Smissen. Die Biographien seiner Tochter Catharina Barbara und deren späteren Ehemannes Christian Friedrich Carl Kleemann können um verschiedene Aspekte bereichert werden, wobei die Verdienste der beiden bei der Sicherung und Fortführung des Werkes von Rösel hervortreten.
Die erst kürzlich bekanntgewordenen Muster- und anderen Tafeln zum Froschbuch aus dem Besitz der Naturhistorischen Gesellschaft Nürnberg (Niekisch 2009) werden einer näheren Betrachtung unterzogen. Die teilweise ausführlichen handschriftlichen Angaben zu den Farben können – unter anderem durch Vergleiche mit einem ähnlichen Tafelsatz zu Rösels Insektenwerk in der Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg – eindeutig Kleemann als Autor zugeordnet werden. Diese Tafeln vermitteln einen Hinweis auf die große Präzision, mit der die Farben ausgewählt und eingesetzt wurden. Beide Tafelsätze entstanden mit ziemlicher Sicherheit zwischen 1766 und 1783. Sie scheinen mit der Absicht der Sicherung des Wissens um die Farbgebung angelegt worden zu sein. Die Kolorierung als wichtigste oder einzige Variable zwischen den einzelnen Exemplaren des Froschbuches lässt – unter anderem mangels Referenzexemplaren – keine Zuordnung zu bestimmten Illuminatoren oder Zeitabschnitten zu, wobei festzustellen ist, dass Exemplare der ersten, 1758 erschienenen Ausgabe der „Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium“ noch bis 1800 produziert wurden.

Summary

By analyzing contemporary church archives and grave registers it was possible to find out more details about the lives of August Johann Rösel and his wife Elisabeth Maria Rosa, for examples the circumstances of their marriage. Information has been collected also on the family of the latter one. The exact number of the couple’s children could be clarified, and for eight of the nine children the dates of their baptism and burial could be found. Most of them died at a very young age and only three of them survived their father. Their names were given to them at least in part after persons whom Rösel and his wife had close relationship with. Together with the list of members of the Nuremberg „Pug Order“ – an organisation similar to the Freemasons – they reveal more about the social connections. A few important details could be added to the biographies of Rösel’s daughter Catharina Barbara and her later husband Christian Friedrich Carl Kleemann. His biography was added by his widow in 1792 to the second edition of the 5th volume of the Insecten-Belustigung and describes him as a gifted artist and naturalist and a diligent and introverted man. Rösel became aware of him when Kleemann was studying at the Painters Academy in Nuremberg and taught him further. They met certainly not before 1756. Kleemann and Catharina Barbara married one and a half year after Rösel’s death. In his last years of life Kleemann was unable to work because of psychological problems and other diseases. Catharina Barbara carried on safeguarding and continuing her father’s and her husband’s work until her death. She did not give up plans to publish a French edition of the frog book and tried to sell her father’s works also in France and England by putting announcements in newspapers in these countries. Her maybe greatest supporter was Professor Johann Hermann from Strasbourg, while one of the persons who gave her lots of trouble was Georg Wolfgang Franz Panzer junior who had evidently copied from her husbands works and was defamatory of her. Like her last children, she died in great poverty. The only recently found master plates and other plates for the frog book in the possession of the Naturhistorische Gesellschaft Nürnberg (Niekisch 2009) are looked at here in more detail. The handwritten notes on the colouring were compared with a similar set of master plates for the Insecten-Belustigung in the collection of the Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg and Kleemann could be identified without any doubt as the author. The plates reveal the great rigor which was used in selecting and applying the colours but also show that Kleemann was not very familiar with the frog anatomy. For example did he confuse the liver with the lung. The hand written comments are not recipes how to produce the colours but rather describe how the right illumination can be achieved by mixing different colours. In some cases, from the names of the colours their origin or composition can be deduced (like in verdigris or cambodge) while others simply describe the tone (such as „nut brown“ or „lilly green“). Ochre is mentioned in many different forms (e.g. light yellow, dark yellow, dark red burned). Both sets of plates were produced most likely between 1766 and 1783 with probably the only purpose of preserving the knowledge about how to illuminate the plates.
The engravings of the black and white plates differ in many aspects from the ones to be coloured. In the latter ones, for example structures of the skin and organs have been engraved as well as shadows, while in the first ones the organs are given only in the outline and no shadow is shown. That is, Rösel really has produced two different sets of plates for the sake of greater naturalness on the one side and more clarity on the other side.
The first edition of the „Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium“ was continuously produced from RÖSEL’s times to 1800, which is over a period of more than fourty years. Due to the lack of reference material and in the absence of securely recognizable specific characteristics in the illumination it is not possible today to determine whether a given volume is an early or late production rsp if it contains „early“ or „late“ colour plates. It is even problematic to find specific differences in the colouring for the three different editions (first, title and second edition).