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Super models

There’s a small world of wonder inside a museum case as you enter the Tentacles special exhibition.

Be sure to take a closer look at the delicate beauty of three glass cephalopods inside – two squid and an octopus – the history of these 130-year-old glass gems is as fascinating as the animals they depict.

Age of wonder

Museums sprang up quickly in the 19th century to satisfy the explosion of interest by the public in science and education. Curators scrambled to display preserved plants and taxidermied animals, but fell short with marine invertebrates. The scarce specimens usually floated in jars, their natural colors all but gone.

Enter Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. Natural history artists, this father-and-son team created a glass menagerie of more than 600 different species of marine invertebrates, accurate to the smallest detail. So magically beautiful was their work that it was once described as “an artistic marvel in the field of science and a scientific marvel in the field of art.”

Between 1863 and 1936, the Blaschkas supplied thousands of models to museums and universities all over the world. The culmination of their careers was the privately commissioned glass flowers collection at Harvard University.

Many of the invertebrate models were broken or lost over the years. Some remain, even in pieces, at a handful of academic institutions, including the largest collection at Cornell University.

Age of restoration

As the daughter of a glass chemist, Elizabeth Brill likes to say she has glass in her genes. She also has a background in marine science, which makes her the perfect “invertebrate preservation specialist” of the Blaschka models at Cornell University.

“I know more about them than anyone,” she says. “The Blaschkas were the best lampworkers (manipulating glass with a torch) ever – before or since.”

She should know. Elizabeth has spent more than 20 years working with the Blaschka invertebrates at Cornell and Harvard, and estimates she has restored about 900 models.

She’s restored models ranging in size from 1.5 centimeters to nearly 2 feet long, and spent as little as 20 minutes to as much as five weeks on a project. Her favorites include some of the large squid and sea cucumbers, even though they’re challenging, and all manner of nudibranchs. “I never get tired of them,” she says.

Her least favorite she called “the never-ending anemone.” As soon as she would successfully reattach one tiny tentacle, four or five others would fall off. “I wound up having to replace them all,” she says.

She also confessed to a particular fondness for the “handle-bar mustache” squid she restored for Tentacles. The Aquarium paid Cornell for Elizabeth to restore the three models on display, and to deliver them personally.

She will return when Tentacles eventually closes to pack up our models and bring them home to Cornell so others will have the opportunity to gaze in wonder at these miniature marvels.

#monterey bay aquarium #Tentacles #blaschkas #glassworking #cephalopods #cephalopod week #blaschka