Ignaz Schiffermüller, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Ignaz Schiffermüller

Austrian entomologist

Date of Birth: 02-Oct-1727

Place of Birth: Hellmonsödt, Upper Austria, Austria

Date of Death: 21-Jun-1806

Profession: naturalist, zoologist, lepidopterist, entomologist

Zodiac Sign: Libra


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About Ignaz Schiffermüller

  • Ignaz Schiffermüller (born 2 October 1727 in Hellmonsödt; died 21 June 1806 in Linz) was an Austrian naturalist mainly interested in Lepidoptera. Schiffermüller was a teacher at the Theresianum College in Vienna.
  • His collection was presented to the old United Royal and Imperial Natural History Collections (Vereinigtes k.k.
  • Naturalien-Cabinet) at the Hofburg where it burnt during the revolution in 1848.
  • With Michael Denis, also a teacher at the Theresianum, he published the first index of the Lepidoptera of the Viennese region das Systematische Verzeichnis der Schmetterlinge der Wienergegend herausgegeben von einigen Lehrern am k.
  • k.
  • Theresianum (1775).
  • His collection is in the Kaiserlichen Hof-Naturalienkabinett (now Naturhistorisches Museum Wien).
  • Schiffermüller is also noteworthy for his work in developing a scientifically based colour nomenclature. In his Versuch eines Farbensystems (1772), Schiffermüller addressed the need for a standardised nomenclature with which to describe the countless colours of nature.
  • Work by predecessors in this field had proved unsatisfactory: he mentions suggestions made by Giovanni Antonio Scopoli (1723–1778) in his Entomologia Carniolica (1763) and August Johann Rösel (1705–1759) in his Insecten-Belustigung (1746–61).
  • To serve as a model, Schiffermüller himself presents a table classifying and sub-classifying shades of blue, and naming them in German, Latin and French: in all, 81 German terms are listed.
  • Matching this table, and using the same alphabetical notation, is a 3 x 12 matrix showing a set of colour samples for blue, with some discussion of the pigments used.
  • The work also contains an attractive full-page engraving with a colour circle, inspired by the optical theory of Father Louis Bertrand Castel (1688–1757) and hand-tinted with twelve colours continuously shading into one another.
  • Evident throughout this pioneering work is a subtle response to the nuances of colour and their accurate rendition.

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