Notebooks from Brazil's cerrado.

• Author: Rutter, John

The miracle of life after in the dry savanna is captured in the botannical paintings and sketches of ninety-year-old Maria Werneck de Castro

Flames from a cattle rancher's torch spread along the surface of the cerrado, incinerating the low-lying vegetation and replacing nature's colors with black. Within a few weeks, however, green shoots broke through the seemingly barren soft as lush grass and wildflowers accustomed to this cycle of life in the savanna regenerated from roots buried deep and protected from the fire.

Maria Werneck de Castro was in her fifties when she first took in the sight of the burning savanna. Five decades of life had taken her to all parts of Brazil, but it was the beauty and uniqueness of the cerrado that touched her most deeply. For twenty years she had worked tirelessly as an anatomical illustrator, sketching human organs for scientific documentation. Now, like the grass of the cerrado, she was remade.

Werneck's life began in the city of Vassouras in the state of Rio de Janeiro on August 24, 1905, one of five children born to Luiz Werneck Texeira de Castro and Maria Albuquerque de Castro. Her family, which formed part of the coffee artistocracy during the Brazilian empire (1821-89), held seven plantation in the coffee-rich Paraiba valley. The plantation owners, known as "coffee barons," or baroes do cafe, because so many of them had been granted titles by the Emperor Dora Pedro II, managed to maintain a life-style appropriate to their station long after the empire ceased to exist. This strongly influenced Werneck's early education and provided her first exposure to art. "It was expected that children of nobility would attend art sessions. At age fifteen, I began learning art by imitating old Dutch and German prints."

Werneck received direction for her artistic skills in 1940 when she was introduced to Professor Raymundo Honorio of the Manguinhos Institute. Here she adapted her natural artistic talent to the technical skills necessary for scientific illustration, specifically pathological anatomy. Artist Dulce Nascimento, who has known her since 1981, says, "Mrs. Werneck has such a deep sensitivity; it is difficult to imagine her in an operating room surrounded by surgical instruments, drawing visceral organs."

Yet she reproduced likenesses of human organs to accompany the written work of doctors for almost twenty years. It became clear that scientific illustration provided Werneck with an outlet for her skill and her desire to lend her support to important research. Although she had found direction, she did not find inspiration until she was transferred to the budding capital of Brasilia in...