Daniela Bleichmar

Painting as Exploration: Visualizing Nature in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Science*

This essay discusses the production of botanical illustrations by Spain’s Royal Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada (1783 /1810), directed by the Spanish physician José Celestino Mutis (1732 /1809) (Amaya 1983; Frı́as Núñez 1994; Gredilla 1982; Pérez Arbeláez 1983; Villegas 1992). Over the years, the expedition’s more than 40 artists created a staggering total of approximately 6,700 illustrations*/ far more than any other European expedition at the time, to the best of my knowledge. Although existing studies have carefully reconstructed the workshop practices that produced these images (de Pedro 1988, 1989; Rodrı́guez Nozal and Gónzalez Bueno 1995; Sotos Serrano 1982, 1984; Torre Revello 1994; Uribe Uribe 1954, 1958), neither the reasons for Mutis’ extreme dedication to visual material nor the ways in which these illustrations functioned vis-à-vis contemporary natural history iconography have been fully examined. This essay seeks to answer two questions: how does one understand this apparent oddity, the botanical expedition as a painting workshop? And, what can one make of the noticeable differences between the expedition’s American-painted images and those produced by contemporary European botanical illustrators? In the first section of the essay I present the manufacture and use of images as a technique for investigating, explaining, and possessing nature. Eighteenth-century natural history expeditions, I argue, acted as visualization projects that enabled Europeans to see the nature of the Spanish Americas. This is not a mere figure of speech. Expeditions always employed draughtsmen, regularly traveling with as many artists as naturalists, if not more. Whether they focused on natural history, astronomy, geography, navigation, exploration, or cartography, and whether they originated in Spain, Britain, France, or other European territories, all expeditions produced numerous images as part of their stated goals. At home or abroad, European naturalists used images in their daily work, and wrote abundantly about

Visible empire: scientific expeditions and visual culture in the Hispanic enlightenment

This essay discusses the connections between botany and visual culture in the Hispanic enlightenment, addressing the importance of natural history to the economic aims of imperialism as well as the cultural and intellectual importance of imperialism to the development of natural history. It focuses on the thousands of botanical paintings produced between 1783 and 1816 by a large team working in New Granada (now Colombia) under the direction of the Spanish naturalist José Celestino Mutis. Images played multiple roles within Spains ‘visible empire.’ Botanical illustrations helped to discipline the eyes of both botanists and artists; they served as entry point, instrument, and result of natural historical investigation; they were essential within a culture of gift-exchange and patronage; and they provided a tool with which to think. However, if an imperial eye brought certain objects into sharp focus, it did so by a process of selective blindness. Images preserved the impermanent and transported the distant, but they did so by excising precisely what made the objects of illustration desirable: their place of origin. The indigenous—people, plants, soil, knowledge—was removed as local plants yielded global knowledge and became global commodities.

The Imperial Visual Archive: Images, Evidence, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Hispanic World

This article examines the role of images as evidence and sources of knowledge in the early modern Hispanic world, arguing for the continued importance of visual epistemology as a technique for producing and circulating knowledge from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Visual materials played a central role in the production of knowledge, scientific and imperial, and served as key instruments for addressing the considerable challenges of distance and place posed by the geographical expanse of the empire. Historiographically, the article highlights the active generation of scientific knowledge in the Hispanic world and connects it to imperial and administrative practices; it highlights trans-regional channels of circulation, demonstrating the connected histories of the viceroyalties and peninsula and the multidirectional trajectories in which information and knowledge moved; and it points out deep connections between earlier and later colonial periods. Methodologically, the essay explores the potential of images as historical sources, suggesting that the high status of images in the early modern Hispanic world led to the creation of an enormous pictorial archive that deserves the same level of scholarly attention and rigor that has been lavished on the textual archive.