Visible Empire: Scientific Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (2009)
Bleichmar, Daniela (Author)
Postcolonial Studies
Volume: 12
Pages: 441--466
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Science, Colonialism, and the Postcolonial”
Language: English
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 Jose Celestino Mutis. Images played multiple roles within Spain's '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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
...MoreDescription English version of JournalArticle; Daniela Bleichmar; Resumen de El imperio... (2008) [1022555]. Article focuses on the botanical paintings produced between 1783 and 1816 in New Granada (now Colombia) under the Spanish naturalist Jose Celestino Mutis.
Article Seth, Suman (2009) Putting Knowledge in Its Place. Postcolonial Studies (p. 373).
Article Bleichmar, Daniela (2008) Resumen de El imperio visible: la mirada experta y la imagen en las expediciones científicas de la Ilustración. Cuadernos Dieciochistas: revista consagrada al estudio de la historia, el pensamiento, la literatura, el arte y la ciencia del siglo XVIII (p. 21).
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