Bleichmar, Daniela (Author)
This dissertation investigates the visual culture of natural history in the eighteenth century and its connection to European colonialism. In the second half of the century, Spain sponsored almost thirty scientific expeditions to its colonies, eight of which focused specifically on natural history. The almost 10,000 images produced by the Spanish expeditions, far from being mere ornamental byproducts of natural history investigation, were central to the project. Expeditions constituted visualization projects that enabled naturalists to identify, translate, transport, and appropriate nature. Natural history, I argue, was an overwhelmingly visual discipline whose notion of sight went beyond the physiological act of seeing to involve acts of expert viewing that required training and specialized practices of observation and representation--not sight, but insight. This visual culture of science was very much a material one linking vision to images, drawn or engraved, and to specimens in collections. Furthermore, the act of viewing nature was inextricably linked to colonialism, as visual culture allowed Europeans to identify, translate, transport, and appropriate foreign natures. The visual culture of nature can not be divorced from its colonial exploitation. More than mere representations, images acted as visual avatars replacing objects that did not survive travel and would otherwise remain unseen and unknown by Europeans. Images defined nature as a series of transportable objects whose identity and importance was divorced from the environment where they grew or the culture of its inhabitants. Pictures were used to reject the local as contingent, subjective, and translatable, favoring instead the dislocated global as objective, truthful, and permanent. In the Spanish Americas, however, hybrid scientific and artistic traditions emerged, presenting alternatives that contested and reappropriated nature from this European uniforming vision. The dissertation discusses, among other topics, the status and uses of images in eighteenth-century natural history; the importance of visual material in training the expert eyes and skilled hands of naturalists, artists, and collectors; the role of print culture in establishing a common vocabulary of scientific illustration, and the ways in which colonial naturalists and artists appropriated and transformed European models, producing hybrid, local representations.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65 (2005): 3961. UMI pub. no. 3151079.
Article
Bleichmar, Daniela;
(2009)
Visible Empire: Scientific Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB001022550/)
Article
Bleichmar, Daniela;
(2008)
Resumen de El imperio visible: la mirada experta y la imagen en las expediciones científicas de la Ilustración
(/isis/citation/CBB001022555/)
Book
Bleichmar, Daniela;
(2012)
Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB001212583/)
Article
Herranz, Jaime Pascual;
(2014)
The Arcane of Cinchona and the New Granada Expedition: The Multi-Dimensional Mind of José Celestino Mutis (1732--1808)
(/isis/citation/CBB001421994/)
Article
Bleichmar, Daniela;
(2006)
Painting as Exploration: Visualizing Nature in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Science
(/isis/citation/CBB000631064/)
Chapter
Kärin Nickelsen;
(2018)
Image and Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB318607436/)
Book
Bernal, J. E.;
Gutiérrez, Alberto Gómez;
(2010)
A impulsos de una rara resolución: el viaje de José Celestino Mutis al Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1760--1763
(/isis/citation/CBB001212584/)
Article
Marcaida, José Ramón;
Pimentel, Juan;
(2014)
Green Treasures and Paper Floras: The Business of Mutis in New Granada (1783--1808)
(/isis/citation/CBB001551587/)
Chapter
Bleichmar, Daniela;
(2008)
Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire
(/isis/citation/CBB000774587/)
Book
David Mabberley;
Mel Gooding;
Joseph Studholme;
(2017)
Joseph Banks' Florilegium: Botanical Treasures from Cook's First Voyage
(/isis/citation/CBB560573386/)
Article
Maldonado, J. L.;
Puig-Samper, M. Á.;
(2006)
An Unpublished Eighteenth Century Treatise on the Birds of Colonial Mexico
(/isis/citation/CBB000600286/)
Article
Groves, Eric W.;
(2001)
Archibald Menzies (1754-1842), an early botanist on the northwestern seaboard of North America, 1792-1794, with further notes on his life and work
(/isis/citation/CBB000100694/)
Book
Cowie, Helen;
(2011)
Conquering Nature in Spain and Its Empire, 1750--1850
(/isis/citation/CBB001251392/)
Book
Paul Henderson;
(2015)
James Sowerby: The Enlightenment's Natural Historian
(/isis/citation/CBB129548231/)
Chapter
Bleichmar, Daniela;
(2009)
A Visible and Useful Empire: Visual Culture and Colonial Natural History in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish World
(/isis/citation/CBB000951595/)
Thesis
Widders, Evan;
(2005)
Science, Medicine, and Criollo Culture in Late-Colonial New Spain
(/isis/citation/CBB001561800/)
Book
Fernández Martín, José Cándido;
(2011)
Celestino Mutis: el viaje de un botánico entre dos mundos
(/isis/citation/CBB001221486/)
Book
Laird, Mark;
Weisberg-Roberts, Alicia;
(2009)
Mrs. Delany and Her Circle
(/isis/citation/CBB001231284/)
Book
Bevilacqua, Fabio;
Fregonese, Lucio;
(2000)
Nuova Voltiana: Studies on Volta and His Times. Volume 2
(/isis/citation/CBB000110617/)
Article
Roos, Anna Marie Eleanor;
Edwin D. Rose;
(2018)
Lives and Afterlives of the Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia (1699), The First Illustrated Field Guide to English Fossils
(/isis/citation/CBB973730328/)
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