Visual Voyages

Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin, published on the occasion of the extraordinary, eponymous Huntington Library exhibition, is effectively a successor to New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery by Anthony Grafton with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi (1992), a book that likewise distilled the current state of the field into an original and stimulating volume to accompany an exhibition. Daniela Bleichmar's Visual Voyages explores images of nature in the region now known as Latin America between 1492 and 1859. Through a prefatory introduction and four chapters, the book shows how peoples of Latin America and Europe shaped art and science as they explored, imagined, depicted, used, and transformed nature. Bleichmar explores the purposes for which images were made, how their makers and viewers understood them, and how and why these images traveled. By building a narrative starting with close visual analyses of images and objects—from indigenous manuscript codices and feather capes to European prints, paintings, and watercolors—Bleichmar offers a new synthesis of how the study of Latin American nature was a visual pursuit.In the post-Columbian era, knowledge of Latin American nature was undergirded by transatlantic collaboration: observing, drawing, translating, testing, preserving specimens, copying, painting, and printing occurred on both sides of the Atlantic, even in the process of creating a single work. Chapter 1 introduces three broad corpora: European illustrated travel and geographical literature, bicultural sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century accounts produced in Latin America, and the gargantuan geographical and natural historical projects of Juan López de Velasco and Francisco Hernández. At the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, elite, Christianized, indigenous pupils worked with Franciscan friars to translate indigenous botanical, historical, and geographical knowledge into the Codex de la Cruz-Badiano and the Florentine Codex. In these works, Nahua glyphs and botanical nomenclature were fused with Latin letters in a variety of European standardized hands or styles, and with the translations of Nahua grammarians and scribes directed by Spanish Franciscans trained in Europe.From the late sixteenth century, richly illustrated works of geography and natural history were printed, translated, and circulated widely. These included the De Bry family's 13-volume America collection of travel accounts (published from 1590 to 1634) and physician Nicolás Monardes's Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias occidentales que sirven en medicina (published in three parts from 1565 to 1574). Through these texts and their images, readers learned of plants and animals that would become sought-after commodities in Europe, and cochineal, chocolate, tobacco, and the passionflower are explored in chapter 2. Yet many products of indigenous farming also had spiritual significance, as, for example, modes of contacting the spirit world through smoking, eating, drinking, and dancing. European natural-commercial and moral economies were, consequently, also entangled. While naturalists initially feared diabolical connections to New World nature, by the eighteenth century the prevailing view of the region was as an earthly paradise.Collecting was a particularly potent form of visual knowledge making. In chapter 3, Bleichmar uses curiosity cabinets and large projects of visual representation—in effect, paper museums—to think about how visual epistemology and classification were shaped by the problematic of Latin American nature. Cabinets, paintings, and visual encyclopedic projects like Luis Thiebaut and José Ignacio Lequanda's massive 1799 painting of the inhabitants, flora, and fauna of Peru—which includes painted inscriptions whose modern transcription fills over 60 printed pages in small type—show makers constituting and communicating natural history information through emerging visual formats (pp. 150–54). Here one might have expected Bleichmar to engage with illustrated cartography, a rapidly diversifying and highly influential early modern mode of visual knowledge making. Renaissance maps had synthesized textual and visual sources to devise ethnographic diagrams that made connections between climate, geography, and human variety explicit and visual and that put the concept of humanity into alarming new conversations with the concept of the monster. Mapmakers made fundamentally new, comparative arguments about the nature of the Americas' inhabitants but appear infrequently in this book.In the popular imagination, natural history begins with Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin. In chapter 4, Bleichmar shows how these and other northern European practitioners were in fact dependent on, influenced by, and part of centuries-long traditions, in which indigenous and Iberian participants and practices were central.The overarching arguments—that images often had “both artistic and scientific dimensions,” that many images that “depicted nature . . . also functioned as instruments for producing knowledge concerning the natural world” and were vital for incorporating New World nature into European markets—will not surprise specialists (p. xiii). Nevertheless, ranging across heterogenous sources and half a millennium gives this book a particular potency, showing why histories of science must attend to the impact and legacies of colonial Latin American science and visual culture. New grand narratives such as this—complicated, nuanced, and cutting-edge—are needed if the fruits of academic labor are to inform popular consciousness. Visual Voyages is a work of great erudition, lightly worn, and a valuable addition to university syllabi and to the personal libraries of specialist and general readers

Art · Art history · Copying · Exhibition · Indigenous · Latin Americans · Literature · Narrative · Painting · Visual arts · Archaeology and Natural History · History · Latin American history and culture · Law