Natural Designs

In Natural Designs, Elizabeth Gansen invites the reader to develop a detailed understanding of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's labors as a natural historian and his contributions to a field of study that was simultaneously challenged and expanded by European encounters with the New World. As the study unfolds, a picture emerges of an author whose efforts to comprehend American nature underwent constant change and revision, from his early years in Darién to his later period of residence on the island of Hispaniola.Although Gansen considers such changes through comparison of the historian's works that appeared in print during his lifetime—the Sumario of 1526 and the first part of his Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535)—she is equally concerned with tracing editorial shifts in Oviedo's later additions and revisions to his general history. Through close study of the extant manuscript versions of those post-1535 additions, Gansen rejects the static and “homogeneous” picture of the Historia general that, she observes, is conveyed by modern published editions, which suppress Oviedo's editorial changes (p. 164). According to Gansen, Oviedo continuously modified his history between 1535 and 1549, an interpretation that offers an “alternative chronology” to that proposed by art historian Jesús Carrillo Castillo, who regards 1541 as a pivotal moment in Oviedo's editorial decisions (p. 164).A striking piece of visual evidence for Oviedo's ongoing program of adjustments to his natural history—a crossed-out drawing of an anteater that was replaced with a new, more lifelike illustration—is drawn from “Book 12: On Animals,” a manuscript section of the Historia general that is privately owned and that was previously regarded as lost. Although Gansen's seemingly unique access to this manuscript allows scholars tantalizing new glimpses of Oviedo's late revisions, her discussion of its contents is surprisingly limited, perhaps reflecting conditions of access to which she was subject.The precise chronologies of editorial changes to the Historia general may be primarily of interest to scholars who specialize in Oviedo's writings. But Natural Designs offers insights into Oviedo's endeavors to understand New World plants and animals that will likely have much broader resonance, especially in relation to the study of Renaissance art and visual images. Gansen traces Oviedo's use of plant illustrations over time, thereby bringing into view a “visual program” that is characterized not only by a dramatic increase in the number of images that are contained in his writings but also by progressively closer integration of image and text and growing sophistication in his ability to understand and represent the plants of the Indies (p. 112).By comparing images of plants in the 1535 Historia general with later revisions and additions that are preserved in the Monserrat manuscript, Gansen examines how, in the latter, Oviedo shifts toward incorporating much larger, centrally placed illustrations and increasingly experiments, for example, with depicting whole plant specimens and drawing interior features such as the insides of seedpods. In tracing these changes, Gansen elegantly demonstrates how visual representation became a crucial tool in Oviedo's efforts to communicate knowledge of New World nature.For Gansen, the study of images also helps to make visible the limits of Oviedo's understanding. In the 1535 Historia general, Oviedo predominantly chooses to illustrate whole cacti rather than depicting a selected part. This decision does not prefigure the botanical literacy that his post-1535 drawings of whole specimens convey. Instead, Gansen argues, it reflects Oviedo's struggle to make sense of cacti and his inability to distinguish between the constituent parts of these plants. Although Gansen is not the first scholar to take Oviedo's illustrations seriously, her study develops an understanding of his use of images that is especially attuned to change over time and, through fine-grain study of the connections between image and text, to the subtleties of how and why he depicted flora and fauna in certain ways.Throughout Natural Designs, the author emphasizes that Oviedo's vast project of documenting New World nature was profoundly shaped by his ongoing exchanges with an array of scholars, artists, informants, and collaborators, beginning with his years as a courtier in the royal households of Castile and Italy, prior to his first transatlantic voyage in 1514. Gansen shows that Oviedo carried with him to the Americas a formative tool kit of Renaissance understandings of nature, natural history, and visual art. But by tracing the ways in which his work as a natural historian continued to evolve in the place-specific contexts of Darién and the Caribbean islands, she deftly highlights his role both as a key contributor to a transatlantic Renaissance and as a founding figure of Spanish American traditions of natural history. In addition to advancing scholarly understandings of Oviedo's thought and praxis as a natural historian, Natural Designs usefully contributes to the expansion of Renaissance studies beyond narrow European frames

Archaeology · Biology · Botany · Fern · Natural (archaeology) · Historical and Architectural Studies · History