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

Abstract

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 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.