Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment

Contents �

List of Illustrations · ix

I n t r o d u c t i o nNatural History and Visual Culture in the Spanish Empire · 3

c h a p t e r o n eA Botanical Reconquista · 17

c h a p t e r t w oNatural History and Visual Epistemology · 43

c h a p t e r t h r e ePainting as Exploration · 79

c h a p t e r f o u rEconomic Botany and the Limits of the Visual · 123

c h a p t e r f i v eVisions of Imperial Nature: Global White Space, Local Color · 149

c o n c l u s i o nThe Empire as an Image Machine · 187

Acknowledgments · 193Notes · 197

Bibliography · 237Index · 273

i n t roduction

Natural History & Visual Culture in the

Spanish Empire�

A Visual Archive

This is a book about twelve thousand images. Created between the late 1770s and the early 1800s, these works depict plants from all corners of the Spanish empire outside of Europe (fig. I.1).1 The vast number of illustrations reflects the immensity of the Spanish Indies, which at the time comprised a significant swath of the globe: much of South America; all of Central America; the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and half of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles; a great part of North America; and the Philippine Islands (fig. I.2).2 Many of these images are the result of close collaborations between naturalists and artists who par-ticipated in four scientific voyages that the Spanish Crown funded to survey the natural history of its imperial territories: the Royal Botanical Expeditions to Chile and Peru (1777–88), New Granada (1783–1816), and New Spain (1787–1803), as well as the expedition to the Americas and Asia led by naval officer Alejan-dro Malaspina (1789–94).3 Additional illustrations arrived in Madrid from con-tributors throughout the empire, such as the Spanish botanist Juan de Cuéllar, who worked in the Philippines in the 1780s and 1790s. Botanical travelers were charged with surveying the flora of the Spanish Indies, exploring its economic potential, and gathering collections for Madrid’s Royal Botanical Garden and Royal Natural History Cabinet. In addition to pursuing these tasks, they focused on visual materials to a degree that may be surprising today. They produced many more images than textual descriptions, specimen collections, taxonomic classifications, or marketable natural commodities. The existence of this exten-

FIGUR E I.1. (facing)Botanical illustrations from the Spanish natural history expeditions (1777–1816).

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sive visual archive, the enormous efforts to which naturalists went to employ, train, and supervise artists, and their frequent discussions of natural history il-lustrations all suggest that images were of central importance to the exploration of American nature.

Yet these images have received scant attention. Historians of science tra-ditionally have not considered images as central loci of knowledge production, and art historians have for the most part disregarded scientific illustrations.4

FIGUR E I.2. The Spanish empire, ca. 1770.

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From the perspective of art history, these are minor works. To begin with, their subject matter is not exalted. As natural history illustrations, they do not belong to the artistic genres that held the most prestige in the period they were made, those of religious, mythological, or historical painting. Nor are they human por-traits, the working painter’s staple and the next genre in the artistic hierarchy. They are not even genre scenes or still lives. Their medium is likewise humble: they are watercolors and tempera paintings on paper rather than oil paintings. None of the artists who created them has achieved great fame over the centuries, and most of them are more likely to be viewed as trained artisans than skilled painters, if not dismissed altogether. In most cases, attributing a drawing or a painting to a specific hand is impossible, since few are signed works. To further confuse any desire to ascertain authorship, a painting often is not the work of a single artist but represents the collaboration of a workshop, each man—for as far as we know they were all men—specializing in a single step of a complex process. Though historians know that at least sixty artists devoted decades of their lives to creating these works, we know very little about most of them or about how exactly they participated in this vast enterprise. These images, many of them strikingly beautiful, have never formed part of the permanent exhibit of a major art museum. Most likely, they never will. As scientific illustrations, they tend to fall through the scholarly cracks, dismissed by most art historians and historians of science as neither great art nor important science. They are the type of image we tend to find in doctors’ waiting rooms rather than in art museums, condemned to the lowly status of decoration.

And so, why devote a book to them? The dozens of neatly stacked archival boxes that preserve these paintings inside a temperature-controlled vault in Ma-drid’s Royal Botanical Garden are the evidence through which we can trace two related histories that remain largely unknown: the history of Spanish scientific expeditions in the Enlightenment, which are for the most part ignored outside the Hispanic world, and the history of visual evidence in both science and ad-ministration in the early modern Spanish empire. Scholars have for the most part neglected these visual materials in their studies of the Spanish natural history expeditions, which they have approached in terms of political, intellectual, and economic motivations.5 While I also consider these aspects in my analysis of the expeditions, I use the impressive visual archive that they generated as my entry point into their story. After all, these illustrations mattered immensely to the naturalists and artists who traveled so far and worked so hard to make them, and to the naturalists and imperial administrators who eagerly awaited them in Europe. That value is reflected in the enormous investment required to produce such a corpus. In today’s world of online databases, instant electronic downloads, and laser printers, it takes some effort to grasp the meticulous and dedicated effort it took to craft a single one of these paintings, let alone so many thousands. Every single illustration entailed multiple steps, and required the

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coordination and close collaboration of large teams that included collectors, naturalists, and various artists. Each image embodies not only a plant but also multiple observations, decisions, negotiations, and types of expertise. The pro-cess of producing an illustration was laborious and time consuming, and in most cases took place under trying circumstances as artists and naturalists traveled together in difficult conditions.

Two of the travelers, Spanish naturalists Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón, char-acterized their botanical exploration of Chile and Peru (1777–88) as the most brutal of pilgrimages. Only other voyagers, they claimed, could fully appreciate

how many and how great were the travails and dangers that we underwent in the eleven years during which we wandered through desert lands without roads: the heat, exhaustion, hunger, thirst, nakedness; the lack of every single thing; the storms, earthquakes, plagues of mosquitoes and other insects; the continual risk of being devoured by tigers, bears, and other wild animals; the threat of thieves and heathen Indians who lay in wait for us; the betrayals from our very own slaves; the falls from precipices, from mountains, and from the branches of the highest trees; wading through rivers and floods . . .

As if the hardships of travel were not enough, Ruiz and Pavón also suffered the death of one of their artists, a great fire that consumed the results of years of work, and the loss of many of the remaining materials to shipwreck.6 Despite these challenges, the naturalists delivered to Madrid a significant herbarium (collection of dried plants) and approximately 2,300 paintings of South Ameri-can specimens. Back in Spain, Ruiz and Pavón labored for an additional fourteen years to publish a Flora Peruviana—an immensely challenging endeavor, as at-tested by the fact that this was the only one of the Spanish expeditions examined in this book that managed to produce a major publication at the time.7

The Spanish natural history expeditions were expensive undertakings, un-predictable and fraught with peril, yet they managed to produce a magnificent body of images that serves as a testament to the ambition and reach of the Span-ish empire. These illustrations suggest that knowing and making visible were inextricably intertwined. This study is an attempt to understand not only the meanings of the images, written words, and collections that emerged from such travails, but also the reasons for their creation.

Visual Epistemology, Natural History, and Empire

This book uses the spectacular visual archive assembled by these Spanish natu-ral history expeditions to explore the connections among natural history, visual culture, and empire in the eighteenth-century Hispanic world. I examine the


many ways in which an eighteenth-century expedition tried to know the world, which included images, collections, texts, experiments, observations, and cor-respondence networks, and present the manufacture and use of images as key techniques in the processes of investigating, ordering, explaining, and possess-ing—or attempting to possess—nature.

I began this project with a set of simple questions: What is this strange beast, the scientific expedition as artistic workshop, painting as exploration? Why did Hispanic naturalists and imperial administrators care so much about images—what work did visual materials do for them? What to make of these images, hybrids of art and science, and in some cases of European and American styles? I was also interested in methodological questions: How to approach a visual ar-chive of this magnitude, and how to relate it to written sources and collections of objects? How can historians use these materials not only for visual analysis but also as historical sources, treating the visual archive as seriously as the textual archive? Simple as they may be, these questions have rarely been asked of these materials. Placing visual culture at the center of an analysis of these scientific voyages allows us to rethink the expeditions as well as to ask larger questions about the role of images and objects not only in constituting and communicat-ing facts in the Spanish empire but also more generally in the production and circulation of knowledge across distances.

The Spanish eighteenth-century natural history expeditions, I argue, acted as visualization projects. One of their key goals was to make global nature visible across distances through images and collections. Visibility, in turn, would make imperial nature movable, knowable, and—ideally—governable. When I describe expeditions as visualization projects, I am not resorting to a figure of speech but to the very concrete ways in which they overwhelmingly privileged visual ways of knowing over other methods of inquiry, and visual statements over other re-search results. The Spanish expeditions shared this visual emphasis with many other voyages: almost without exception, European expeditions at the time em-ployed artists (often many more of them than naturalists) and produced great numbers of illustrations. At home or abroad, European naturalists used images in their daily work and wrote abundantly about them in their journals and cor-respondence. Pictures deserved special mention in the inventories of collections shipped back to Europe and frequently received the most attention as crates were unpacked and unloaded. When traveling naturalists sought to honor a pa-tron, scientific or administrative, or needed to ask a favor, images constituted the preferred instrument of persuasion. At a time when European powers under-took the exploration of distant natures as a matter of key economic, political, and scientific importance, the production of images represented a central practice for investigating imperial nature and incorporating it into European science. Thus, the importance of images to natural history is by no means an exclusively Spanish story, though as I will address the way in which these particular illustra-

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tions interacted with an imperial project was distinctive to the Hispanic world.My central concept for explaining why images mattered so greatly in eigh-

teenth-century natural history is what I term “visual epistemology”: a way of knowing based on visuality, encompassing both observation and representation. Eighteenth-century European natural history—both in the Spanish empire and elsewhere—was a dominantly visual discipline, with a methodology based on acts of expert viewing. Naturalists developed specialized ways of seeing through multimedia training that involved plants, texts, and images. The work of natural history required carefully conducted and strongly enforced practices of obser-vation and representation. Trained as observers and representers and working closely with artists, naturalists constructed a visual culture based on standard-ized ways of viewing nature and on pictorial conventions guiding its depiction. They resorted to images and visual metaphors in research and communication, be it published or manuscript. Going beyond sight, they aspired to insight.

For naturalists, images were much more than simple illustrations: they provided an entry point into the exploration of nature, functioned as a key in-strument for producing knowledge, and constituted the foremost result of their investigations. Botanists’ work consisted in gathering plants, closely observing their flowering structure, and then collating this visual evidence against the il-lustrations and textual descriptions in published works in order to classify new specimens or rectify mistakes, in this way staking claims about the novelty and significance of their observations. Images operated at every point of a trajectory that moved from the collection of natural data to its comparison to its incorpo-ration into a global inventory of nature through textual description and visual representation. Visual epistemology is what the philosopher Ian Hacking, with a nod to the art historical category of style, terms a “style of reasoning”: a specific way of knowing that has its own techniques, materials, questions, and answers. “Truths of certain sorts,” Hacking writes, “are what we obtain by conducting certain sorts of investigation, answering to certain standards.”8 Eighteenth-cen-tury naturalists thought visually, worked visually, and posed visual questions to which they offered visual answers.

Furthermore, the visual culture of natural history was global both in deed and ideology. Naturalists practicing European natural history, regardless of na-tionality and whether in Europe or abroad, understood their tasks in similar ways, consulted the same books, and looked at the same images. This is not to suggest that there existed a single viewpoint: differences of opinion were frequent and at times bitter. Nevertheless, most naturalists consulted the same titles, whether they agreed with them or not. This resulted in a large degree of consensus about what the critical issues were, as well as a distinct sense of the state of this constantly evolving field at any given moment. Furthermore, conceptual disagreements tended to be about systems and words, not modes of representation. There might have been competing theories and a multitude of methods, but there was basically a single pictorial idiom for natural history il-


lustrations, widely accepted and used. For this reason, European natural history had a highly regimented look, whether a naturalist was English, French, Dutch, or Spanish; whether he conducted observations in the British countryside or the Amazon; and whether his book was published in Vienna or Madrid. Naturalists agreed not only on their adherence to a prevailing iconography and style, but also on the value they assigned to the visual, the way in which they produced and used images, and the criteria they used to judge illustrations.

This shared visual language allowed naturalists to engage in what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have termed “collective empiricism.”9 Global natural history was a group practice, and naturalists used specimens, letters, and—above all—images to corroborate or challenge one another’s observations despite geo-graphical distance. Visual epistemology was by no means a peculiarity of the Spanish expeditions or limited the Hispanic world; it was common to Euro-pean natural history in general and to the domestication of foreign nature in particular. The manufacture and use of images was a central practice through which European naturalists investigated, explained, and attempted to possess nature, particularly foreign and exotic nature.10 Illustrations constituted both a vital technique and one of the more important results of natural history as a field of study.

What, then, did these images do? Why were they so crucial? Images allowed eighteenth-century natural history to abstract information, visually embody ex-pert observations, and mobilize across distances plants that remained in crucial ways unseen and unknown, even three centuries after Europeans had first en-countered New World nature. Naturalists moved constantly between the world of objects “out there” in the field and the world of objects “in here” in collections. Images bridged the gap between travel and stasis, the field and the cabinet, by providing a domesticated paper nature that was always and perfectly available for virtual exploration. Natural history illustrations offered flowers forever in bloom, fruits permanently ripe, animals caught in clarity and permanence.

While part of this story is one of a pan-European visual culture of natu-ral history, another part is specific to the Hispanic world. In the Spanish em-pire, visual epistemology operated not only in natural history but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of using images as documents and of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes. In the Hispanic world, images helped to discover, document, persuade, and make arguments. They had a privileged status for authenticating and communicating both locally and as part of the imperial project of governing at a distance. From the earliest days of exploration and settlement, the budding Spanish imperial administration requested images from its new territories, asking for maps and depictions of the peoples, plants, and animals of these new lands. Visual appetite came to characterize a Hispanic way of knowing the empire. The eighteenth-century natural history expeditions were but a portion of a much larger project of making the empire visible in order to know and exploit it, which involved a

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varied cast of characters from the peninsula and the viceroyalties. For over three centuries, in a wide variety of contexts and for a huge range of purposes, the task of making the New World knowable and governable involved making it visible.

The naturalists in the Spanish expeditions therefore inhabited two over-lapping domains in which observation and representation served as powerful epistemological tools: a scientific sphere and an imperial sphere. Both science and empire aspired to universality, and both found images important tools for extending their reach. Spain and its Indies were connected through a visual loop: images in various media traveled back and forth across the Atlantic and the Pacific, usually accompanied by words and often also by objects. If Spain re-peatedly requested images from its territories, the viceroyalties produced visual materials not only in response to these demands but also of their own initiative and pursuing their own interests. The Hispanic world functioned as a visual ma-chine, churning out a prodigious quantity of images that made this vast empire visible locally and across distances.

As part of my focus on the processes of observing, representing, and trans-porting imperial nature, I draw a distinction between making visible or visualiz-ing, on the one hand, and seeing on the other. Very few eyes managed to examine the botanical illustrations I discuss in the period in which they were produced, in large part because the vast majority did not reach print at the time. But though questions of circulation and reception are undoubtedly important, they are not the focus of my investigation. Despite lack of publication, the fact that natural-ists, artists, and administrators concurred on the importance of visual materials and that the expeditions produced over twelve thousand images are testimonies to the centrality of visual epistemology, and these illustrations remain valuable both as objects of study and as historical sources. Making visible was a process that involved not only the final viewing of an image but also, as importantly, the acts of observation and representation that yielded the illustration. Making vis-ible had both pragmatic and symbolic dimensions, and was widely understood as an integral part of the processes of producing knowledge and enacting gov-ernance. Whether in the end images managed to be seen or not, whether they proved themselves useful or not, they had great epistemic and cultural value. Visual materials were considered necessary and created continuously, by mul-tiple makers, for various purposes, and in astonishing numbers.

Visual History: Connecting the Histories of Science, Art, and Empire

Mining the visual archive that the Spanish natural history expeditions produced requires an interdisciplinary approach. In this book I have drawn on research in the histories of science, art and visual culture, and the early modern Hispanic world. My aim is not only to contribute to these various fields but also to bring them into conversation with one another. In a way, this book functions as the


type of cross-cultural visualization project it analyzes, seeking to make the cul-tural and social histories of science, art and visual culture, and the transregional Spanish empire visible to one another.

Methodologically, I pursue what can be termed “visual history,” exploring what history looks like when it is written using images not as mere illustrations and not always as the final object of analysis but also as historical sources. His-torians tend to use visual sources in their publications, teaching, and public pre-sentations for many of the same reasons that the historical figures who populate this book resorted to them: to communicate and convince, to help the memory, to make a point more vividly or clearly, to delight and entertain. But only rarely do contemporary historians treat visual materials with the same degree of rigor that we apply to textual documents, or for the same interpretive purposes. If as historians we insist on sensitivity to actors’ categories, on avoiding anachronism, and on the critical interpretation of texts in context, then we should apply these same principles to visual sources.11

This book pursues visual history in five ways. First, through close and de-tailed visual analysis, since images themselves have much to tell us about the ways in which they were used, the work they did, and the approaches and expec-tations of those who made and saw them at the time. Second, by looking outside the picture frame to examine the processes of making and using visual materials, because these practices evince meanings that emerge only in historical context and cannot be deduced from images alone. Third, by connecting images to ma-terials in other media, principally texts and natural history specimens. Fourth, by examining the various types of work that images performed, in different con-texts and for different viewers. And finally, the book pursues visual history by examining an expansive range of visual materials that includes multiple media and genres, and by studying images that fall both within and outside the usual purviews of the histories of art and visual culture. What makes this explora-tion possible is the magnificent archive that the Spanish expeditions created: a visual collection of thousands of images; a rich textual collection consisting of manuscript journals, letters, scientific treatises, and administrative memos and reports, as well as printed sources; and a material collection composed of natural history specimens. The pages that follow examine this visual, textual, and mate-rial archive and track the day-to-day practices that produced it in order to tell the intertwined stories of imperial science and visual culture in the eighteenth-century Hispanic world.

A Guide to the Voyage

In the first chapter, I introduce the Spanish imperial natural history expedi-tions and outline their mode of work, explaining their joint pursuit of visual-ity and utility. I consider the expeditions as part of an ambitious program of

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imperial science launched in the Hispanic world during the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV of Spain (1759–1808). This program pursued multiple and interconnected objectives, including taxonomic botany, economic botany, and collecting. It involved not only expeditions but also peninsular and viceregal institutions—most notably botanical gardens and natural history cabinets—as well as the recruitment of members of the colonial administrative network as scientific informants. This large-scale effort brought together European and American naturalists, artists, administrators, and various local inhabitants who collaborated to make imperial nature visible. Natural history, especially botany, promised to address Spanish concerns with utility, profit, and the search for re-newed political and economic power both in the peninsula and throughout the empire. In the Hispanic world, Enlightenment renovation was framed not as a new development but rather as a way of restoring the empire to a more prosper-ous condition by reconnecting to past successes, particularly sixteenth-century achievements: a botanical reconquista. And, drawing on a long-established tra-dition of imperial information gathering, visual materials were central to inves-tigating New World nature.

The second chapter examines the importance and operation of visual epis-temology in eighteenth-century natural history. I discuss the specialized ways of looking that came to characterize naturalists at the time, and the process through which they trained their eyes as diagnostic tools. Books were indispens-able for learning to observe like a naturalist, as well as for the everyday work of traveling naturalists. This was particularly the case for travelers investigat-ing non-European territories, who carried with them as many illustrated books as possible and used them frequently in the field. To a large extent, their job entailed creating an inventory of the flora they explored and classifying it in order to help compile a global catalog of nature. Naturalists contributed to this collective project by correcting erroneous information or introducing new spe-cies. For this reason, they found it imperative to be aware of which plants had previously been described in publication and which had not. This involved com-parative acts of multimedia seeing, with naturalists confronting newly collected specimens against printed images and texts in order to ascertain the novelty of their observations. Although all three media were necessary, visual materials had important advantages over words and things.

While traveling naturalists used printed images to interpret what they en-countered in the field, some cabinet naturalists found that access to unpublished illustrations allowed them to bypass travel altogether. A naturalist in Europe, whether alone in his cabinet or surrounded by students at a botanical garden, depended on the voyager who had faced discomforts and dangers in order to obtain new data. This made the images from the Spanish expeditions particu-larly attractive to European botanists who used these paper floras to conduct long-distance observations of American nature from Madrid, Montpellier, and Geneva. Sometimes, the traveling naturalist and the cabinet naturalist consid-


ered one another collaborators. However, collective empiricism could also be competitive, with travelers worrying about losing years of work should someone else manage to beat them to publication. A heated debate between the Madrid-based botanist Antonio José Cavanilles and Hipólito Ruiz, one of the leaders of the Chile and Peru expedition, shows that cabinet and field naturalists vied for the right to claim authorship over observations, and that they framed much of that controversy in visual terms.

The third chapter offers a close look at the expeditions’ botanical illus-trations, discussing what they look like, how they were made, and how they were used in multiple contexts, most notably taxonomic identification and patronage in both scientific and courtly settings. Given the importance of visual materials, the expeditions’ naturalists went to great efforts to hire artists. They turned to the Fine Arts Academies in Madrid and Mexico City and also to prestigious American workshops, and hired artists that they then retrained as botanical draftsmen. Given the specialized parameters of natural history visual epistemology, botanists worked extremely closely with artists, specifying what their works should include and ignore as well as what exactly these images should look like. José Celestino Mutis, director of the New Granada expedition, was especially devoted to the idea of painting as botanical exploration. He assembled a workshop unique in its size and productivity, and supervised his artists particularly fastidiously. The New Granada artistic workshop was the largest of any scientific endeavor anywhere in the world at the time, and yielded an unparalleled total of about 6,500 botanical illustrations. I provide a close analysis of images from this expedition in particular, focusing on the ways in which they adhere to and depart from European models. This is an important issue in the study of images and objects produced by non-European artists based on European models: how do we interpret the differences we often find between the two? Going beyond notions of original and copy, and the opaque catch-all of “hybridity,” I argue through visual and textual evidence that in the case of the New Granada expedition these differences are not the result of the inability of American artists to reproduce European standards but rather of a conscious effort to develop a distinctive style that Mutis and his artists considered better suited to botanical illustrations.12

In chapter 4 I turn to metropolitan and viceregal attempts to locate and exploit valuable natural products like pepper, cinnamon, tea, and cinchona in the Spanish Indies. Naturalists and administrators alike hoped that these in-vestigations would allow Spain to compete commercially with British, French, and Dutch trade in botanical commodities. Although naturalists used images in their efforts to establish taxonomic identities, these particular botanical goods required additional methods of investigation such as chemical analyses, thus showing the limits of the visual. Attempts to transport foreign plants to Spain in order to grow them in the peninsula also failed. The expeditions proved bet-ter at taxonomic botany than at economic botany, and while they succeeded in

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producing an impressive visual archive they did not manage to make imperial nature profitable.

The chapter uses these experiments in economic botany to examine the geopolitics of natural history investigations in the Hispanic world, exploring the relationship between Madrid and the viceroyalties as well as those among impe-rial locales. My analysis of various viceregal initiatives refutes center-periphery models of knowledge production, demonstrating that the Spanish empire func-tioned instead as a network with multiple nodes and competing interests. Nor were the expeditions purely extractive projects: while they sent or took back to Spain both materials and information, they also created institutions, trained students, and pursued projects in the viceroyalties. As a result of their lengthy American stays, their members developed strong ties to both Iberian and local institutions and interests. In some cases, their involvement with local projects eventually competed with or even surpassed metropolitan agendas. Although Spain always remained the central reference point from which orders, funding, prestige, and even value emanated, the expeditions nevertheless set down deep roots in the Americas.

The final chapter expands my inquiry into the geopolitics of knowledge by turning once again to the visual record. I suggest that the Spanish natural history expeditions labored not only to make imperial nature visible, but also to make much of the empire invisible. Their images show isolated botanical fragments floating on overwhelmingly blank pages. This extremely selective pic-torial approach erased geography, turning local plants into decontextualized natural specimens that could circulate globally. This was the manner mandated by European natural history, as evidenced by the published models that the ex-peditions used as well as by the allegorical frontispieces to these books.13 But this was not the only possible way of visualizing the empire. During the same decades in which the expeditions took place, artists working independently of one another in sites across the Hispanic world developed new types of paintings that focused to an unprecedented degree on the flora, fauna, and human types of Spanish American regions, insisting on their inalienable interconnectedness. The examples I discuss from this tradition are a series of six cuadros de mes-tizaje (miscegenation paintings) from Quito, casta paintings from Mexico, and a painting of the natural history of Peru. Despite the differences between these two modes of representation—one insisting on global white space, the other on profusions of local color—they were both premised on the value of visual ma-terials for collecting, classifying, and transporting American nature, making it visible across distances.

In this book, I bring the histories of science, art and visual culture, and the His-panic empire into conversation with one another. I trust that readers coming to this study from different perspectives will discover enriching insights arising


not only from the lines of thought that are familiar to them, but also from find-ing themselves in the company of authors and ideas that are new to them or not central to their own disciplines. As the Spanish eighteenth-century naturalists so vividly tell us, travel into foreign territories is as often fascinating and enliv-ening as it is uncomfortable, disconcerting, or even frustrating. Nevertheless, they never doubted the importance of pushing ahead in their explorations of lands that combined the familiar with the strange, for confusion often led to the excitement of new discoveries.

Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment

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