Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked – until now.
In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.
Reviews
"'Visible Empire' explores an important yet virtually unexplored chapter in the history of Spain's eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It was then that the country's Bourbon monarchy, for reasons both commercial and scientific, set out to discover, record, and systematically classify the botanical riches of the New World. This ambitious project resulted in thousands of botanical illustrations of extraordinary originality and quality, many of which are reproduced in this handsome volume for the very first time. Bleichmar's approach to these images is imaginatively interdisciplinary, as she examines the circumstances surrounding their production; the artists, native as well as Spanish and creole, involved; together with the thorny aesthetic issues that representing nature necessarily entails. She also situates these images within the broader context of the Enlightenment's quest to understand the mysteries of the natural world. 'Visible Empire' is an extraordinary achievement, and definitely one that deserves a wide audience" – Richard L. Kagan, Johns Hopkins University
"Daniela Bleichmar finds a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Hispanic world, not overstretched and reeling upon its 'last legs' of empire, but rather fired by the prospect of revealing a vast and valuable nature within its realms, and thus newly ambitious, interconnected, and fervently in motion. With elegance and precision, she shows how the travels and labors of a startling array of investigators, botanists, and artists converged to make empire not only viable but visible. Their global enterprise, and the knowledges, realizations, and values they produced, are still very much with us today" – Kenneth Mills, University of Toronto
"The history of late eighteenth-century Latin America is often told simply as the Creoles' ever-increasing disenchantment with an unenlightened Mother Spain. Daniela Bleichmar's remarkable book offers us a different history, one in which an Enlightenment study of natural history takes center stage. She casts before the reader passionate and dedicated men of learning and the arts who under Spanish royal sponsorship were entrusted to perform precise observation of the natural fruits of divine creation and render them into splendid and copious scientific illustrations; the results of 'artful looking... a barometer of Enlightenment thought'. Bleichmar provides more than just an account of these accomplishments; she wields an interdisciplinary brilliance that melds the best of the history of science, art history, and history and serves up a critical and fascinating examination of Linnean classification, scientific illustration, and their complex intersection, scientific and social, in recording the flora of South America" – Thomas B. F. Cummins, Harvard University
