Visible empire : botanical expeditions & visual culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment / / Daniela Bleichmar

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910826709303321
• Autore: Bleichmar Daniela <1973->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, c2012
• ISBN: 0-226-05855-7; 1-299-19219-X
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (299 p.)
• Disciplina: 581.946
• Soggetti: Botanical illustration - Spain - Colonies - History; Botany - Spain - Colonies - History; Natural history - Spain - Colonies - History; Scientific expeditions - Spain - Colonies - History
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction. Natural History & Visual Culture in the Spanish Empire -- Chapter One. A Botanical Reconquista -- Chapter Two. Natural History & Visual Epistemology -- Chapter Three. Painting as Exploration -- Chapter Four. Economic Botany & the Limits of the Visual -- Chapter Five. Visions of Imperial Nature: Global White Space, Local Color -- Conclusion. The Empire as an Image Machine -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.