From Nahua Improvisation to the “Linnaean Optic”: Art and Botany in the Construction of New Spanish Nature

Enlightenment-era botanists from the Royal Botanical Expedition (1787-1803) had been commissioned to complete the work from two centuries earlier by the Renaissance-era botanist Francisco Hernández (1570-1577). Both expeditions centered observation and the production of visual images, and both were designed to enforce the authority of the Spanish empire within New Spain. Yet members of the eighteenth-century undertaking rejected Hernández’s scientific authority, his use of indigenous structures of botanical knowledge, and his embrace of the artistic improvisations developed by indigenous draftsmen. This presentation examines the visual strategies employed by each of these expeditions, and considers how and why, despite their similar missions, they each made very different kinds of uses of botanical illustrations, and with what outcomes.