The Imperial Visual Archive Images Evide PDF

Colonial Latin American Review, 2015
Vol. 24, No. 2, 236–266, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2014.972699
The Imperial Visual Archive: Images,

Evidence, and Knowledge in the Early
Modern Hispanic World
Daniela Bleichmar
University of Southern California
Downloaded by [108.220.76.80] at 07:03 10 September 2015
This article is a reflection on the Hispanic imperial visual archive, by which I mean
the thousands of images produced in the Spanish American viceroyalties in order to
document, communicate, and transport claims about the New World in pictorial
form. I examine the role of images as evidence, arguing for the continued importance
of visual epistemology as a technique for producing and circulating knowledge from
the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Scholars of colonial Latin America have
noted that images held a particular power ‘to move and instruct’ (Farriss 2010, 5) in
arenas such as political representation, religious practice, and the crafting of
individual and group social identity, in which they were used ‘to please, to teach,
and, most important, to persuade’ (Adorno 2000, 83). My work has examined the
functions of visual materials in knowledge practices, scientific and imperial, and their
use as instruments for solving the considerable challenges of distance and place posed
by the geographical expanse of the empire (Bleichmar 2012).1 This essay focuses on
visual epistemology and mobility, addressing the capacity of images to embody
information and objects and to transport them from one place to another. Its goals
are thus: (1) to highlight the active generation of scientific knowledge in the Hispanic
world, often connected to imperial and administrative practices; (2) to present
transregional channels of circulation, demonstrating the connected histories of the
viceroyalties and the Iberian Peninsula and the multidirectional trajectories in which
information and knowledge moved; and (3) to point out the deep connections
between the earlier and later colonial periods, which often remain disconnected in the
historiography.2
This article also explores the potential of images as historical sources, suggesting
that the high status of images in the early modern Hispanic world resulted in an
enormous pictorial archive that historians have failed to consider with the attention
and rigor they have lavished on the textual archive. Colonial Latin Americanists have
rightly pointed to the importance of archival culture in the Spanish Americas, highly
© 2015 Taylor and Francis on behalf of CLAR
Colonial Latin American Review 237
bureaucratic and legalistic societies in which most aspects of life left a paper trace.
Kathryn Burns (2010) and Tamar Herzog (1996), for instance, have shown the
importance of notaries (escribanos) in colonial Peru and the thoughtful and active
ways in which men and women there participated in the creation of local archives.
Processes of recording and incorporating information into the administrative and
legal record provided ways of establishing and contesting political and social power.3
The work of Burns and Herzog draws on a rich literature on the relationship between
the written word and power in colonial Latin America.4 However, much less studied
is the imperial visual archive, a rich depository of thousands of images painstakingly
produced by historical actors who considered them privileged means of commun-
ication and proof both locally and at a distance. I invite historians to consider visual
materials not only to produce histories of particular images but also as historical
sources in their own right.5
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Spanish pharmacist and botanist Juan
Tafalla sent to Spain the fruits of months of work spent investigating and collecting
the flora of Guayaquil, Ecuador.6 As part of his shipment, he produced an eight-
page inventory listing the materials he was sending to the Royal Botanical Garden
in Madrid (Figure 1). The document details the contents of a collection of pressed
dried plants (herbario or herbarium), organized into numbered packages. Each
package contains ten items, also numbered sequentially. However, each of these
numbers corresponds not to a single thing but rather to various incarnations of a
plant, in three media: object, word, and image. The first column on the left, entitled
‘description,’ relates the pressed herbarium specimen to a textual record of the
plant’s appearance, a systematic description detailing the characteristics of various
anatomical features used to identify and classify the plant according to the
Linnaean system. The second and third columns correspond to the generic and
specific names of Linnaean binomial nomenclature, connecting the narrative to
precise taxonomical identity. Annotations following the species name at times note
‘Linn.’ or ‘Jacq.,’ indicating that a particular plant had already been described in
publication in Carl Linnaeus’s Species plantarum (Stockholm, 1753) or Nikolaus
Joseph von Jacquin’s Selectarum stirpium Americanarum Historia (Vienna 1763;
2nd. ed. 1780; 3rd. ed. 1788). In some cases, the abbreviation ‘Sp. nov.’ identifies a
new species, a major botanical coup and the desired goal for the traveling
naturalist. Her current book project examines the itinerant lives of Mexican codices
and the production of transatlantic knowledge in the early modern world.
Even the most ardent enthusiast would be hard pressed to describe Tafalla’s
inventory as an exciting document: it is the everyday, matter-of-fact record of things
gathered, pressed, written down, pictured, packed, and shipped. And yet, this modest
list is intriguing as it records not only things but also practices and priorities.7 It
suggests the difficulties of placing things in motion across distances, and the amount
of attention and labor it took for a traveling naturalist to constitute and stabilize a
plant species through incarnations in various media, tying one to the other as tightly
as possible to prevent them getting separated during transit. The inventory was the
238 Daniela Bleichmar
Figure 1 Juan Tafalla, “Lista del Herbario acopiado en las Montañas de Huayaquil,”
ca. 1799–1803. Archivo del Real Jardín Botánico, IV, 13, 5, 3.
crucial document that would allow Tafalla’s intended recipient across the Atlantic to
relate the physical herbarium specimen to the textual description and to the drawing
that provided a plant’s ‘viva imagen’ (living image).8 Transportation posed a danger
not only to the physical integrity of items shipped—which all too often suffered
damage from moisture, salinity, insects, or human neglect, when not lost—but to the
labor and potential contribution of the field naturalist.
Historians routinely work with inventories, and in my research on eighteenth-
century botanical expeditions in the Hispanic world I reviewed hundreds of
documents like the ones Tafalla produced. To a historian trained to analyze texts,
these sources presented a methodological challenge: they pointed to the existence
and importance of non-textual records, in the form of dried plants and botanical
illustrations. The crucial role of herbarium specimens was straightforward:
naturalists used them as the ultimate referent for a plant species, and they
continue to do so today. The images invited close study both in terms of their
role in eighteenth-century botany, in particular imperial botany, and of their
frequent appearance in colonial Latin American documents across genres and
periods. My research on Enlightenment scientific expeditions kept excavating
images, which in turn had a tendency to lead to yet more images. The visual
archive expanded horizontally across genres in the same period, as well as
vertically across time.
1. Images and Botanical Expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment

Between 1759 and 1808, the Spanish Crown funded almost sixty scientific expeditions
throughout its empire, mounting a vigorous research campaign with economic,
political, and scientific goals. Among these voyages, botanical expeditions aroused
special interest from imperial and viceregal naturalists and administrators, and five
separate projects surveyed the flora of the Spanish Indies: the Royal Botanical
Expeditions to Chile and Peru (1777–1788), New Granada (1783–1816), and New
Spain (1787–1803), the expedition to the Americas and the Pacific led by naval officer
Alejandro Malaspina (1789–1794), and the research of botanist Juan de Cuéllar in the
Philippines (1780s–1790s).9 These missions pursued taxonomic and economic
botany, and also gathered collections for two institutions recently established in
Madrid, the Royal Botanical Garden (founded 1755) and the Royal Natural History
Cabinet (founded 1771).10
Hispanic botanical expeditions focused on visual materials to a degree that at first
glance may seem surprising. They employed not only naturalists but also large
numbers of artists, and produced many more images than textual descriptions,
specimen collections, taxonomic classifications, or marketable natural commodities.
Naturalists went to enormous efforts to employ, train, and supervise artists. They
constantly used natural history illustrations in their work and discussed them in their
writings, and they also deployed visual evidence in patronage and institutional
settings. Working for over three decades, the expeditions’ artists and naturalists
collaborated to produce approximately 12,000 illustrations.11
Accustomed as we are today to downloadable digital images, Google searches,
databases, and laser printers, it can be hard to grasp the dedicated labor it took to
craft one of these botanical drawings, let alone thousands. A single image involved a
close collaboration among plant collectors, botanists, and teams of artists who
specialized in the various steps it took to achieve a finished illustration. This process
took several days, when not weeks. Each image embodies not only a plant but also
time, labor, decisions about inclusion and exclusion, negotiations, and multiple types
of expertise. For the historian, this archive poses intriguing questions: why this many
images? What work did they do for naturalists and administrators? What is this
strange beast, the scientific expedition as artistic workshop, painting as exploration?
Methodologically, how should a historian approach the image as historical source,
and the visual archive as a whole?

My research suggests two reasons for the expeditions’ visual voracity. The first
concerns visual epistemology, that is, the role of visuality as a way of knowing, and
the processes of observation, collecting, representation, and circulation that were
integral to the production of knowledge. The second relates to mobility and
distance: given that only a few travelers had firsthand access to viceregal nature, the
much larger number of non-travelers depended on representations and collections
in order to observe at a distance. Moreover, I propose that questions can be asked
and answered not only through textual sources but also with visual materials
themselves.
These issues of visual epistemology, distance, and mobility are articulated in visual
materials produced by the expeditions, for instance a portrait depicting José Celestino
Mutis, director of the New Granada expedition, in the very act of inspecting a plant
(Figure 2). Mutis embodied the Hispanic naturalists’ visual voracity. During three
decades of sustained work, his expedition produced some 6,500 botanical illustra-
tions. Mutis cared deeply about visual representation, and was committed to hiring,
training, and supervising artists. Over the years, his expedition employed more than
forty artists, about thirty of them working at one time. Mutis recruited artists from
near and far, but he found academically trained Spanish artists too slow and
argumentative—they simply had too many ideas of their own about what images
should look like. He preferred to employ South American artists from the noted
workshops of Quito. Eventually, Mutis established a drawing school to train young
boys as botanical illustrators.
The Mutis portrait depicts a naturalist deeply engaged in the pursuit of his art. He sits
before a worktable, his focused gaze fixed on the viewer with weary patience, as if we
had just burst into his study of muted grays and browns and interrupted his silent labor.
He has lifted his head but his body remains hunched over in concentration, eager to
resume the examination of the flower he holds up towards him. A branch of the same
plant lays ready to be pressed between the pages of a notebook and thus to become an
herbarium specimen; books scattered around the table serve as sources of corroboration
Figure 2 Salvador Rizo?, portrait of José Celestino Mutis (1732–1808), ca. 1800, oil on
canvas, 48 ¾ x 36 ¼ in (124 x 92cm). Real Academia de Medicina, Madrid.
in describing and classifying this plant. The magnifying lens that Mutis holds in his
right hand connects the naturalist’s instrument—his eyes—to his subject of study, a
symbol of the acute observational capacities that characterize him as a botanist. This is
not simple looking but rather expert, disciplined, methodical observing.12
If Mutis’s portrait highlights the importance of visual epistemology, another
painting produced by his workshop addresses the capacity of images to move across
distances more easily than things, especially live organisms—botanical or human,
both of which had an unfortunate tendency to perish during their voyages. This
second portrait depicts Antonio José Cavanilles, a renowned Spanish botanist at
Madrid’s Royal Botanical Garden and a long-time correspondent and supporter of
Mutis (Figure 3). This painting also shows a naturalist in the act of producing
knowledge through observation, but whereas Mutis is shown examining a live South
American specimen, Cavanilles is depicted working with an illustration from the
Mutis expedition. Gazing attentively at the image to which he points with his left
hand, the botanist observes the various parts of the plant and immediately transforms
Figure 3 Salvador Rizo (attr.), portrait of Antonio José Cavanilles (1745–1804), ca. 1800,
oil on canvas, 33 7/8 x 26 in (86 x 66 cm). Museo Nacional, Bogota, Colombia
his visual analysis into a textual taxonomic description, which he writes with a quill
pen on a notebook. Eye and hand work in coordination, image produces text. The
botanical illustration is as much a protagonist of this painting as the man rapt in its
study. The illustration’s travels from South America to Madrid allow Cavanilles to sit
at his desk in Europe and conduct ‘firsthand’ observations of foreign nature, using the
image to classify and name New World flora: the image allows long-distance knowing
by seeing. This is exactly how Mutis expected his expedition’s images to be used. As
he explained in a letter:
No plant, from the loftiest tree to the humblest weed, will remain hidden to the
investigation of true botanists if represented after nature for the instruction of those
who, unable to travel throughout the world, without seeing plants in their native
soil will be able to know them through their detailed explanation and living
image.13
Images preserved the impermanent and transported the distant. More than
illustrations or representations, they came to stand in for the objects they depicted,
providing European naturalists with visual repertoires that allowed them to gather
and compare natural specimens from around the world within the enclosed spaces of
their studies.14 As Tafalla realized when he prepared the detailed inventory that
accompanied his shipment to Madrid, the success of his mission depended not only
on gathering materials but also on transporting them in stable and interconnected
forms to Madrid, where cabinet and garden naturalists would incorporate them into a
global European science through publication.15 Images were a crucial medium for the
exploration, collection, and classification of American nature.
2. Natural History Images and Imperial Administration in the Hispanic

Enlightenment
Once the historian opens her eyes to the visual archive, the images start multiplying.
The 12,000 botanical illustrations produced by the five major expeditions are in fact
the tip of a pictorial iceberg. In the same decades, artists working in the Spanish
Americas and Europe created numerous other depictions of New World nature, in
various genres. Some of these are connected to the expeditions themselves: in
addition to the 6,500 botanical illustrations created by the artists of the New Granada
expedition, Mutis also commissioned and sent to Spain a series of six canvases
portraying American human types surrounded by local plants and fruits (Figure 4).
Figure 4a Vicente Albán, series of six paintings of human types and local ﬂora known as
Cuadros de mestizaje, 1783, oil on canvas, 31 ½ x 43 in (80 x 109 cm). Museo de América,
Madrid, 00071–00076
Figure 4b
The series is dated 1783, the same year in which Mutis received royal approval for his
Figure 4c
Figure 4e
Figure 4d
Colonial Latin American Review
245
Figure 4f
botanical expedition after two decades of unsuccessful requests, suggesting that it

functioned as a patronage gift.16 Mutis, a physician and botanist, found visual
materials useful not only in a scientific context, in which images served as
instruments for collecting and classifying specimens and for sharing them with
botanists in other locations, but also in an imperial one, in which depictions of
American nature served both as evidence of local expertise and as currency in
patronage settings.
These canvases, painted in Quito by the artist Vicente Albán, highlight the fertility
of American nature and connect human populations to flora and fauna. The series is
organized around six main human figures, each surrounded by the flora of the region,
ripe and colorful, exuberantly presented in fanciful arrangements for visual
consumption. Textual cartouches name and describe the humans and salient plants
and fruits, at times comparing local specimens to Spanish ones in ways that suggest
that the intended audience would be unfamiliar with American products. Like
cornucopias, these canvases emphasize abundance without any attempt to indicate
ecological relationships. The series format helps to convey a sense of American nature
as extravagantly fertile, suggesting through the accumulation of multiple paintings
that a single canvas would not have been enough to contain its bounties.17
In this series, a lay taxonomy classifies the human types and relates them to one
another. This ordering impulse is brought out through the contrast among the
individual paintings: viewing them comparatively one against the other creates a
relational order among the types depicted. Thus, while the paintings belong to a genre
quite separate from scientific illustrations, they share with the latter an interest in
classification—not the specialized Linnaean taxonomy prevalent in natural history at
the time but a lay taxonomy that attempted to order the natural world, including
humans, according to American categories.
Beyond the expeditions, there are numerous other examples of pictorial statements
produced throughout the Americas in response to the vigorous program of natural
history exploration and collecting taking place throughout the Bourbon Hispanic
world. Many of these visual records were commissioned not by naturalists but by
imperial administrators who received requests for materials and instructions for
collecting them from Madrid’s Royal Botanical Garden and Natural History Cabinet,
and also at times witnessed the work of the scientific travelers (Dávila 1776; Gómez
Ortega [1779] 1992). These imperial officers understood well the high currency of
natural history and Madrid’s avid desire for New World specimens, and hoped to
capitalize on their local access to American nature through shipments of seeds,

plants, wood samples, other natural and manmade products and, above all, images.18
One spectacular example of this bureaucratic art is the Quadro de Historia Natural,
Civil y Geográfica del Reyno del Perú (Painting of the Natural, Civil, and Geographical
History of the Kingdom of Peru), commissioned by José Ignacio Lequanda and
signed by the artist Luis Thiebaut in Madrid in 1799 (Figure 5) (Bleichmar 2011; Pino
Díaz 2013; Peralta Ruiz 2013). Born near Bilbao, Lequanda left Spain for Peru in
1768. He lived there for twenty-eight years, becoming part of the kingdom’s
administrative and intellectual elite and working his way through the viceregal
financial administration as accountant and treasurer in the cities of Lima, Huamanga,
and Trujillo. Lequanda formed part of a lively circle of enlightened administrators
and intellectuals deeply concerned with the relationship between the economic and
political wellbeing of the viceroyalty, on the one hand, and its natural resources,
commerce, and industry, on the other. For these men, acquiring a deep knowledge of
Figure 5 Luis Thiebaut and José Ignacio Lequanda, Quadro de Historia Natural, Civil y
Geográﬁca del Reyno del Perú, 1799, Madrid, oil on canvas, 45 ¼ x 128 in (115 x 325 cm).
Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid
the kingdom’s natural history was a first step towards a successful economy and
political administration. Between 1792 and 1794, Lequanda published several articles
on the population and economy of various regions of Peru in Lima’s Mercurio
Peruano.19
In 1796, Lequanda returned to Spain after spending the majority of his life in South
America. In March 1798, the Council of the Indies granted him the post of contador
mayor (chief accountant or comptroller) in the Lima Tribunal de Cuentas (Royal
Auditing Agency). Lequanda never managed to take this position; he died in Madrid
in 1800, the year after presenting the Quadro del Perú as a gift to the Head Secretariat
of the Indies Treasury—probably as a gesture of gratitude for his new position.
The painting put before peninsular eyes an encyclopedic pictorial collection of
Peruvian nature, gathering over two hundred individual cells that depict the
kingdom’s human types, quadrupeds, plants, birds, aquatic creatures, and insects as
well as a map and a view of a mine. In addition to this large number of images, the
painting includes a lengthy text in the form of captions and sidebars. This text,
written by Lequanda, provides a detailed treatise on Peru’s natural history, geography,
economy, population, social order, and human history. Its transcription extends over
sixty single-spaced pages printed in a small type size (Barras de Aragón 1911). In
content and aim, the treatise is related to Lequanda’s journal articles. However, the
radical shift in format represented by the decision to make a statement not only
through words but also—and most noticeably—through images is highly significant.
After three decades in America, Lequanda could present himself at the headquarters
of Spain’s imperial administration as a knowledgeable source on the current and past
state of Peru and on its natural history, and parlay his hard-earned American
expertise into a better job. To thank his patrons, this accountant wrote a natural
history treatise; to impress them, he had it painted. The resulting work is spectacular
in its detailed contents, intricate composition, and massive scale—it measures 325 by
115 centimeters (roughly ten and a half by almost four feet), suggesting Lequanda’s
interest in its display. The painting served as a visual testament to Lequanda’s
firsthand experience of Peru and made American specimens available in Madrid for
visual inspection. The Quadro demonstrates a shared understanding among colonial
and peninsular elites that images constituted a privileged medium for capturing,
transporting, and displaying distant nature. Images could accomplish something that
words alone could not.
The existence of numerous other examples from the same period suggests how
widespread this notion was. A renowned but under-analyzed instance is Trujillo del
Perú, a collection of almost 1,400 drawings commissioned by bishop Baltasar Jaime
Martínez Compañón in connection to a two-year visita or administrative tour of his
bishopric.20 The drawings are bound in nine volumes, and although scholarly
attention has focused on the three that address Peruvian territory and human
populations, six volumes focus on the quadrupeds, birds, fishes, and flora of the
region—the very same topics treated in the Quadro del Perú. Like Lequanda’s
painting, this collection constitutes an extensive pictorial encyclopedia of Peru,
commissioned by a Spaniard with personal knowledge of the region for peninsular

viewers who may or may not have traveled there themselves. However, in contrast to
the Quadro del Perú’s loquacity, Trujillo del Peru consists exclusively of images
without a text. While it is uncertain whether Martínez Compañón had planned a
written treatise to go with this visual material or considered that the watercolors
sufficed on their own, the project nevertheless attests to a shared understanding of the
importance of collecting and transporting American nature through visual means.21
Another example, less well known, consists of two sets of drawings depicting the
animals, plants, and indigenous inhabitants of the region of Moxos (in present-day
Bolivia), which were commissioned from local artists by Governor Lázaro de Ribera.
Ribera sent these images to Madrid between 1786 and 1794 together with the reports
detailing his work as governor as well as collections of images and objects (Ribera
[1786–1794] 1989). While Martínez Compañón was a prominent and powerful
figure, serving as bishop of Trujillo and later as archbishop of Bogotá, Ribera held a
middling position in the administrative hierarchy and lived in a remote area that had
only recently been incorporated into imperial geography after the expulsion of the
Jesuits from Spanish territories in 1767. Despite these differences, both men clearly
understood the privileged status that natural history images enjoyed in Madrid.
In the last decades of the eighteenth century, naturalists, artists, imperial
administrators, church officials, and countless others throughout the Hispanic world
worked intensively to create thousands and thousands of images—as well as written
reports and material collections—that traveled from points throughout the Americas
and the Philippines to repositories in Spain, allowing imperial nature to become
visible, and in that way knowable and potentially valuable. A flurry of scientific
expeditions crisscrossed the empire, surveying, collecting, and documenting its
natural history as part of a process of reassessing and rediscovering kingdoms that
though long-held remained in crucial ways half-known. In addition, throughout the
viceroyalties local institutions and a wide cast of characters that included both
Europeans and Americans participated in a concerted effort to identify and represent
useful and valuable natural products. Many of these mobile images of American
nature were commissioned not by naturalists but by imperial administrators who
understood the high currency of natural history at the time and the importance of
individual contributions to the larger project of making the empire visible.
3. The Long History of Visual Knowledge in the Hispanic World

Eighteenth-century naturalists and administrators across the Hispanic world sought
to explore and represent nature as part of a project of imperial renovation, and they
privileged images as sources of knowledge, as evidence, and as means of transporta-
tion. They understood their work not only within the context of Enlightenment
ideologies and policies at a time of imperial contraction but also as the continuation
of ventures that had taken place in the sixteenth century, a glorious moment of
imperial expansion. That is, the project to make the empire visible was not exclusively
an Enlightenment phenomenon but the continuation of a longstanding tradition that
went back over two hundred and fifty years.
In the sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown developed practices of information
gathering and reporting that stimulated natural history investigations and technolo-
gical innovation (Barrera-Osorio 2006). These procedures for compiling and
deploying useful information often involved visual evidence. For instance, explorers
and settlers received orders to send not only textual descriptions but also maps, and
conquistadors who wanted to establish encomiendas—claims to the labor and tribute
of a certain Amerindian population—were likewise required to send both written
accounts of the land, its inhabitants, and taxable goods and pinturas (drawings or
paintings) (Barrera-Osorio 2006, 82, 84).22 Maps were particularly prized and, since
they often contained information sensitive to exploration and imperial administra-
tion, the Spanish Crown sequestered them as classified documents held at Seville’s
Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade, est. 1503) or at the Consejo de Indias

(Council of the Indies) (Portuondo 2009, esp. 103–7 and 210–56). Images were often
considered valuable arcana imperii, state secrets (though the status of natural history
was often unclear compared to that of maps).23
The two sixteenth-century projects that bear the most direct connection to the
eighteenth-century expeditions are a set of questionnaires known as the Relaciones
geográficas that began to be compiled in 1577, and the expedition of physician
Francisco Hernández to New Spain between 1570 and 1577. Both originated in
Spanish efforts to collect information about its possessions that could serve
administrative uses. This documentary culture, which flourished during the reigns
of Charles V (r. 1519–1555) and Philip II (r. 1556–1598), was closely connected to
Spanish bureaucracy and deployed both in the Old World and in the Americas,
establishing precedents for the measures enacted during the reigns of Charles III
(r. 1759–1788) and Charles IV (r. 1788–1808) (Pimentel 2001, 22).
Thus, the printed and manuscript instructions that Madrid’s Royal Botanical
Garden and Royal Cabinet of Natural History distributed to administrators
throughout the viceroyalties, requesting plants, objects, and images, had earlier
incarnations. In 1573, Juan de Ovando, president of the Council of Indies, drafted the
‘Ordenanzas para la formación del libro de las descripciones de Indias,’ a set of
instructions that outlined a program through which Spanish administrators in the
New World would prepare reports providing information about the regions they
oversaw. Administrators would send such reports to the Council in Madrid, where
they would be held as state secrets.24 Around the same time, the Council prepared a
questionnaire with two hundred items that specified the desired information to be
collected from the Indies. At the Casa, royal cosmographer Juan López de Velasco
abbreviated this form to a shorter version with fifty questions, and sent published
copies to local administrators in New Spain in 1577 and 1578. This fifty-item
questionnaire requested reports on the history, natural history, mineral deposits,
trade and navigation routes, and landscape of each region. Local administrators
throughout New Spain composed these reports, often in consultation with local
populations. In addition to these written responses or relaciones geográficas, two of

the questions asked for pinturas.25 In this way, the imperial administration deployed
its expanding network of officials, asking them to act as the Crown’s surrogate eyes
and to report their observations in order to make the empire visible. This practice of
using questionnaires to compile a collection of multiple reports about local conditions
was an innovation of Spanish imperial administration, and one that was repeated
periodically—relaciones were requested again in 1603, 1743, and 1777, the same year
that the Royal Botanical Expedition set out for Chile and Peru, highlighting the
continuity between early practices and Enlightenment imperial science.26
Between 1570 and 1577, the humanist physician Francisco Hernández traveled in
New Spain in his capacity as Protomédico de las Indias Occidentales. Hernández
gathered information on New World medicinal practices and products, with a heavy
emphasis on botanical medicine. Hernández consulted native healers, assembled
collections, commissioned drawings of the medicinal substances from native artists,

and drafted a manuscript that he hoped would provide a complete natural history of
the Indies, doing for the New World what Pliny had done for the Old. There are
many parallels between his voyage and the late-eighteenth-century expeditions, and
indeed the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain (1787–1803) was conceived in
part as a continuation of Hernández’s work.27
Based on his travels, Hernández produced a manuscript text on New World
medicinal products with descriptions of about 3,000 plants, over 500 animals, and
about a dozen minerals, totaling almost 2,000 pages in Latin and more than 2,000
illustrations. While the text came from Hernández’s hand and the images from
Mexican artists, it is worth noting that he considered both equally important, clearly
aware that his task consisted of making the new imperial territories visible. Upon
returning to Spain, Hernández wrote in a report (memorial) to Philip II that ‘he had
strived to paint and describe the natural things of that land,’ mentioning the visual
sources before the written ones, even though he had not made them himself.28
The publication of Hernández’s materials was a long and complicated affair. The
original manuscripts were destroyed in a fire at the Escorial in 1671. However, in the
early 1580s Philip II had commissioned his chamber physician, Nardo Antonio
Recchi, to prepare Hernández’s original materials for publication. Copies of Recchi’s
abridged manuscript served as the basis for the first publication of the material,
Francisco Ximénez’s Quatro libros de la naturaleza y virtudes de las plantas y
animales (Mexico, 1615), and also for a fuller and revised edition by the Accademia
dei Lincei, the Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus (Rome, 1651), which
included printed illustrations based on the woodcuts cut in Spain in the 1580s in
preparation for an edition that was never produced.29 Many other early modern
authors included versions of Hernández’s illustrations in their works, suggesting that
copies of the drawings must have circulated.30 In the 1770s, during the second wave
of Spanish imperial exploration, the Cronista Mayor de Indias Juan Bautista Muñoz
located a previously unknown copy of Hernández’s manuscript at the Jesuit Colegio
Máximo in Madrid. Casimiro Gómez Ortega, director of the Royal Botanical Garden,
used this manuscript as the basis for a new three-volume edition, which appeared in
Madrid in 1790.31 It is through this publication process that Gómez Ortega and the
eighteenth-century Spanish expeditions returned full circle to the exploration
program undertaken two hundred years earlier.
Moreover, as in the eighteenth century, authors and artists in the Spanish Americas
created images not only in response to requests and orders from Madrid but also on
their own initiative, aware of the appeal of American images for peninsular viewers. It
is important to note that some of the earliest images created in the New World for
the purposes of transmitting information about the Americas to Europe were the
work of Amerindians and mestizos and drew heavily on indigenous traditions of
pictographic writing.32 Two notable export codices were produced in connection to
the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, a school run by the Franciscan order from
the early 1530s. At Tlatelolco, young men from the indigenous elite received a
trilingual education in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl that concentrated on grammar,

religion, and the classics. This college is the source of the important Florentine Codex
(ca. 1577), a twelve-volume pictorial encyclopedia written and drawn by native
scribes under the direction of friar Bernardino de Sahagún, based on interviews
conducted with Nahua elders over a period of about twenty years (Figure 6). The
Florentine Codex is one of the richest existing sources on pre-Hispanic Nahua life, the
conquest of the Aztec empire from a native viewpoint, and Nahua life in the decades
following the conquest. Some images act as illustrations to the text, while others
supplement its content with additional information. The page layout used throughout
the codex and the content and style of the drawings demonstrate the presence of
European prints and illustrated printed books in New Spain and the use that artists
made of them. Many of the images in the codex show elements taken from printed
sources, among them perspectival views with gridded or tiled floors, and architectural
elements like columns and arches. The Florentine Codex forms part of the widespread
practice of using visual materials as documents for collecting, stabilizing, and
transmitting information in the Spanish Empire.33 The college at Tlatelolco also
produced the earliest post-conquest botanical and medical treatise, which also
stressed visual communication. In 1552, Juan Badiano—a Christianized Indian and
professor of Latin—translated into Latin the information on medicinal herbs
provided by the Aztec healer Martín de la Cruz. This illustrated manuscript, the
Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (‘Little Book of the Medicinal Herbs of the
Indians’) or Codex de la Cruz-Badiano, consists of sixty-three folios of text and
drawings organized into thirteen chapters. Many of the pages in the codex contain
large color botanical drawings in the top portion, with manuscript annotations
underneath describing how each plant is used; some of the pages limit themselves to
botanical drawings accompanied by the plants’ names, without further commentary
(Figure 7). While the majority of the text is in Latin, the plants names are provided in
Nahuatl. In its botanical focus and its combination of word and image, it is a direct
antecedent of the work of the eighteenth-century expeditions. However, the drawings
are done in the native style, and the botanical and medical information comes from
Figure 6 Bernardino de Sahagún et al., Florentine Codex (ca. 1577), book 11, f. 133v.
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana
Nahua medicine (Gimmel 2008). The codex was commissioned by Francisco de

Mendoza, the viceroy’s son, and intended as a gift to then-Prince Philip II. Thus, for
European eyes this export work registered both as a repository of exotic and useful
information from the New World, and as a demonstration of the successful
Figure 7 Martín de la Cruz and Juan Badiano, Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis
(Codex Cruz-Badiano), folio 13v, 1552, Tlatelolco, Mexico, 8 ⅛ x 6 in. Biblioteca Nacional
de Antropología e Historia, Mexico
Latinization of the indigenous elite, reflecting well on Mendoza and on the

Franciscans who ran the college at Tlatelolco.
The importance of visual material for capturing and transmitting New World
nature is also evident in the work of early Spanish chroniclers. Gonzalo Fernández de
Oviedo y Valdés noted in his Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias (Toledo,
1526) that some aspects of American nature were difficult to describe, and in those
cases he had found it necessary to make drawings in order to convey ‘by means of
vision what language misses.’34 Fernández de Oviedo’s more extensive Historia
general y natural de las Indias (Seville, 1535) provided descriptions of the American
landscape, native customs and history, and aspects of botany, zoology, and New
World diseases. Though he was not a trained artist, the manuscript for the Historia
includes Fernández de Oviedo’s drawings of some curious and interesting New World
objects, which served as the basis for the woodcut engravings that illustrated the
published book and introduced many American novelties to European audiences—

among them animals and plants like the pineapple (Figure 8). These images provide a
powerful testament to the importance of visual material in making the New World
visible to distant audiences.
In the text of the Historia, Fernández de Oviedo repeatedly resorted to visual
metaphors to communicate information about the Americas and to validate his
authority as a credible source based on his own eyewitness experience, claiming in the
prologue to the work that, ‘the blind man cannot distinguish colors, nor can one who
is absent bear witness to these matters like one who sees them’ (Fernández de Oviedo
1526, 1:129). He often compared the exotic natural world and inhabitants of the
Americas to paintings and other visual arts (Myers 1993, 193). According to
Fernández de Oviedo, the new world was home to people, animals, and trees that
were so different from anything that was known to Europeans, that they could be
almost impossible to comprehend. ‘Without doubt,’ he noted, ‘the eyes are a great
part of our intelligence of these things’ (Fernández de Oviedo 1526, 2:246).
The outspoken Bartolomé de las Casas—‘defender of the Indians’ but no friend of
Fernández de Oviedo’s—also emphasized in his writings the importance of vision for
knowing and understanding the New World. Las Casas based his critique of other
authors on the New World and defended his own credibility and reliability in terms
of personal experience, which he discussed in visual terms—autopsia, or eye
witnessing. The word ‘historian,’ he wrote following Isidore of Seville, ‘means “see”
or “know”; for no one among the ancients dared place himself in any position other
than among those where he had been present, and had seen with his own eyes that
which he had determined to describe’ (Pagden 1993, 91).35 Las Casas evaluated
experience in terms of visual epistemology, insisting that in order to write about the
New World it was necessary not only to witness it personally but also to witness it
appropriately.36 Thus, he dismissed other authors’ firsthand reports by claiming that,
although they had been in the New World, they had been blinded by greed and had
not been able to comprehend what they had seen.
Figure 8 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, drawing of a pineapple, Historia

general y natural de las Indias, 1539–48, book 7, chapter 14. Huntington Library, HM
177, vol. 2, fol. 46 r
European interest in seeing the New World was not an exclusively Spanish
phenomenon.37 However, visual thinking was particularly important and strong in
the Spanish empire, where it took root and developed to a degree and in a variety of
contexts that did not exist in English, French, Portuguese, or Dutch enclaves in the
New World or Asia. From the early sixteenth century and for the next three hundred
years, the empire functioned as a visual machine, churning out an enormous variety
of images produced in diverse contexts, for different purposes, and for multiple
audiences. 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, with the aim of making such a vast
empire visible locally and across distances.
Conclusion: Visual Evidence

The title page to a manuscript General History of Peru, completed around 1615 by the
Spanish Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa with illustrations by Andean artists,
articulates the special status of images in the Hispanic world (Figure 9). Below the
work’s title, an illuminated ornamental scrollwork shield links the coat of arms of
Castile (above) with those of viceregal Peru (left), the Inka kings (right), and the
Order of Mercy (below), in this way bringing together past and present, empire and
religion. In the center, the watchful eyes and attentive ears of the historian-witness
certify the manuscript’s veracity and underscore its documentary function, a message
supported by the motto ‘Testamur quod vidimus et audivimus’ (we testify to what we
have seen and heard) (Adorno 2008, 85).
In 1540 as in 1799, in the Hispanic world visual epistemology was central to an
imperial apparatus that embraced the documentary function of images, deploying
them as visual evidence both in the production of knowledge and in administrative
contexts. Images helped to discover, document, and persuade. 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, and
the empire functioned as an image machine, steadily producing observations and
representations by the hundreds and thousands. 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.
DANIELA BLEICHMAR is Associate Professor in the departments of Art History and

History at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on the history of
the Spanish empire and early modern Europe, the production and uses of visual
material in science, the history of collecting and display, and the history of the book
and prints. She has received several awards and fellowships for her scholarship,
among them a Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship, a Getty Foundation
Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and a Getty Research Institute fellowship. She is the author
of Visible Empire. Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic
Figure 9 Martín de Murúa, Historia general del Piru, 1613, J. Paul Getty Museum Ms.
Ludwig XIII 16
Enlightenment (2012). Her current book project examines the itinerant lives of
Mexican codices and the production of transatlantic knowledge in the early modern
period.
Notes
1
See also Penhos 2005.
2
On the black legend about the lack of science in the Hispanic world, see Cañizares-Esguerra
2003, 2004, and 2006. On connected histories, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s seminal work 2005a
and 2005b.
3
More generally see Davis 1987, and Stoler 2002 and 2008.
4
Particularly influential works include Cañizares-Esguerra, How to write the history of the New
World: Histories, epistemologies, and identities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world (2001);
Mignolo, The darker side of the Renaissance: Literacy, territoriality and colonization (2003);
Rama, The lettered city (1996). A recent response to the latter is Rappaport and Cummins,
Beyond the lettered city: indigenous literacies in the Andes (2002). Historical examinations of
visual or material sources tend to focus on their uses by indigenous communities as alternatives
to literary ones; see for instance Boone and Mignolo, Writing without words: Alternative
literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (1994) and Dean, A culture of stone: Inka perspectives on
rock (2010).
5
For examples of visual history, see Burke 2001; Haskell 1993; Kagan 2000. Ludmilla Jordanova
offers a manual in The look of the past: Visual and material evidence in historical practice (2012).
Similar arguments can be made about material culture, which provides another rich archive for
historical investigation that brings up methodological issues of its own; see for instance Lane
2010. The literature on material culture is too vast to summarize here. See among many others
Daston 2000 and 2007; Findlen 2013; Bleichmar and Martin, forthcoming, 2015.
6
In 1785, Tafalla joined the Royal Botanical Expedition to Chile and Peru (1777–1788). After the
expedition’s two original botanists, Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón, returned to Spain in 1788,
Tafalla continued botanizing in South America and sending materials until his death in 1711. See
Estrella 1989–1991. The Flora Huayaquilensis is available at http://bibdigital.rjb.csic.es/ing/Libro.
php?Libro=3967&Hojas= (vol. 1) and http://bibdigital.rjb.csic.es/ing/Libro.php?Libro=3968&-
Hojas= (vol. 2).
7
Recent discussions of inventories include Keating and Markey 2011; Riello 2013.
8
The evocative phrase is from another Spanish naturalist in South America, José Celestino Mutis,
in a letter to Juan José de Villaluenga, president of Quito Audiencia, 10 July 1786, Archivo del
Real Jardín Botánico (Madrid), III, 2, 2, 196 and 197 (reproduced in Mutis 1983, 1:316).
9
The literature on the expeditions is vast. Particularly helpful works include La expedición
Malaspina 1987–1996; Engstrand 1981; Galera Gómez 1988; Higueras Rodríguez 1989; Pimentel
1998; and San Pío Aladrén and Higueras Rodríguez 2001.
10
See Añón Feliú 1987; Barreiro 1992; Bédat 1989; Colmeiro 1995; Calatayud Arinero 1988;
Pimentel 2003; and Villena et al. 2009.
11
I discuss these images in detail in Visible Empire (2012, ch. 3), addressing both their adherence to
European models of botanical illustration and their departure from these conventions.
12
For a more thorough discussion of visual epistemology in eighteenth-century natural history, see
Bleichmar 2012, 43–77. More generally see Daston and Lunbeck 2011.
13
Mutis to Villaluenga, Archivo del Real Jardín Botánico (Madrid), III, 2, 2, 196 and 197
(reproduced in Mutis 1983, 1:316).
14
Gardens were also important instruments for mobilizing and acclimatizing plants. See Brockway
1979; Desmond 1994; Drayton 2000; Mukerji 1997; Schiebinger 2004, 1–104; Schiebinger and
Swan 2004; and Spary 2000.
15
The expeditions had very limited successes with publication.
16
Previous scholarship has either failed to connect these canvases to Mutis or done so without
supporting evidence. However, the manuscript evidence exists: in a letter from March 1784,
Mutis describes spending the day at the viceregal court attending a public viewing of what he
calls ‘my natural history oil paintings.’ This must refer to this series, given that the expedition’s
botanical illustrations were tempera paintings, not oil paintings, and that no other works from
the region in that period can be described in those terms. The 1783 date and courtly setting
support this interpretation, suggesting that Mutis commissioned the works to thank his patrons
in Bogotá and Spain and intended them for Madrid’s Royal Natural History Cabinet. This is
consistent with Mutis’s repeated use of visual materials in patronage settings, and with his active
response to the requests for Americana emanating from Madrid’s cabinet and botanical garden.
17
Although the paintings are a series, it is unclear whether the artist had a specific sequence in
mind for their display. None is indicated in the cartouches or through numeration. The number
two, which appears at the bottom center of each painting, is a later addition. For a detailed
analysis, see Bleichmar 2012, ch. 5.
18
Parrish (2006) describes a similar situation for naturalists in British North America.
19
‘Descripción corográfica de la provincia de Chachapoyas,’ Mercurio Peruano V, no. 165 (Lima, 2
Aug. 1792); ‘Descripción geográfica de la ciudad y partido de Trujillo,’ Mercurio Peruano VIII,
no. 247 (Lima, 16 May 1793); ‘Descripción geográfica del partido de Piura perteneciente a la
intendencia de Trujillo,’ Mercurio Peruano VIII, no. 263 (Lima, 11 July 1793); ‘Descripción del
partido de Saña o Lambayeque,’ Mercurio Peruano IX, no. 285 (Lima, 26 Sept. 1793);
‘Descripción geográfica del partido de Caxamarca, en la intendencia de Trujillo,’ Mercurio
Peruano X, no. 333 (Lima, 13 Mar. 1794). On this journal, see Clément 1997; for a comparison
with Mexico, see Clark 2008a and 2008b.
20
On Martínez Compañón, see Berquist 2014; and Trever and Pillsbury 2009.
21
Peralta Ruiz (2013, 48 n.2) contests the longstanding but undocumented commonplace stating
that Lequanda was Martínez Compañón’s nephew.
22
The word pintura referred at the time to any two-dimensional handmade image, drawn or
painted, in any genre including landscapes, maps, portraits, etc. Sebastián de Covarrubias
defined ‘pintar’ in terms of its mimetic function and lack of dimensionality: ‘imitar con varias
colores en plano a las cosas naturales, o a las artificiales’ (1611, 589).
23
On visual knowledge as state secret see Kagan 2002; more generally see also Kagan 1995
and 2009.
24
Reproduced in Solano 1988, 16–74.
25
See Mundy 1996. Another important set of early Mexican maps, also connected to issues of
governance, is the cartographic collection of mercedes de tierra (land grants). See Russo 2005.
26
The questionnaires are reproduced in Solano 1988. The relaciones have a complicated and
fascinating story; see Cline 1972; De Vos 2006; Mundy 1996; Portuondo 2009; and West 1972.
27
On Hernández, see Álvarez Peláez 1998, 1:15–138; López Piñero 1991; López Piñero and Pardo
Tomás 1994 and 1996; Varey 2000; and Varey et al. 2000. The standard biography is Somolinos
d’Ardois, Vida y obra de Francisco Hernández (1959).
28
Quoted in Álvarez Peláez 1998, 36.
29
See, in particular, Varey 2000, n.35. On the Lincei edition, see Freedberg 2002, 245–74.
30
See for instance López Piñero 1991. In addition to the Lincei’s ‘Mexican treasure,’ Hernández’s
work was famously incorporated into Juan Eusebio Nieremberg’s Historia naturae maxime
peregrinae (Antwerp, 1635); it also made its way into the works of Gregorio López (ca. 1583,
published 1678), Juan Barrios (1607), Francisco Ximénez (1615), Johannes de Laet (1625, 1630,
1633), Georg Margraf (1648), Robert Lovell (1659), Henry Stubbe (1662), Hans Sloane (1707–
1725), James Newton (1752), and James Petiver (1715). See Cañizares-Esguerra 2006, 40–41.
31
Francisco Hernández, Opera, cum edita, tum inedita, ad autographi fidem et integritatem
expressa, ed. Casimiro Gómez Ortega (Madrid, 1790).
32
Among the vast literature on Mesoamerican codices, see especially Boone 1994, 1998, and 2000.
33
See, in particular, the 13-volume translation by Anderson and Dibble 1970; see also, Klor de Alva
et. al. 1988. On the images see Baird 1987. On the library at Tlatelolco, see Mathes 1985.
34
Barrera-Osorio 2006, 107–8, quoting Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Sumario de la natural
historia de las Indias (Toledo, 1526, 84). The literature on Fernández de Oviedo is vast;
particularly relevant for my focus on the use of visual materials are Carrillo Castillo 2004 and
2008; Myers 1993; and Myers and Scott 2007.
35
However, writers on the New World often combined their firsthand experiences with existing
official accounts: see Adorno 1992.
36
On the importance of eyewitnessing in early modern science, and of virtual witnessing in
particular, see the classic study by Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the air pump: Hobbes,
Boyle and the experimental life (1985).
37
The literature on early responses to the New World is vast. A landmark study is Stephen J.
Greenblatt, Marvelous possessions: The wonder of the New World (1991).
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Colonial Latin American Review, 2015

Vol. 24, No. 2, 236–266, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2014.972699

The Imperial Visual Archive: Images,

1. Images and Botanical Expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment

and the visual archive as a whole?

2. Natural History Images and Imperial Administration in the Hispanic

botanical expedition after two decades of unsuccessful requests, suggesting that it

capitalize on their local access to American nature through shipments of seeds,

commissioned by a Spaniard with personal knowledge of the region for peninsular

3. The Long History of Visual Knowledge in the Hispanic World

Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade, est. 1503) or at the Consejo de Indias

populations. In addition to these written responses or relaciones geográficas, two of

collections, commissioned drawings of the medicinal substances from native artists,

trilingual education in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl that concentrated on grammar,

Nahua medicine (Gimmel 2008). The codex was commissioned by Francisco de

Latinization of the indigenous elite, reflecting well on Mendoza and on the

published book and introduced many American novelties to European audiences—

Figure 8 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, drawing of a pineapple, Historia

Conclusion: Visual Evidence

DANIELA BLEICHMAR is Associate Professor in the departments of Art History and

Stanford University Press.

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