The star of colonial Latin American art is ascendant. Though some museums, like the Denver Art Museum and the San Antonio Museum of Art, have long had important collections in this area, others have recently begun to take more than a passing interest in the period and region. Just last year the Louvre and the Philadelphia Museum of Art held major colonial Latin American exhibitions. This was the second show of such scale at Philadelphia in recent history. Their 2006 exhibition, Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, after traveling to Mexico City, went on to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2007 (click here for review). LACMA returned with another major colonial Latin American show in 2011. Furthermore, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently made one curatorial appointment in colonial Latin America and one in pre-colonial and hopes to expand its holdings. These shows tend to include a little bit of everything, from religious and historical scenes to decorative arts and native artisanal work. Saints and virgins and casta paintings (domestic scenes that categorize and name the variety of offspring that resulted from miscegenation) are among the best-known images from colonial Latin America. In fact, Thrall (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), the most recent collection of poems by Natasha Trethewey, the U.S. poet laureate, is a series of ekphrastic poems based on casta paintings.

This current trend in Europe and the United States to collect colonial Latin American art is part of a long history of the waning and waxing of European and U.S. curiosity about the region. For example, the quincentennial of Columbus’s first voyage created for about ten years on either side of 1992 heightened interest in colonial Latin America. The first of these European “rediscoveries” of Latin America was in the eighteenth century. In 1735 the French Geodesic Mission, led by La Condamine and accompanied by the Spanish geographers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, traveled through northern South America to measure the circumference of the world. The information gathered and disseminated by this expedition (in essence the first new scientific information about Latin America since the late sixteenth century, when the Habsburg monarchy closed off the Americas to Europe, classifying such information as state secrets) piqued a curiosity that ultimately lead to the Bonpland/Humboldt expedition and the Prussian naturalist’s half-century long publishing project on American nature. Between La Condamine’s and Humboldt’s journeys, the Spanish crown, in a desire to exercise better political control over its colonies and to find new revenue streams by turning American natural abundance into profit, funded a little less than sixty natural history expeditions to the Americas. Daniela Bleichmar’s Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment addresses a body of about twelve thousand images, mostly watercolors, produced by four of the principle Spanish expeditions during these years. Her book studies the intersection of art, scientific exploration, and empire and argues the important role pictorial renderings of American nature played in the global development of Enlightenment science.

Though interest in Latin America goes through cycles, the current fascination by non-specialists in the art of colonial Latin America has been hard won. Scholars have had to contend with questions of anonymity, originality, technique, and subject matter. The largely anonymous casta paintings are a success story of modern reception. The last chapter of Visible Empire, in fact, explores the difference between how casta paintings depict Latin American nature as local color and how the natural history images present it on a blank, white canvas, abstracted from context. This discussion, which explores the tension between local, creole interests and global, imperial ones, connects Bleichmar’s study to the larger field of colonial Latin American art history without turning away from her primary interest in grappling with the relationship between art and science.

Like early studies of casta paintings, Bleichmar, given the nature of the works she examines, finds the need to justify her object of study. These images, works that “have never formed part of the permanent exhibit of a major art museum” (5), are mostly anonymous and/or collectively produced in American workshops and suffer not only the stigma of provenance, but also of medium, purpose, and subject. This is to say, they are watercolors that are decidedly not heroic, epic, or philosophic in composition, but meant to serve the needs of a scientific community. Thus, though the undated, unsigned Alstroemeria multiflora that graces the cover of Visible Empire is beautifully rendered, it is little more than a well-executed flower, meant to be the picture of an Alstroemeria multiflora to help a botanist in Spain readily identify the species. In order to render intelligible this trove of images, drafted and painted by about sixty artists over several decades, and weave a compelling story about the intersection of well-crafted pictures, science, travel, and imperial politics, Bleichmar comes with a set of 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? . . . How to approach a visual archive 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? (7)

These concerns are not just philosophical and political, but also methodological. Though focused on minor works, she is firmly grounded in the discipline of art history. From this position, she moves outward to make an invaluable contribution to art history, to the history of science, and to colonial Latin American studies.

Bleichmar situates this archive of images within the context of the Bourbon Reforms and the Spanish crown’s desire to better govern and make profitable its ultramarine colonies. Guiding her historical contextualization are the related principles of “visibility and utility” (39). Utility speaks to the expectation that increased knowledge of Latin American nature would by definition reap economic benefits. However, as she shows in chapter 4, Spanish ventures into what she calls “economic botany” are largely failures. Visibility tracks the importance of vision as a means of knowing and understanding the world. Central to her understanding of visibility is “visual epistemology.” In her discussion of this term, she shows how deeply connected the well-organized and well-trained eye is to reason, knowledge, and Linnaean classification. Traveling naturalists worked in concert with trained artists who drew and painted representative specimen. These images, in turn, were also described verbally and often accompanied by dried plants. Working with text, image, and dried specimen allowed “naturalists around the world to participate in collective empiricism and communicate with one another” (76).

The story she tells is one of global and local intellectual exchange, but not everything remains at the macro level of scientific communication and intellectual debate between field naturalists and naturalists that worked exclusively with specimens found in natural history cabinets, greenhouses, and libraries. In chapter 3, “Painting as Exploration,” Bleichmar closely examines the technique used by artists on these expeditions. This chapter, full of beautiful tempera-on-paper illustrations, develops a history of the training that artists received, strategies employed while in the field, the various uses made of these images (from taxonomy to gift), and the development of an American school of painting nature. All the while, Bleichmar pays careful attention to the craft of the image. The way she interweaves these readings of individual images with the larger narrative of natural history expeditions as “visualization machine[s] that captured imperial nature in effigy” (122) is not unique to this chapter, but characteristic of how she engages her archive of images throughout the book.

Visible Empire explores the “rich social lives” of these natural-history watercolors that circulated as objects “among the various participants in global networks of knowledge production, as gifts with symbolic value exchanged in patronage relationships, and as embodiments of the plants they represented” (76). It tells the story of intellectual and scientific collaboration, debate, and competition among naturalists for fame and nations for profit. Writing at the intersection of art history, colonial Latin American history, and the history of science, Bleichmar weaves a compelling narrative that provides a nuanced understanding of the relationship between late colonial Latin America and Enlightenment Spain while also asking interesting methodological questions of an archive of images previously little studied.