Dr. Juan Ricardo Rey Márquez: Simulated Nature: Color and texture in the eighteenth-century botanical drawings of José Celestino Mutis and his circle

During the last quarter of the 18th century, the Spanish crown sponsored several expeditions throughout its territories.  Among several scientific subjects that encouraged such endeavour, botany had a special place given its paramount importance for the economy and the arts. But it also proved to be a high challenge to the Spanish botanist. Since the Hispanic American flora defied the sexualist method by Carl von Linnaeus, mainly based on the written description of the flower, the study was not as easy as to apply Linnaeus ideas. Besides, collecting dried specimens on the field to be sent to Europe was especially difficult in terms of conservation because of the heat and humidity of the tropics ¿How could they possibly prove the exceptional features of Hispanic American flora using only textual description? ¿Could it be possible to sort out the decay to send well-preserved specimens to Spain?

In this talk, we will discuss the case of the Botanical Expedition to New Granada whose production of images was developed at its depth by an exceptional team of artists directed by José Celestino Mutis. By studying some of the drawings made by the Mutis team, we will see how the development of a particular painting technique served to render the ultimate visual description of a plant: an icon whose visual features were as realistic as the ones of the living thing.  

PhD. Juan Ricardo Rey-Márquez is a Colombian art historian based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There Rey-Márquez obtained his PhD at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 2019 with the dissertation “On the imitation of the Vegetable Kingdom. Artistic literature and local knowledge in the 18th-century, Botanical Expedition of Nueva Granada producing of colour (1783- 1816)".