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The Faces ofNature
in Enlightenment Europe
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Concepts & Symboles du Dix-huitieme Siecle Européen
Concepts dc Symbols of the Eighteenth Century in Europe
edité par I edited by Peter-Eckhard Knabe et I and Roland Mortier
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The European Seienee Foundation (ESP) aete as a eatalyet for the
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ISBN 3-33U5-U360-1
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The Eases of Nature
in Enlightenment Europe
Lorraine Daston
Gianna Pomata
(eds.)
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S-,.__ié - G L3 Table of Contents
Lorraine Daston and
Gianna Pornara
The Faces of Nature: ‘Visibility and Authority ............................ ..
Roy Porter
The Enviromnent and the Enlightemnent: The English Experience
Sarah Bendaii
Mapping and Displaying an English Marshland Landscape in the Mid-
Eighteenth Century .......................................................... ..
Fernando Vidai
Extraordinary Bodies and the Physicotheological Imagination ......... ..
Martha Feirirnan
Nature Personified: Remaking Stage and Spectator in lvIid-Eighteenth-
Century Parma ........................................ ... ..................... ..
Christian Licoppe
A French mid-eighteenth Centwy Crisis in Experimental Natural
Philosophy through Public Display. Nollet's Electrical Shows vs. the
Devious Ways of Franklin's Electrical Annospheres .................... ..
Anneiore Rieire-Mrliiier
Von der lebendigen Kunstkamrner eta Liebhaberei.
Fiirstliche Menagerien im deutschsprachigen Raum tvfihrend
des 13. Jahrhunderts .......................................................... ..
Ernrna C. Spar)’
Forging Nature at the Republican Museum ............................... ..
Andrew Canninghan:
Auto-Icon: Jeremy Bentham's Three Bodies, the Moral Laws of
Nature, and the Ideology of Industrial Capitalism ........................ ..
Fania Findien
The Scientistis Body: The Nature of a Woman Philosopher in
Enlightenment Italy .......................................................... ..
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Marta Cavaaaa
Women's Dialectics, or the Thinking Uterus: An Eighteenth-Century
Controversy on Gender and Education .................................. .,
Nadia Maria Fiiiopini
"Sanctuaire de la nature ou prison du fcetus": nature et corps féminin
sous le combat sur la cesarienne en France an XV[IIe siecle ........ ..
VI
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The Faces of Nature: Visibility and Authority
Lorraine Daston and Giarma Pomata
Making Nature Visible
In the preface to his hugely popular poern The Ternpie ofitiaasre (1803), the
English physician and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin described the
purpose of the work as
simply to amuse by bringing distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and
sublime images of the operations of Nature in the order, as the Author be-
lieves, in which the progressive course of time presented them.’
The Eleusinian mysteries of Antiquity were in reality, Darwin believed, natu-
ral philosophy, as allegorically revealed to the initiated hierophants. The
meaaotint frontispiece of his poem shows two priestesses in classical dress,
one kneeling and the other raising a curtain on a multi-breasted female figure
representing Nature, as she is evoked in the poem:
SI-IRlN'[) in the midst majestic NATURE stands,i Extends o'er earth and
sea her hundred hands,',i Tower upon tower her beamy forehead crests,i And
births unnumber"d milk her hundred breasts?
This image of nature as at once mighty yet mysterious, vast yet veiled, points
to a characteristically Enlightemnent predicament. Never had the authority of
Nature (almost always majuscule in these contexts) been so often and broadly
invoked, to justify everything from the Christian religion to neo-classical
aesthetics to the metric system of weights and measures. Natural laws
allegedly govemed not only the course of the planets but also the passions of
the human heart and indeed goverrnnents themselves. Yet the very enormity
and ubiquity of Nature created the impression of nebulosity, of a near-divine
power hidden by a curtain. Hence the innumerable Enlightenment attempts to
make Nature visible, to give nature a face — and sometimes a body to boot.
The essays collected in this volume’ describe a range of eighteenth-century
efforts to render abstract Nature concrete and, as Darwin put it, vivid to the
I Erasmus Darwin, The Tenrpie of Nature," Or, the Origin of Society-.' A Poem, with
Pniiosophicai Notes, London I803, Preface, n.p.
2 Darwin, Temple ofNature , L129-I32, p. I2. The fionfispiece was drawn by Fuseli and
engraved by Houghton. On the identification of Nature with the many-breasted Diana of
Ephesus figure, see Mechthild tvlodersohn, Nature ais Gtiitiin im Mirreiairer.
Hconographische Sradien ea Darsreiiangen tier personrfieierten Natar, Berlin 199?, p.
lo ff; also Theodora Jelmy-Rapper, Mattergdrrin and Gorresntatter in Ephesos: Von
Artemis ca Maria, Ziirich I936.
3 The essays were originally written for two conferences held under the auspices of the
European Science Foundation project on "Concepts and Symbols of the Eighteenth-
I
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imagination. These efforts span vanguard natural philosophy and provincial
map-making, the opera and the menagerie, ribald satires on learned women and
ponderous treatises of natural theology, the garden and the museum. They
draw upon sources in French, German, Italian, English, and Latin, spamring
the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Amidst all of this
variety, several eonnnon themes may be discemed: first, the perpetually
bltnred boundaries between the natural versus the artificial, the preternatural,
or the supemattnal; second, the repeated efforts to visualize abstract Nature
by means of specific natures — be these latter exotic animals displayed in a
royal zoo, electrical experiments, women's bodies, or on-stage personifica-
tions; and third, the question of who can know nature and in what institu-
tional setting - who is qualified to draw the curtain, and what sites qualify as
true "temples of nature"?
Fluid Boundaries
Modem nature is defined by a series of eitherior oppositions: the natural ver-
sus the artificial, the natural versus the cultural, the natural versus the super-
natural. Although eighteenth-century Europeans routinely appealed to these
oppositions (or to their rough equivalents: nature versus culttue would usu-
ally have been phrased more narrowly as nature versus education), they just
as routinely tmdertnined them. Venerable pattems of thought and practice
inherited from Greek and Roman Antiquity, as well as from the Latin Middle
Ages, encouraged a more fluid model of the relationship between nature and
its various opposites than the rigid, either-or categories of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries permit. In the case of nature and art, for example, eight-
eenth-century Europeans still subscribed to a co-operative model, in which art
can aid or improve nature. The paradigm cases here would have been medi-
cine, in which the physician's art assists the healing power of nature, and ag-
riculture, in which the farmer improves the land by plowing, fertilizing, and
other georgic arts. However, the co-operative model could be and was ex-
tended to education ("cultivation" in a metaphorical sense), in which the
child's nature was perfected by the proper upbringing. The co-operative
model of art and nattue implied a certain plasticity in nature. To speak, for
example, of woman's "nature" (including her anatomy and physiology) was
not yet to speak of her destiny: for better or for ill, nature could be super-
Century in Europe" (organized by Roland lvlortier and Peter-Eckhard Knabe), in the
section on "Nature" (chaired by I-lans-Peter Reill): "The Display of Nature in Eighteenth-
Century Europe" (organized by Lonaine Daston in Berlin, 12-14 December I996) and
"l'-Iattu'e Embodied" (organised by Gianna Pomata in Bologna, 4-ti July 199?). We me
grateful to the ESF, the Ivlax-Planck-lnstitut fiir Wissenschaflsgeschichte, and the
Dipartimento di Discipline Storiche dell'Universita degli Studi di Bologna for their
support.
2
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seded by education. The French physician Pierre Roussel for example be-
lieved that women's softer and more delicate bodily tissues and organs suited
them for a life of retiring domesticity, but feared that this natural order, both
corporeal and familial, had been subverted by pemicious education and cus-
tom. " Similarly, the claim that all htnnan beings were equal under natural law
by no means implied that this was their actual political condition. Nature
could be thwarted, as well as helped, by art and education.
Roy Porter's essay "'ln England's Green and Pleasant Land‘: The English
Enlightemnent and the Enviromnent" describes the intertwining of art and
nature in eighteenth-century English attitudes towards improving agriculture,
landscape, and gardens. Porter argues that the model relationship between
humans and natrue was the fann, in which the farmer served as God's stew-
ard, carrying out the divine directive to cultivate and enrich the earth and its
products. It was "man's right - his duty even - to harness nature", and to im-
prove it by "turning wasteland into wealth". Previously, the farm had been
viewed as an outpost of civilization against the encroaching wildness of na-
ture. But once nature itself became domesticated as the farm, prosperous
English la.ndowners were free to aestheticize wildness in their gardens land-
scaped after the fashion set by Capability Brown for "a new Arcadian
escapism", that turned "the mansion into an island lapped by a sea of park-
land". Yet this "sea" was not without its carefully plarmed vistas and poplar-
lined boundaries. Even more assertively wild nature was turned into art and
mentally flamed: not only erupting volcanoes but even vistas outside of
Ttmbridge Wells could be perceived as sublime paintings by Salvator Rosa.
The motif of nature framed, in both literal and figurative senses, recurs in
Sarah Bendall's essay "Mapping and Displaying an English Marshland Land-
scape in the Mid-Eighteenth Century". Maps conmrissioned by country
squires were often large and elaborate, drawn on expensive materials like
parchment and vellrun, richly ornamented, proudly indicating improvements
made by the landowner, and sometimes framed for prominent display. The
maps connnissioned of Ronmey Marsh in South-eastern England were at once
utilitarian and symbolic, intended to be accurate and beautiful. On the one
hand, they served as the basis for levying taxes to maintain drainage and sea
walls; on the other, they were frequently decorated and coloured. They were
a visible statement of the prosperity of Kentish landed families as well as of
the skill of the surveyors who drew and embellished them with coats of arms
and compass roses. At least in the case of the surveyor and mapmaker
Thomas Hogben, these artistic touches seem to be due to his own aspirations
as a skilled artisan, rather than to instructions given by a client-landowner.
Regardless of style, I-logben charged the same flat rate of sixpence per acre to
all his customers.
4 Pierre Roussel, Systems physique er morai tie ia femme [ITTS], 5th ed., Paris 1309, pp.
21-22.
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