pts& Symhulcsdu l)ix-huiliémcSiéclc liumpécn is& S_\/111hn|s0f1l1c Eighlccnlh(‘c|1IL|ry in Eumpc The Faces ofNature in Enlightenment Europe Lorraine Duslo|1/Giu11m1 Pomutu (cds.) nameuy¥&E,RUA~F_1ER w|ss11.r\1sg,“N@,§§,’§q'$'-,£§’(4*|;:i|_g;(;_,_\¢§(1 The Faces uf Nature in En]ightBI'l11I1EI1tEUIDp-B F I ¢1II:~-"51 '1-a ’r'-"~:;:|-'"|'- 69* 813 L_JP-l|1x’ER5|T‘r' OF f'--'1|CH|£I5»ixP»J 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 DP -i?‘ £*'~t- —I|I - 1-1.553* "1o“n ii"Ia 4;.‘-‘II The European Seienee Foundation (ESP) aete as a eatalyet for the development of eeienee by bringing together leading aeientista and funding agenoiea to debate, plan and implement pan-European eeientifie and aeienee policy initiatives. ISBN 3-33U5-U360-1 C-0 316 The Eases of Nature in Enlightenment Europe Lorraine Daston Gianna Pomata (eds.) Bwv - BERLINER WISSENSCHAFTS-VERLAG G0 gle am;;or -r-I--"".__;- E Bibliografisohe Information Der Deutsehen Bihliothek “E. J’ Die Deutsehe Bibliothek verzeiehnet diese Publikation in der Deutsehen Nationalhibliografie; detaillierte bibliografisehe Daten sind im Internet iiber ht§p:h'dnb.ddb.de ahrufhar. J. x 1'52 " P7 "I; ISBN 3-3305-U360-1 I.-‘F ‘Ff II (‘D 2003 BWV + BERLINER WISSENSCHAFTS-VERIAG GmbH Axel-Springer-Strafle 54 B - 10117 Berlin Printed in Gemiany. Alle Reehte, aueh die des Naehdruelcs tron Ausziigen, der fotomeehanisehen ‘Wiedergahe und der Uhersetzung, vorbehalten. C-0 316 grclffi 033:»-12:; Ct:1,l"w 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 .......................................................... .. C-0 gle 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 C-0 gle 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 C-0 316 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 C-0 gle 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. 3 C-0 gle