Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
ISSN: 1463-6204 (Print) 1469-9818 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20
Arte y ciencia en el barroco español. Historia natural, coleccionismo y cultura visual John Slater To cite this article: John Slater (2017): Arte y ciencia en el barroco español. Historia natural, coleccionismo y cultura visual, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14636204.2016.1274501 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2016.1274501
Published online: 12 Jan 2017.
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Date: 12 January 2017, At: 09:05
JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Arte y ciencia en el barroco español. Historia natural, coleccionismo y cultura visual, by José Ramón Marcaida López, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2014, 337 pp., €27 (hardback), ISBN13 978-84-15963-36-3 The baroque has a special place in the historiography of modernity; it suits Spain and Spain’s neighbors. Unlike Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Romanticism and so on, baroque is one of the few historical descriptors of international modernity that does not reliably serve as a marker of Spanish otherness. The arenas of Spanish cultural endeavor that we think of as baroque seem almost to be paradigmatic examples of supranational trends in art, architecture, literature, even demography and jurisprudence. Spanish science and medicine from the same period, on the other hand, have often been characterized as laggardly and out of step with international trends. This makes Marcaida’s decision to consider early modern Spanish cultural production broadly – the sciences, as well as the arts – through the lens of the baroque an intriguing choice: baroque science, as Thomas Glick once told me, sounds like a paradox. In this marvelous book, however, Marcaida constitutes the “ciencia del Barroco” as a fruitful field of inquiry. In essence, Marcaida explores one of the central questions about early modern Spain and the character of modernity itself: how do the disparate forms of cultural production that constitute modernity interact? His point of departure is often the world of the Jesuit author Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595–1658), who taught at Madrid’s Imperial College, but the broader context is European. Nieremberg’s work is woven into a fabric that more often includes naturalists, artists, collectors and patrons in Italy, the Low Countries and Germany than it does the theologians and professors of Spanish universities closer at hand. Marcaida places his scholarship in conversation with the work of Harold Cook, Lorraine Daston, Peter Dear, Peter Mason, Brian Ogilvie and other notable historians of early modern science, as well as the great historians of early modern Spanish intellectual history, such as Fernando Rodríguez de la Flor. The felicitous result is an ambitious new history of the sciences of the baroque told with attention to epistemology and a focus on representation, primarily visual representation. Marcaida gives shape to his book mainly through the use of a number of touchstones: the passion flower, the perpetuum mobile, the bird of paradise and the figure of Nieremberg. In most cases, these touchstones are familiar to scholars. What is novel is Marcaida’s reassembly of familiar tiles into a strikingly original, broadly European mosaic. Marcaida divides his book into sections devoted to accumulation, representation and preservation. The first and longest section, dedicated to accumulation, is marked by the influence of Mason, Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan; Marcaida examines all sorts of collections – visual, material and textual – beginning with the paintings of Adriaen van Stalbemt. Readers are kept pleasingly off balance by a narrative trajectory that often begins outside of Spain and then veers back to the peninsula to look at things afresh. Crucially, Marcaida is interested in the accumulation of representations, rather than the accumulation of things. He is attentive to the effects of commerce on collection (he treats the commodification of natural wonders as axiomatic), but there is very little buying or selling of objects. Commerce remains a theoretical category, a pervasive influence, but not a set of particular transactions. So there are marvels and merchants, but few bills of sale. Following a practice perhaps most memorably developed by Pamela Smith in her study of Franz de le Boë’s house, Marcaida examines a particular room – the “cuarto bajo de verano” – in which Philip IV displayed select paintings from his massive collection. Marcaida
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BOOK REVIEW
explores the ontological confusion created by a visual conflation of objects and images in the “cuarto bajo de verano” to show how the room embodies a philosophical program. The labor of conceptual reconstruction is fascinating, and Marcaida demonstrates his marvelous ability to communicate the meaning of a collection, but certainly Philip IV’s artworks do not constitute a typical instance of the influence of commerce on the epistemological status of depictions of nature. (Things pertain to the king in ways in which things do not pertain to private citizens, even Olivares.) More intriguing is the next collection Marcaida examines in the section on accumulation: that of Juan de Espina. Although they were legendary, little is known for certain about Espina’s collections. Marcaida makes this uncertainty an object of inquiry and studies the literary representation and fictionalization of Espina’s collections. Marcaida closes the section on accumulation by examining Nieremberg as a collector of words, quotations and references to the exotic. Sometimes, Marcaida’s focus on collections of representations – rather than collections of objects – makes the section on accumulation less a contribution to the science of the baroque than a story of the triumph of the baroque over scientific ways of knowing. To be fair, however, Marcaida does name a secondary effect of the baroque – the amplification and exaltation of reality – but this analysis is less successfully developed. The baroque, Marcaida says, makes nature inapprehensible through the senses by foregrounding fictive accumulation. Gracián casts a shadow here but is not named. The second section of the book is dedicated to representation and in particular to representations of the passion flower. Nieremberg’s natural history of 1635 depicted the passion flower in a highly symbolic, almost schematic, way emphasizing the signs of Christ’s passion that Nieremberg believed could be seen in the flower. Marcaida’s analysis of numerous illustrations of the passion flower leads him to a wonderful consideration of drawing from life and drawings made from preexisting illustrations, especially in the case of Francisco Hernández’s monumental natural history (the manuscript of which was lost in a fire). The status of the scientific illustration and its possible relationship to a natural original introduces Marcaida’s study of theories of harmonious artistic representation as formulated by Francisco Pacheco and Vicente Carducho. Here, as elsewhere, Marcaida moves effortlessly among art, science and philosophy, demonstrating masterful control of recent scholarship. The final section, on preservation, begins with a discussion of market value. Things had to be preserved and shipped intact in order to be sold. Marcaida tells engrossing stories of the bird of paradise and why techniques of preservation such as taxidermy led many natural historians to insist that the bird had no feet. For many naturalists, including Nieremberg, the bird of paradise had no feet because it was an almost celestial being that never touched the earth. It remained, like the perpetuum mobile, restless. Once again, however, the birds themselves, even their preserved bodies, are largely an abstraction; Marcaida is interested in representation. He meticulously traces the history of the representation of the bird of paradise in artworks and in print, carrying readers back and forth across Europe. Here, Marcaida shows a particular talent for elucidating the interplay between text and image in printed natural histories. He closes this section with a meditation on vanitas paintings by Antonio de Pereda and Juan de Valdés Leal, paintings that paradoxically preserve the images of objects that symbolize ephemerality. Marcaida’s book itself is a collection of marvelous images, a luxurious treat for the mind’s eye. It includes 56 plates and illustrations that are occasionally reproduced diminutively (two to a page) but the reproductions are sharp. If there is a criticism to be made of Marcaida’s efforts, it is that the book sometimes adopts the values of the culture it analyzes. The same ontological instability that conditions our reception of a vanitas painting is often at work in the book’s pages: the status of things can recede into immateriality. The commerce that happens in this book is generally trade in exotics: “Especias, frutas, animales y productos
JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES
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exóticos … ” Other things that were commonly bought and sold – grain, cloth, human beings and so on – leave little trace here. There is a great deal of value, but little sense of volume. At other times, Marcaida is inattentive to the persistence of the sciences of the baroque. In his consideration of the passion flower, for example, Marcaida tends to treat Nieremberg’s symbolic interpretation of the plant as something that botany would eventually overcome; this overlooks the fact that the genus of the plant is still Passiflora. Styles of visual representation changed, but Nieremberg’s ideology and Christ’s passion were encoded terminologically in botanical nomenclature. As in the case of the passion flower, the name of the bird of paradise (of the family Paradisaeidae) proved more resilient than the conventions of visual representation; the bird regained its feet in scientific illustration, but the paradisiacal name remains. Nieremberg taught us to speak the baroque, as well as to see its symbolic valences. The extraordinary achievement of this book belies its title: at its best it is not merely about “el barroco español”, but rather about “las ciencias del barroco”. Marcaida allows readers to understand the sciences of the baroque as international phenomena with an intellectual center in Spain. Figures such as Athanasius Kircher become comprehensible to us through the works of Nieremberg, instead of the other way around. Writing with brio, range and sensitivity, Marcaida has made a lasting contribution to European scientific and cultural history. John Slater University of California, Davis
[email protected] © 2017 John Slater http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2016.1274501
