Illustrators of the New World. The Image in the Spanish Scientific Expeditions of the Enlightenment

Abstract

In the Eighteenth Century, with the boom in the exploration of the Earth, most travellers and explorers had painters and illustrators at their sides who recorded their adventures, even their deaths, the exotic locations they visited, the aborigines, the landscapes or the strange creatures or plants that inhabited them. The presence of artists would increase in these types of exploration companies, sent by Spain, in order to recognise the natural resources and the imperial control of their territories. We take as a starting point Löfling’s expedition, in which naturalist artists seek to comply with the requirements of the Linnaean classification system then, looking at the case of Francisco Requena, who cartographically represented the territory and drew the activities of his own expedition members along the boundaries with the Portuguese empire. Likewise, we analyze expeditions known as “Botanical” to the different viceroyalties, which attempted to transmit the American nature idealized in a few “types” that were drawn and recorded to make the new species and the wealth of the Empire known, until finally arriving at the expedition of Malaspina, in which there is a step towards the depiction of the imperial landscape.