During the nineteenth century, gridding, graphing, and surveying proliferated as never before as nations and empires expanded into hitherto "unknown" territories. Though nominally geared toward justifying territorial claims and collecting scientific data, expeditions also produced vast troves of visual and artistic material. This book considers the explosion of expeditionary mapping and its links to visual culture across the Americas, arguing that acts of measurement are also aesthetic acts. Such visual interventions intersect with new technologies, with sociopolitical power and conflict, and with shifting public tastes and consumption practices. Several key questions shape this examination: What kinds of nineteenth-century visual practices and technologies of seeing do these materials engage? How does scientific knowledge get translated into the visual and disseminated to the public? What are the commonalities and distinctions in mapping strategies between North and South America? How does the constitution of expeditionary lines reorder space and the natural landscape itself? The volume represents the first transnational and hemispheric analysis of nineteenth-century cartographic aesthetics, and features the multi-disciplinary perspective of historians, geographers, and art historians.
Author(s): Ernesto Capello, Julia B. Rosenbaum
Series: Routledge Studies in the History of the Americas
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 268
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: The Expeditionary Impulse
Notes
Part I Seeing and Not Seeing
2 Alexander von Humboldt: The Aesthetic Science of Landscape Pictures
Portrait and Landscape Pictures as Models for Humboldt’s Holistic Vision of Nature
Definition of the Ecological Unity as a “Picture of Nature”: Classical Ideal Landscape Painting
Picturesque Descriptions of American Nature
Humboldt as Art Historian: The Evolution of the Tropical Landscape
Conclusion
Notes
3 Triangulating the View: Art and the Great Surveys of the American West in the 1870s
Notes
4 Cartographic Representation in the Age of Vernacular Landscape: Pictorial Metaphor in Stephen Long’s Map of the ...
Notes
5 Seeing Solitary Deserts Full of People: The Chorographic Commission in Colombia’s Eastern Plains, 1856
The Chorographic Commission
Expedition to the Eastern Plains
Depictions of Indians: The Casanare Map and Watercolors
Appropriating and Acknowledging Local Knowledge
The Posthumous Maps: Emptied Spaces
Notes
Part II Lines and Tracings
6 Intervisible Border: Photographs and Monuments along the US-Mexico Boundary
Topography and Photography
Monuments and Maps
Acknowledgments
Notes
7 “Visual Expeditions” Supporting Geopolitical Vindications: Maps, Photographs, and Other Visual Devices in the Diplomatic ...
Introduction: The Andes as a Border
The Argentine Position: “The Mountain Range Is a Natural Border”
The Maps and the Facts
The Visible as Evidence: Creating Visions (through Photographs)
The Evidence and the Evident: Visual Devices
Final Remarks: Making Evidences from the Visible
8 Female Eyes on South America: Maria Graham in Brazil
Domesticating Expeditionary Literature
Setting the Historical Stage
Botanizing
Picturing the City: Iconic Subjects and Sites of Personal Discovery
Forging the Picturesque through Text and Image
Conclusion
Notes
9 Science, Wonder, and Tourism in the Early Mapping of Yellowstone National Park
Wonders and Wanderers, on and off the Map
Putting Yellowstone on the Map
F. V. Hayden, Mapping, and Making the National Park
Mapping the Early National Park
Promoting Wonderland
Notes
Part III Art and the Expeditionary Impulse
10 Delineating Land: Art, Mapping, and the Work of Frederic Edwin Church
Acknowledgments
Notes
11 Albert Operti: An Arctic Historical Painter and the Popular Sublime
Notes
Index
