ABSTRACT
At its broadest span, this essay is about how early modern (pre-Linnaean) natural history organized its experience of the natural world. More narrowly, I am conerned with the visual organization of the natural world by means of naturalistic figuration (mimetic pictures) and schematic representation (grids). Much of the chapter will focus on naturalistic representation in the classification of blowfish in the first decade of the seventeenth century in the Netherlands, and on grids and schematic tables in natural history of the period. I conclude by suggesting that the coexistence of these two modes of representation is a crucial feature of early modern natural history and that, taken together, they may help to explain how botanical still-life paintings are structured, compositionally and epistemologically speaking. In other words, this essay treats the organization of the natural world by images and the impact of natural history’s modes of visualization on the new genre of flower pictures ca. 1600.
