Painting natures: Buffon and the art of the 'Histoire naturelle' (Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, France).

摘要

This dissertation looks at the metaphor of the “painter of nature” in the French Enlightenment as it described the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), and the literary style of his forty-four volume Histoire naturelle générale et particuliére avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (1749–1804). The metaphor has obscured the actual presence and the study of more than two thousand engravings that Buffon published with his original text. On the evidence of those pictures and Buffon's direct and sustained contact with artists, I argue that artistic labor completed his material practice in natural history. The production and use of images imported to Buffon's work (and thus to French science for nearly fifty years), the interests and theoretical debates of visual representation in eighteenth-century France. Foremost among these was the contest between the entrenched academic representation of nature as it ought to be, “ la belle nature,” and the possibility, glimpsed by the artists of the Histoire naturelle, of objects represented “as they are” in “la nature pure.”; The first chapters identify Buffon's ambition for the Histoire naturelle to achieve in life science the intellectual, professional, and popular status of Newton in physical science. Next I provide an account of the primary collaborators: naturalists Buffon and Daubenton, and artists de Séve and Martinet. I describe the labor of natural history as practiced at the Jardin du Roi in Paris and linked to French institutions of art, natural philosophy, commerce, and publishing. A small chapter shows the range of genres and forms of graphic art that Buffon sampled for his preliminary theoretical discourses and history of nature. Subsequent chapters pursue specific animals and illustrations for their rapport with historical and contemporary problems in representation. These images addressed ancient and modern theories of imitation, resemblance, sensation, and sensibility; they actively participated in the empiricist explorations of animal form and nature. The penultimate chapter marks the introduction of color to the illustration of birds, and the changes that Buffon made in his visual program, his collaborative partners, and his systematic thought. A conclusion summarizes the artistic impact of Buffon's painted tableau of nature.