A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON89fying assonances and discrepancies. For this reason, the gaze of the nat-
ural historian ontologically equalized animals and plants. Flora un-
ashamedly visualizes this aesthetic continuity that metaphorically and
aesthetically flattened both animals and plants. As will be seen in this
chapter, this emphasis on surfaces and the epistemic practice of flatten-
ing proved to be of paramount importance to the emergence of taxidermy
in the Victorian period.
Visual traces of the study of plants date back to the second century bce
and the work of medic and botanist Crateva di Mitridate, who is today
considered the father of botanical illustration. Although his body of work
has been entirely lost, it is claimed that his drawings were incorporated into
medieval texts.^49 Thereafter, the field was furthered by Pliny (23–79 ce)
and Pedanius Dioscorides (54–68 ce), although next to nothing remains
of their work.^50 One of the most interesting examples of the iconographi-
cal approach originally employed in botanical illustration can be identi-
fied in the illustrations of the Vienna Dioscurides, an early sixth-century
illuminated medical manuscript from Greece.^51 In this collection of il-
lustrations and medical texts, plants already appear flattened and clearly
manipulated to best fit the flatness and borders of the page on which
they were drawn (fig. 2.3). The background appears neutral, like in
Gesner’s and Jonston’s later images, while most of the leaves and flowers
are parallel to the page. These examples show how the iconographical
choices that would become central to the emergence of zoology were al-
ready in place in the study of botany. The contemporary Herbarium Apu-
leii Platonici incorporated similar representational strategies and became
one of the most popular herbaria of the Middle Ages. Here the realism
characterizing the illustrations of plants was reduced in favor of a more
synthetic approach that would become typical of medieval European rep-
resentations.^52 Likewise, The Old English Herbarium (late tenth century)
proposed flattened and largely synthetic representations of plants.^53
The epistemic shifts that enabled the emergence of the new iconogra-
phy of natural history, as seen in Gesner’s and Jonston’s zoological work,
influenced the production of more realist images in Brunfels’s Herbarum
Vivae Eicones (1532–1536) and Fuchs’s De Historia Stirpium (1547).^54 But
around this time, alongside the epistemic importance gained by illustra-
tion in the representation of plants, we also encounter the emergence of
herbaria in which plants are not drawn but are actually preserved as
pressed specimens. The collection of live plant specimens was initiated by