92A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICONmaterial contingencies of the spatializations through which nature was cul-
turally constructed—the role played by architectural configurations in the
shaping of power/knowledge relationships should never be underestimated.
Foucault’s interest in the spatializations of knowledge is well known.
His attention to institutionalized spatializations, such as the hospital, the
prison, and the asylum, focused on the concept of surveillance and con-
trol.^60 Surveillance and discipline did not simply figure as tools for the
control of individuals but were outlined as more complex concepts simul-
taneously entailing containment and making visible.^61 In Discipline and
Punish, Foucault focuses on the functional, as well as hierarchical, roles
played by the organization of cells, places, and ranks in late Renaissance
and classical institutions.^62 He draws a direct link between the material-
ity of the architectural spaces of schools, hospitals, and prisons and his
earlier analysis of natural history illustration featured in The Order of
Things.^63 Surveilling and disciplining spatializations are simultaneously
real but also ideal—they are real in the sense that they physically struc-
ture and organize spaces and bodies, and ideal in that they enable “ar-
rangements of characterizations, assessments, and hierarchies.” Here
the connection between the materiality of human bodies, architectural
spaces, and the representational ordering operated by the arrangement of
botanical and zoological gardens, becomes overt. This is what Foucault
calls a “disciplining space of natural beings.”^64
The materiality of the epistemological spatialization, and the mate-
rial contingencies of the page in the natural history treatise, played a
substantial role in the ontological and representational flattening process
of representing animals. Confined within the margins of the page, cir-
cumscribed by written text, immobilized against a plain background,
rendered clearly visible, and silenced, animal bodies could be subjected
to a metaphorical/representational surveillance and disciplining. What
emerges at this stage is a triad of parameters through which animals are
culturally constructed in natural history during the Renaissance and the
classical age: space, power, and knowledge. Along with natural history
illustration and the herbarium, this triad played a key role in a third im-
portant spatialization in fashion at the same time: the cabinets of curi-
osities that emerged during the late fifteenth century as the new epistemic
spatializations for the observation of eclectic gatherings of objects. Cabi-
nets of curiosities were the most opulent and visibly ostentatious sedi-
mentation of power/knowledge relationships involving natural objects, and