A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON93relied on an ontological flattening that aligned natural objects and art
objects, contributing to the process of animal objectification essential to
the emergence of taxidermy.
Through the Renaissance and the classical age, the power of the gaze of
the natural historian defined the epistemology of natural history—it gave
birth to the sovereignty of the viewer. The positioning of the gaze as key
ordering principle in epistemology was exemplified by Jeremy Bentham’s
late eighteenth-century design of the panopticon. Its roots lay at the foun-
dation of the practices of segregation and monitoring enforced by the
syndics during the plague in medieval society.^65 The panopticon was thus
conceived as a system in which economies of power could be dispensed
through architectural configurations that imposed visibility for the pur-
pose of surveillance.^66 In Bentham’s design, a tower stood in the center of
an annular building divided into cells in which opposed windows enabled
FIGURE 2.6 “Ritratto del Museo di Ferrante Imperato,” in Ferrante, I. (1599),
Dell’ historia naturale... (Naples: C. Vitale), 12 p. l., 791 p. illus., double plate. Open-
access image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.