A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON95enabled the organization of an effective analytical system.^68 At the core
of the removal of the background in the iconography of early natural his-
tory thus lay a power/knowledge relationship in which the gaze of the
naturalist exercised a sovereign, ordering power over nature, capable of
stripping animals of their semantics, and heralding the role of the collec-
tor as the epistemic origin capable of activating the otherwise passive
hidden wonders of nature.^69 Fundamentally humanist, the cabinet of
curiosities and natural history illustration constituted a literally anthro-
pocentric epistemic blueprint for future studies of nature.
THE CARTESIAN SYNERGYBecause conceptions of panopticism and sovereignty have emerged as
values embedded in the epistemic spatializations of natural history, it is
legitimate to wonder how the Cartesian conception of animals as autom-
ata that emerged in the seventeenth century might be related.^70 Traces of
their cultural synergy might be found in the ontological fluidity that
characterized the heterogeneous gathering of objects in cabinets of cu-
riosities. As seen, this had already operated an ontological f lattening
between animals and artifacts. Along with paintings, sculptures, jew-
elry, and curious artificialia, naturalia such as fossils, bones, shells,
corals, preserved birds, mammals, and dried botanical specimens were
arranged on shelves.^71 The ontological fluidity characterizing the Renais-
sance has its roots in relations of resemblance that played a defining epis-
temological role in outlining the nexus between disparate objects.^72 The
formation of knowledge during this period revolved around the linking
of things by relations of physical similarity and analogy. The primary
task of knowledge was therefore that of teasing out similitudes between
objects.^73 Knowledge identified similitudes on the grounds that objects
were intrinsically defined by their signatures: their embedded, symbolic
signification. Thus, in this epistemic milieu, words and things appeared
intertwined in seamless ways. In the Renaissance, all that there was to know
about an object, or an animal, resided on its surface. It was not necessary
to look underneath the skin of animals or the bark of trees to know their
nature.^74 The principal ordering agent of signatures was convenientia.