DIORAMAS111modern age. The new regimes of visibility that emerged at this time were
in fact no longer the private domain of the aristocratic class or kingly
prerogatives: the displays of the modern age played a key role in the edu-
cation and civilization of the masses.^9 This shift in the production and
consumption of knowledge was characterized by a widening divide be-
tween the amatorial and professional approaches to seeing and saying in
natural history—a change that had substantial consequences in the his-
tory of natural history itself.
The 1793 opening of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris
played a pivotal role in the institutionalization and growing popularity
of modern, western natural history.^10 As previously mentioned, right at
the beginning of the modern age, in 1803–1804, the practice of stuffing
animals was officially appropriated by natural history through the emer-
gence of the statement taxidermie. Taxidermy then became a new and
spectacular epistemic tool of visuality at a time when museums of natu-
ral history aimed to engage nonspecialist audiences. In that context, de-
spite frequent assumptions to the contrary, it is worth remembering that
the most prominent role of museums was to entertain audiences, and
taxidermy surely provided the means to fascinate. However, this form of
entertainment capitalized on the specific ontologization of the museum
display: in opposition to other entertainment-oriented spatializations of
the time, such as the circus or the fair, the natural history museum had
to provide truth.^11
As sites of visibility, the display structures and modalities of natural
history museums incorporated the sedimentations of the panoptic rela-
tionships that defined natural history illustrations and cabinets of curi-
osities. On one level, the museum “disciplined” the bodies of objects
through practices of spatial ordering, organizing displays and defining
pathways and routes to best deliver moral and normative narrativiza-
tions. On another, it facilitated educational processes by metaphorically
and physically placing visitors’ bodies at the center of the exhibiting (pan-
optic) complex.^12
Historically, if considered amid the events that characterized their
emergence, the museum’s ordered, self-contained, and rationalized visual-
izations counterweighted the ever relentless widening of an uncontainable
world increasingly shaped by imperialist and industrializing forces.
The new and exciting materialities of the natural objects on display