A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON79Eden.^18 Both Foucault’s and Lévi-Strauss’s theorizations ultimately relate
to the visibility of the outside of objects: their surfaces. Internal organs
and functions fell outside the range of visibility of the episteme of the clas-
sical age—they were invisible to the discourse and practices of the time.^19
An inherent exclusivity is at play in the modes of visualizing and ren-
dering visible of any episteme. As a result, some objects of knowledge
become visible through one episteme as they fall into invisibility in an-
other, for it is impossible for man to access the totality of knowledge.^20
The fact that epistemic modalities of the classical age were substan-
tially defined by a focus on surfaces is of defining importance to natural
history and to the emergence of taxidermy alike. It is upon the surfaces
of natural objects that the relationship between seeing and saying es-
sential to taxonomy unfolded.^21 And it is from this perspective that
Fairnington’s critique of natural history illustration appears to gain cur-
rency. His juxtapositions of animal and plant bodies suggest an ontologi-
cal collapse gesturing toward the reductionism of natural history and
the primacy of the surface as a very privileged epistemic stratum. In this
sense, the study of botany essentially laid the epistemic foundations of
zoology. In the classical age, plants were understood to wear their organs
on the outside; once flattened on the page of the herbarium, they clearly
displayed all that there was to know about them during that specific
epistemic milieu.^22 This condition encapsulated the epistemological mo-
dality of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which it was pos-
sible to know and to say only what could be ordered within a taxonomic
area of surface visibility.^23 It is for this reason that an early system of
natural history taxonomy can be found in the herbarium.
THE BESTIARIUM A S N E W
EPISTEMOLOGICAL SITEAlthough Fairnington’s paintings directly subvert the iconography that
characterized natural history in the classical age, it is also important to
consider how this objectifying approach to animal representation oper-
ated over time for the purpose of identifying the aesthetic regularities
that established this iconography and its objectifying paradigms.