A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON85and the East Indies.^40 These new animal bodies appeared somewhat sus-
pended between the empirical and the fantastical as the novelty of their
colors and shapes made them implicitly otherworldly. But their undeni-
able physical presence challenged authors with a blank space in the place
of narratives. The new animals were wholly or mostly unknown and did
not carry with them any animal semantics: they were as symbolically
bare as they could be. The impossibility of interpreting these animal bod-
ies through a defined anthropocentric, sociosymbolic schema brought
Gesner to focus on their morphology in order to register with accuracy
their essential features instead. As a result, Gesner’s illustrations capital-
ized on a representational naturalism that had already resurfaced in the
sculptural and pictorial arts through the revival of classical art and Greek
philosophy during the Renaissance.
This important epistemic crisis is problematized in Fairnington’s
paintings in the Flora series, where exotic and European varieties of
plants and species of animals visually merge with a fluidity that obliter-
ates animal semantics and enables the emergence of new orders of juxta-
position. Many of the titles of Fairnington’s paintings emphasize this
fluidity by disregarding scientific nomenclature. Interestingly, the word
flirt recurs more than once in different titles, such as Flirt (tortoiseshell)
and Flirt (six butterflies). A nonscientific term, the word flirt suggests a
playful game of attraction—one standing in direct opposition to the rigid-
ity and separateness of the taxonomical grids of natural history. Fairning-
ton’s paintings thus gesture toward a “what if... ?” What if natural history
had adopted a different epistemic modality through which to produce
knowledge of animals and plants? What if instead of isolating animals
and plants within the perimeter of the page, the natural history illustra-
tion had opted for a fluid and open intertwining of life? What would our
relationship to animals and plants be like today?
But instead, the absence of animal semantics bore other implications
in two iconographical registers. Stylistically, a more realistic approach to
animal form became favored. Compositionally, the plain backgrounds
against which animal bodies were positioned became more common. The
absence of backgrounds was indicative of the absence of animal seman-
tics. In the absence of specific cultural knowledge of exotic animals, the
new iconographical modality at play in the production of illustrations po-
sitioned animal bodies in a contextual vacuum, capitalizing upon only