86A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICONthose formal traits that could be empirically recorded, such as body shape
and color. The representation stopped at the evidence, and the evidence
was provided without context.
This aesthetic shift was also characterized by a different positioning
of animal bodies within the epistemic spatialization of the page as
they began to more regularly appear longitudinally situated across the
page. Unlike the animals illustrated in the bestiaries, which were usu-
ally represented as participants in some narrative act surrounded
by a contextualizing backdrop that functioned as a theatrical stage
(at times shared with men and other animals), Gesner’s animals were
singled out.
The semantic networks that connected animals to the world they in-
habited were thereafter altogether removed in the representational work
of John Jonston published in 1657 and titled Natural History of Quadru-
peds. As Foucault notes:
The words that had been interwoven in the very being of the beast have
been unraveled and removed: and the living being, in its anatomy, its
form, its habits, its birth and death, appears as though stripped naked.
Natural history finds its locus in the gap that is now opened up between
things and words—a silent gap, pure of all verbal sedimentation, and yet
articulated according to the elements of representation, those same ele-
ments that can now without let or hindrance be named.^41Most importantly, Gesner’s and Jonston’s optics established the icon-
ographical modality of scientific representation in classical natural
history. Filtered and limited for the purpose of being transcribed into
discourses, starkly rendered and longitudinally positioned in the picto-
rial plane so as to display their formal attributes with heightened clarity,
animal bodies appeared aligned as closely as possible with the words that
described them.
By the mid-sixteenth century, the classical iconography adopted by
natural historians was characterized by a recurring type of drafts-
manship that predominantly transcribed the objects of inquiry through
a sense of linearity, in opposition to the “seeing in masses” of a more
painterly approach. A formal analogy can be drawn between linear
draftsmanship and the words that accompanied the illustrations in