110DIORAMASRealism is a complex and elusive term, constantly shifting in differ-
ent disciplines, time periods, and media. The conception of realism in
Renaissance painting, for instance, is very different from that of photo-
graphic realism in the nineteenth century. And both conceptions are sub-
stantially different from the realism of film and digital photography of
today. In all cases, the nature of realism is substantiated by the material-
ity of the medium that enables its emergence, and by the ideological
structures that organize its signifiers. Realism thus becomes a circular
interface through which the epistemic modality of a certain period can
become manifest. It is a shared modality of interpreting and forming the
world that underlines discourses and practices. Realism has the tendency
to naturalize itself through repetition, empiricism, and synthesis, and
thus it simultaneously constitutes a way to construct the world. In this way
it produces a limited and ideologically encoded perceptual experience of
it.^6 During the Renaissance, for instance, when optical realism remerged
following the flattened and synesthetic visions of the Middle Ages, real-
ism was the tool of God—a tool at the artist’s disposal for the reproduc-
tion of God’s perfect creations as they appear to us.
NEW VISUAL ENCOUNTERSDuring the second half of the eighteenth century, especially in central
Europe, the emergence of state-controlled institutions staffed by paid,
full-time expert researchers added to the epistemic contributions of the
amateur gentlemen and gentlewomen enthusiasts.^7 This phenomenon
guided major reconfigurations in the economies of visibility of natural
history and consequently in the power/knowledge relationships involved
in taxidermy, realism, and museum displays. This reconfiguration is what
Tony Bennett called the exhibitionary complex, a response to the prob-
lem of order that developed simultaneously with the reorganization of
visibility and invisibility in the carceral system—another Foucauldian-
informed connection between exhibiting spaces, surveillance, and disci-
pline.^8 During the nineteenth century, the notions of spectacle and sur-
veillance explored in the previous chapter were also further problematized
by the fragmentation of optics that characterized the episteme of the