Exotica and Europe

This chapter focuses on exotica in Europe. Many of the botanical and zoological aspects of Versailles were supported by increasingly rigorous scientific studies being carried out in Paris. Since the early 1500s, France’s botanists had sought a permanent facility where living plant specimens could be studied. Indeed, the French were eager to establish a counterpart to the successful research gardens organized in Padua and Pisa. The Jardin du Roi in Paris was meant to make the capital, and by extension France, the world’s pre-eminent center for natural history. Elsewhere in Europe, it was the major banking houses and trading companies that brokered shipments of exotica along with spices, textiles, and other goods. In Italy, wealthy banker and merchant families vied to obtain the latest New World and tropical wonders for their private gardens. The Dutch went further, cannily marketing the entire globe as a rich, alluring repository of exotica, whose possession by nonroyal persons would confer pure delight, free of the burdens of statecraft. From transit pens at the ports of Antwerp and Amsterdam, exotica were sent on to both private and royal customers.

The Cradle of Exotica

This chapter discusses the role of exotica in the Mesopotamian mind. By 1875, The Epic of Gilgamesh had begun to emerge from the thousands of clay tablet fragments freshly unearthed in the remains of the great royal library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh. Gilgamesh’s drive to possess the exotic is rooted in long-standing Mesopotamian tradition. From the third millennium on, when he supposedly reigned, scholar-scribes organized and classified nearly all aspects of the natural world. Thematic lists of flora and fauna, heavenly bodies, precious and semiprecious materials, and topographical features provided the educated elite with a means of conceptualizing patterns and interrelationships. For Gilgamesh, as for many Mesopotamian rulers, the acquisition and display of exotica were key aspects of kingship. Once secured within the walled, urban cores of Mesopotamian cultural identity, exotica offered tangible signs of wide-ranging military might, commercial enterprise, and political status and control.

Introduction

This introductory chapter presents two new directions in Western scholarship that coincide with the study of human relationships with flora and fauna in gardens and zoos. The first grew out of increasing interest in natural history in its broadest sense, with investigation into such topics as the intersection of science and art, and the societal and personal motivations behind the collection of specimens, living and not. Historians of botanical and zoological gardens, for their part, were now considering the evolution of planting schemes, display architecture, public access, and popular expectations, as well as the psychology of interaction with the strange and wonderful. The second direction was a byproduct of globalization. Here, museums led the way by mounting exhibitions that transcended disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate influences and linkages across time and space. Thought-provoking juxtapositions illuminated the myriad ways in which communities reflected, absorbed, reinterpreted, and sometimes rejected the exotic. Ultimately, among the book’s unifying themes is the pervasive, persistent notion that exotic flora and fauna were essential elements in creating and ordering perfect, microcosmic worlds.

Novelties on the Nile

This chapter examines the role of exotica in the Egyptian mind. Egypt’s involvement with exotic flora and fauna began in earnest in the Old Kingdom, which flourished during the final two-thirds of the third millennium. The best evidence for Old Kingdom exotica comes from several pharaonic funerary monuments, but more often from the tombs of the notables buried near their kings. Many of these officials, courtiers, and members of the royal family had commercial and diplomatic responsibilities that brought them into direct or indirect contact with foreign lands and peoples. Cedar, myrrh, turquoise, lapis lazuli, and elephant ivory were among the desirable commodities that had to be obtained from beyond the Nile Valley and Delta. Animals and plants were sometimes shipped as well, either as additional items in a consignment or as early examples of royal and elite gift exchange. Indeed, the notables’ tombs include numerous scenes of exotic creatures being caged, watered, fed, and otherwise tended.

True and Proper Pictures

This chapter assesses the representation of exotica in European art. This depiction sheds considerable light on the constructs of veracity and the bounds of imagery, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. In addition to their subsidiary but vital roles in historical landscape and commemorative narrative, exotica served as the principals in natural history illustration. Among the first works with detailed, if schematized, illuminations of flora and fauna were religious texts and medieval editions of ancient medical treatises. These largely didactic presentations of European plants and animals provided the pictorial structure for the earliest renderings of exotica. Whether artists drew them from life in the course of their travels, viewed them in menageries and botanical gardens, or based their illustrations on collections of dried or stuffed specimens, they placed their subjects against uniformly plain backgrounds. Land mammals, aquatic creatures, and plants were suspended in a pristine world, while birds were shown perched upon accessory branches.

Epilogue

This epilogue discusses the concept of Eden. In the absence of any consensus on where Eden is, interim Edens were created, from the circumscribed gardens in medieval abbey cloisters to the ambitious botanical and zoological microcosms of Renaissance kings. As the boundaries of the known world expanded, beginning in the Age of Discovery, these enclosed Edens gave way to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paradises ever larger, seemingly limitless in their floral and faunal wonders. Throughout Western art, exotic flora and fauna have consistently dwelled in Eden. In medieval illuminations, the Tree of Life was typically a lush date palm, while the Tree of Knowledge was usually the golden orange, introduced to northern Europe from the Middle East via Muslim Spain.

Crossing the Atlantic

This chapter explores the existence of exotica in America. The flora and fauna of the Americas offered fresh scope for demonstrating the centrality of European culture. New species had to be ordered, classified, named, and fitted within established parameters. From the start, the same was true for native peoples. Furthermore, pictorial and textual descriptions were used to advance several agendas with far-reaching consequences. Primarily to encourage settlement in the New World, exotica were portrayed as variations on European plants and animals. Early maps of North America thus featured deer, bears, beavers, and rabbits, with only the occasional wild turkey—unique to the New World—intruding upon the familiar bestiary. Throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, European colonizing and commercial interests continued to purvey a vision of American resources as easy to transform into marketable commodities.

Knowing the Unknown

This chapter looks at the various existence of exotica in the Classical, Byzantine, and Islamic periods. Through Egyptian intermediaries, monkeys from elsewhere in Africa reached Minoan Crete and the Cyclades during the first half of the second millennium B.C.E. Dozens of them appear thereafter in wall paintings, seals, and jewelry, engaging in animal and human activities in formal and informal settings. From the seventh century on, gradually expanding colonial and commercial contacts—especially in the eastern Mediterranean—brought exotic experiences back to the Greeks. This gave rise to Greek writing on natural history. Meanwhile, the rise of imperial Rome meant that exotic fauna found themselves inextricably linked with the self-image of the state; any exceptional creatures were reserved as gifts for the emperors. Menageries also existed throughout the Arab/Islamic world from an early date.