ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Drawing, Engraving, Copying: Visual Mediation and the Making of the Hortus Malabaricus (1678-1693)

• In Event: From Sketch to Knowledge: Visual Mediation in Early Modern Natural History

English Abstract

This paper follows the Hortus Malabaricus through three stages: drawings made in Cochin, engravings printed in Amsterdam, and a little-known manuscript copy produced in Rouen. Seen together, they show how the book’s images were shaped by a chain of practical decisions and how material changes affected what the plants could be made to mean. The early drawings already take on a printed look: framed pages, cartouches, and a layout that aligns with European botanical books. But they also retain things the engravings later removed, including small traces of how the plants were handled and observed. These sheets show the work of several hands (local informants, interpreters, VOC draughtsmen) and give a sense of the negotiations behind the images. Once the drawings reached Amsterdam, they were translated into a stricter visual system. The engraved plates isolate each plant, regularise scale and viewpoint, and remove narrative details. The printed folios present the plants as clean, ordered specimens and downplay the circumstances in which the drawings were made. The Rouen manuscript copy adds a different kind of transformation. Here the plates are redrawn and coloured by hand and reorganised into a more compact format. Detached from the Amsterdam paratext, this version shows how the Hortus continued to be reshaped once it circulated beyond the Dutch Republic. By moving between these stages, the paper shows how the Hortus Malabaricus was not a single visual project but a sequence of remakings, each one filtering the plants of Malabar through new expectations, materials, and hands.

Author

• Trude Dijkstra, University of Amsterdam