ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Death Becomes Her: An Investigation into the Aesthetics of Plant Disease

• In Event: Old Collections, New Stories:  Doing Natural History Humanities in Cambridge and Beyond

English Abstract

What does it mean to mimic a ‘disease aesthetic’ and why did artists sometimes illustrate ‘damaged’ plants? In my talk, I investigate how humans have curated perceptions of beauty in nature through the aesthetics of diseased flowers and question why certain artists chose to depict imperfect plants with visible maladies. This research considers images of plants within Cambridge’s collections seen as ‘beautifully’ or ‘naturalistically’ portrayed due to being visibly diseased. This line of inquiry prompts us to reflect on what we expect sickness to look like in the natural world and encourages us to examine the role humans have played in fetishizing and popularising the aesthetics of disease in nature. 

A review of the current literature on the history and scientific research on the aesthetics of plant diseases reveals a gap between the art historian’s visual analysis and the botanist’s scientific discourse wherein links between botanical art and plant pathology emerge but have yet to be significantly considered. This talk considers how botanical illustrations of diseased plants interact with historic and contemporary scientific discourse in the form of published manuscripts, plant specimens, and teaching material investigating the root causes of plant illness. Working with botanists and gardeners at the Cambridge University Herbarium and Botanic Gardens, I will not only include collection items which were identified as afflicted with an illness in their time but also uncover new information about drawings of plants in the collection that exhibit symptoms of disease based on present-day scientific research. 

Author

• Kimberly Glassman, University of Cambridge