Research seminar: Adopting Indigenous Mexican Natural History Paintings at the Escorial

Dr Matthijs Jonker presents a paper entitled 'In Honour of the King: Adapting Indigenous Mexican Natural History Paintings at the Escorial'.

This seminar is part of the Empires and Aftermath series in the School of History.

About the paper

Shortly after starting his natural history expedition in Mexico in 1571, the physician Francisco Hernández wrote to his patron King Philip II of Spain about the enormous quantity and the medicinal usefulness of the local medicinal plants. Five years later, Hernández sent back to Madrid almost 3,500 descriptions and more than 4,000 paintings – produced by Indigenous artists – of Mesoamerican plants and animals.

According to Hernández, the publication of the material, both texts and images, would bring great fame to the king. This expectation turned out to be largely false because the material was published, not by Hernández under the aegis of Philip II, but by later naturalists and in other countries. Still, in one of these publications, the so-called Tesoro messicano (1651) published by the Roman Accademia dei Lincei, several visual references to King Philip II remained.

This talk deals with how the Indigenous visual material was reworked by European artists to celebrate and honor Philip II as initiator and sponsor of the expedition, first in the private quarters of the king in the Escorial and later in the Tesoro messicano. Although traditionally discussed separately, it will be argued that the Lincean images should be understood in relation to those in the Escorial.

About the speaker

Dr Matthijs Jonker is Assistant Professor of Early Modern Art History at Utrecht University. He studies the transcultural and trans-Atlantic production and circulation of knowledge in the early modern period, especially the functions of images and illustrations in this context in (present-day) Mexico, Italy and Spain. Earlier, he was Director of Studies in Art History and Cultural Sciences at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome (BHMPI), where he started his current research project. Matthijs’ first book, The Academization of Art: The Early Histories of the Accademia del Disegno and the Accademia di San Luca, was published in 2022 with Quasar in Rome. Together with Dr Katherine Reinhart, he is currently completing an edited volume on the visual culture of scientific societies in the early modern period.

Image acknowledgement

The frontispiece of the Tesoro messicano: Mexican Treasure (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1651). Made available via the World Digital Library, part of the Library of Congress.