The exhibition of early natural history drawings on display at the Queen's Gallery in Buckingham Palace, with its array of images of precious stones, fruits, birds, insects and animals, as accurate as they are delicate, will please those with the most conservative and unadventurous tastes. However, these genteel people may be perturbed to hear that they will also be having a "contemporary art experience." The aesthetic effects they are responding to in these images are all fundamental features of contemporary and conceptual art.
The gorgeous and hypnotic images on show, taken from illustrated natural history books from the "age of discovery," are among the masterpieces of 16th, 17th and 18th-century art. These works—by the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo and the flower painter and adventurer Maria Sibylla Merian, among others—may not exhibit the same painterly skills as a Rembrandt or Velázquez. But in the light of today's art practices, we can see that these painters of the natural world were employing another set of skills, on a par with those of the acclaimed masters of their day.
Encyclopaedic books of animal drawings had their origins in 12th-century "bestiaries" (lavishly illustrated books of beasts), a form at which the English excelled. Bestiaries were the precursors of scientific catalogues of animals, but their purpose was religious explanation (a wolf's eyes shone in the dark, they would explain, to show that many things that seem attractive are the work of the devil).
Leonardo da Vinci's analytical studies of animal forms and musclature launched western art's engagement with realism, but what we might call the "contemporary" sensibilities of natural history drawing began with Cassiano dal Pozzo. Dal Pozzo, who was active in the early 17th century, commissioned drawings of classical statues, plants, animals and fossils from artists whose names he never recorded, just as many conceptual artists today employ others to produce their work. He then collected the drawings together in what he called a "paper museum." His collecting, his use of other hands to execute his work and his transformation of an immobile three-dimensional space into a portable two-dimensional one would amply qualify him as a conceptual artist today.
After the collecting comes the organising. Exquisite pages from Dal Pozzo's "museum" contain neat rows of seed pods or precious stones. In the 1960s, this "scientific" practice of laying out typologies was appropriated as an artistic strategy by Dan Graham, who applied it obsessively to suburban homes in his "Homes for America" series. Today, natural history typology has become one of the most debased strategies of conceptual art—as in Damien Hirst's endless cabinets of skeletons.
Perhaps to interpret these works in such a way is merely to read backwards. It could be argued that we only see Merian's work like this because we are familiar with O'Keeffe's sexualised images of flowers, and with the surrealist imagination, rather than because of anything inherent in her work. But another aesthetic property of Merian's illustrations is less vulnerable to this caveat. Unburdened by the rules and conventions that governed 17th-century painting, motivated by the desire to create a scientific copy of the beauty she saw around her, without evidence of the artist's hand, Merian developed a "hyperreal" objective aesthetic that really did look forward to the late 20th century. In brightly coloured drawings, like those of toucans, the exactitude, the detail and the intensity of her colour work impart a mesmerising air of significance. This is the aesthetic of the hyperreal "copy," which was employed by scores of photorealist painters in the 1970s, and today by Jeff Koons, whose Hanging Heart, an immaculate enlarged recreation of a heart-shaped helium balloon, sold for $23.6m last November, making it the most expensive work by a living artist ever auctioned.
There's one more correlation between these natural history drawings and contemporary art, which the "flower-book" of British horticulturalist Alexander Marshal draws attention to. Marshal, who drew flowers for his own personal pleasure, was participating in the 17th century's version of today's art boom—an obsession with flowers. Just as today there is a huge interest in the artists coming out of the "new" geographical territories of contemporary art—China, India, the middle east—so, three and a half centuries ago, there was huge curiosity about the exotic plants that were being brought back from the "new lands" of North and South America and north Africa. In Britain, the rich took up the hobby of "collecting" and cultivating these flowers, and their gardens became their galleries. The speculative bubble in tulips in Holland, known as "tulipomania," was part of the same phenomenon, and the collapse of the tulip market in the 1637 may prove a precedent for where the contemporary art market is currently heading.
