This superbly illustrated catalogue, published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, echoes the themes in Daniela Bleichmar's previous book Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. There, Bleichmar focused on natural history expeditions commissioned by the Spanish crown in the eighteenth century, which, she argued, acted as “visualization projects.” This exhibition and catalogue have the same central thesis—that the imperial desire to observe, represent, and write about the natural world in what has come to be called Latin America—was a pursuit that intertwined scientific, political, and economic aspirations. The catalogue, augmented by images of more than 150 maps, books, manuscripts, and paintings drawn from the Huntington and other collections, distills and condenses Bleichmar's findings from Visible Empire and allows her to widen her scope beyond the Enlightenment to span a period from Europe's first encounters with the New World to the end of the nineteenth century, after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and his own discovery of the American continent while traveling on the Beagle.

The objects, such as the frontispiece of an atlas, engravings of a passionflower, or a treatise on tobacco, are examined not as unique specimens but as part of an ecosystem. Bleichmar has a gift for both close readings and bringing to light the interrelationships between an array of texts and images. Through images selected from over four centuries, we see how America's natural world—which initially seemed to be reduced in the European imagination to cannibals, pineapples, armadillos, and parrots—is made visible in an increasingly more complex way by European and native artists, authors, and scientists. The historic scope of the catalogue allows us to contrast early images from sources like the Vallard Atlas (ca. 1547), made by European cartographers with no firsthand knowledge of the new lands, with one of the latest images from the catalogue, an agricultural map by Antonio García Cubas, from the first atlas of the newly independent Mexico produced by a geographer who was a native of the land he was visualizing.

Bleichmar elucidates the stories of discrete objects in a way that goes beyond a superficial survey as she moves through items such as the sixteenth-century Codex de la Cruz-Badiano, prints produced by the Royal Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada, led by José Celestino Mutis in the eighteenth century, and nineteenth-century landscape paintings by Frederick Church and José María Velasco. These scientific and artistic renderings, along with texts and illustrations linked to the region's key commodities like chocolate, tobacco, and cochineal, support and echo the argument of her previous work: we are seeing evidence of a form of botanical reconquista—an epistemological reconquest of a previously colonized land.

The final chapter is less satisfying. It focuses on the nineteenth century, the advent of Darwinian thought, and the influence of Humboldt on those who visited the region in his wake. Surprisingly, the catalogue makes no mention of the advent of photography in the first half of the nineteenth century. It would have been intriguing to have Bleichmar's perspective on how this new technology revolutionized the ways of seeing Latin America in the work of early practitioners like Désiré Charnay, and later, Alfred Maudslay. Maudslay was a contributor to the last of the great nineteenth-century collecting projects, the Biologia Centrali-Americana. Finally, the author who focuses on a Tupinambá feather cape from seventeenth-century Brazil in her introduction, never addresses some of the questions elicited by that object—questions about how Native Americans conceived of and visualized their natural world outside of the European filter.

However, these are minor gaps. In the end, the catalogue—both a well-researched resource for scholars and a pleasure for the eyes—provides a highly readable, interdisciplinary introduction to this scholar's innovative work on visual and textual representations of Latin America through the lens of natural history.