Picturing Tropical Americas: Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius’s Visual Practices for a Global Geography of Palms

Abstract

This article explores the significance of palms for geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868). Long regarded as representative of tropical nature, palms became a central object in Humboldt’s work, and later in the multivolume work Historia naturalis palmarum (1823–50) published by Martius. By reflecting on the practices by which palms were made objects of research—during travel and fieldwork, and in specimen collection, depictions of landscape, and cartography—this essay considers the process of visualization that led to a coherent representation of tropical nature. I argue that the development of landscape, along with reports from fieldwork, collections, and botanical images, contributed to the stabilization of a tropical space explained as result of its physiognomies. Within this frame, I focus on Humboldt and Bonpland’s palm Ceroxylon andicola and Martius’s world map of palm distribution.