Art and Empire: Jos Celestino Mutis
and the Art of the Royal Botanical Expedition to Nuevo Granada
by Miles Roberts
Colombia is a country of three seas. Bounded in the north and west by the Pacific and the Caribbean and in the south by the Amazon basin, Colombia is surrounded by water. Not surprisingly, Colombia boasts more than 9,300 miles of navigable waterways and more than 12,000 square miles of lakes, reservoirs, swamps, and marshes. Colombia's borders also contain an amazing diversity of landscapes: Andean watersheds, tropical rainforests, plains, llanos, oceanic plains, mangrove swamps, and rain-shadowed cordilleras with deserts and plains. This unique geographic diversity, proximity to the equator, and diverse weather systems conspire to produce a vast ecological tapestry with some of the greatest biological diversity on Earth.
During the Age of Exploration, Spain claimed much of South America as its own. No part was more important strategically and economically than the band north of the equator known as Nuevo Granada, a vast holding that included modern-day Colombia as well as Ecuador and Panama. This great equatorial territory is the stage for the story of one of the great biological expeditions of modern times, the Royal Botanical Expedition led by Jos Celestino Mutis.
Mutis was born in Cadiz in 1732. A rich childhood stimulated by books and the bustling life of the busiest seaport in the greatest seagoing nation in the world primed Mutis for a life of high adventure. After grammar school and a university program in philosophy, Mutis studied medicine and qualified as a doctor. After graduation and until 1760, Mutis held the Chair in Anatomy at the general hospital in Madrid, where his exposure to medicinal plants and herbal medicines sparked a lifelong passion for natural history. In 1770, not satisfied with a teaching career, and longing to visit the near-mythic lands that were home to his beloved medicinal plants, Mutis traveled to Nuevo Granada as personal physician to Pedro Messia de la Cerda, the new Spanish Viceroy there. Within a couple of years, the ever-restless Mutis became bored with medicine and distracted by the dazzling beauty of the country around him. He quit medicine forever and launched into a series of mining ventures to exploit the spectacular mineral resources of Nuevo Granada. His search for silver and gold took him to the far reaches of Nuevo Granada, where he always took time to indulge his passion for botany and plant collecting. During these peripatetic prospecting years, Mutis began corresponding with Carolius Linnaeus, inventor of the modern system of scientific nomenclature. Their long association would not only bolster Mutis's scientific acumen but would also lead to connections with many of the most prominent biologists and explorers of the age. Encouraged by his colleagues, Mutis's involvement in botany became his obsession and in 1763 he petitioned King Carlos III of Spain to create a scientific expedition to explore the biological riches of northern South America.
Mutis's
petition went unanswered and he continued his other work,
becoming a local fixture in the Spanish court. Then, in 1772,
a new Viceroy, Manuel de Guiror, was appointed to Nuevo Granada.
He immediately took interest in Mutis's botanical work, encouraging
him 
to
pursue his scientific endeavors full time. He also urged Mutis
to renew his petition to the Spanish court and finally, in
1783, after 20 years of waiting, Mutis won permission to mount
the "Expedicin Botnica de Nuevo Granada." He immediately
undertook his first sorties into the hinterlands to pursue
"the exploitation of chinchon, benefits from cinnamon,
discovery of western spices and other plants useful for trade,"
and bravely (but naively) vowed to inventory the botany of
the whole of northern South America.
Mutis's primary mission in the Expedicin Botnica was to complete a classification of the flora of the Bogota region using Linnaeus's system. To accomplish this, Mutis recruited a small group of botanists and illustrators and established a herbarium laboratory and school in Mairquita in the Magdalena Valley. There he was able to pursue both his botanical exploits and the mineralogical interests of his sponsor, the Viceroy. Mutis's botanical surveys concentrated mainly on tropical forests of the eastern mountains but, in covering a range of between 1,600 and 9,800 feet in a small geographic area, he sampled plants in hot, temperate, and cold climatic zones.
Mutis hired local artists and trained them in the scientific illustrating styles pioneered by the great Dutch, French, and English scientific illustrators of the time. The artists were taught to observe and record the natural world in scientific detail. Each was paid an hourly wage according to his abilities. At any given time, 20 or more artists were working in and around his lab under the strict personal supervision of Mutis and his assistants. The variety of artistic styles in the published works reflects not only the large number of artists working on the project but also the evolution of an artistic movement with uniquely American roots and traditions. Mutis also established a tuition-free school near his workshop where local youngsters learned how to study and record the natural world. It was possibly the first school of its kind established in America and reflected Mutis's dedication to leaving a living legacy.
Mutis pursued the botanical inventory methodically and scientifically. His laboratory, called "The Botany," was really a herbarium where plants were carefully recorded, labeled, pressed, and mounted. His illustrators faithfully recorded the anatomy, color, and growth habits of each specimen, then prepared pen-and-ink and watercolor studies to serve as models for the later preparation of more detailed color plates or laminas. Because many of the ultimate plates illustrate all of the growth and reproductive stages of a plant on a single plate, many specimens of a single species were collected over time to create the final composite illustrations. This process required the diligence, dedication, and determination that were the hallmarks of Mutis's career.
Mutis published very little of his work himself but generously made his collections available to visiting scientists. The famous German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was one such visitor who, after having access to Mutis's collection, published a seminal description of a large piece of Mutis's collection under his own name (with, I might add, a glowing dedication to Mutis and his colleagues).
After Mutis's death in 1808, the Expedition's work continued for another two years, directed by his protg Francisco Jose Caldas. But Caldas was killed in 1810 during the independence wars between Spain and the insurgent colony, bringing the Expedicin Botnica to a sudden end. In 1816, by order of the King of Spain, all the specimens, descriptions, and illustrations of the Expedicin Botnica were packed up and sent to the Royal Botanical Gardens of Madrid. At its conclusion, the Royal Botanical Expedition had labored for more than three decades to produce more than 6,000 illustrations, 2,945 in color, of 2,700 plant species-possibly the most lavish collection of botanical illustrations ever made.
The collection remained unused and forgotten in Madrid until 1929 when it was reopened and organized by Ellsworth Paine Killip, a botanist from the National Herbarium of the Smithsonian Institution who was working temporarily in Spain. Its "rediscovery" led to a distribution of parts of the collection to several museums around the world, including the Smithsonian Institution, and a revival of interest in Mutis's work. Mutis's herbarium collection proved to be a tremendous resource to botanists working in northern South America and there was much international interest in seeing the work published. However, the Spanish Civil War and World War II postponed the herculean task of reviewing the collection until the late 1940s and publication of the first volume of botanical descriptions and illustrations was delayed until 1953. Volumes have since been published regularly and currently the published "Mutis" work amounts to 23 volumes containing more than 500 illustrations and scientific descriptions. Recently, about two dozen of Mutis's composite oil paintings of the animals of Nuevo Granada were discovered in Madrid and arrangements are currently being made for their publication.
In June 1998, reproductions of 54 original prints, reflecting a cross-section of the botany and artistic diversity of the Expedicin Botnica, went on display at the National Zoo's Amazonia Science Gallery to celebrate the biological and cultural diversity of Colombia, the heroic work of Mutis and his colleagues, and the historic link between Colombian and Smithsonian scientists. This exhibit, a collaboration between the Embassy of Colombia, the Colombian Ministry of External Affairs, the National Zoological Park, and the National Herbarium, also reminds us what it takes to catalog the world's biodiversity-and how much remains to be done.
Miles Roberts is Deputy Head of the National Zoo's Department of Zoological Research.
(ZooGoer 27(4) 1998. Copyright 1998 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.)
