Bulletin of the Comediantes

JUAN PIMENTEL PRESENTS US with a panoramic history of Spanish science, from the early sixteenth century to the present. Its leitmotif is an understanding of science as a ghostly and haunting activity in the context of Spanish culture, where science has been underrepresented and lacking in national and international recognition despite the abundant achievements of scientists from Spain over the centuries. To illustrate his argument, Pimentel makes good use of some of the most impressive scientific accomplishments in the history of Spain and Hispanic America. Chapter 1, "Espectro y avistamiento del Mar del Sur," studies the so-called discovery of the Pacific Ocean by Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475–1519) and the subsequent first cartographic representation of the Americas' Pacific coast: the Carta portulana representando el Mar del Sur (1518), a cartographic milestone Pimentel finds "haunted" by the "ghosts" of the extinct Cueva people, particularly Ponquiaco, main cacique of the Panamanian coast; these Amerindian spectral presences accompany the "ghosts" of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian experts who helped demarcate and imagine a coast that included Dabaiba, a mythical golden city precursor of the most famous El Dorado.

If native people of Darién and Veragua were responsible for a great deal of the geographical information gathered by the Núñez de Balboa expedition, the Indigenous presence in early modern Spanish science is even more haunting in the work of doctor Francisco Hernández de Toledo (ca. 1515–87). The author of the Historia natural de Nueva España is, along with Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934), the most famous of all Spanish men of science. Hernández tackled the unimaginable task of updating, perfecting, and completing the Natural History of Pliny with a natural history of the New World. In chapter 2, "Naturalezas de otro mundo," Pimentel relates Hernandez's massive project to an equally gigantic enterprise: the gathering of reliable geographical and naturalist information about Spain's overseas possessions by the Council of Indies in the 1570s. The most visible result of these efforts is the well-known Relaciones Geográficas de Indias (1579–85), of which Pimentel provides a beautiful example: the mestizo map of the Zapotec town of Macuilxochitl, where Indigenous informants provided the immense majority of the knowledge displayed, including their consciousness of the ecological changes brought about by Spanish presence in their lands. The [End Page 179] polyphonic knowledge included in the Relaciones de Indias and in Hernández's natural history became a ghostly presence in early modern science accounts as neither of these two massive works sponsored by the Council of Indies would be published for centuries. Nevertheless—and despite the tragic loss of all of its colored illustrations—the work of Hernández had considerable influence in the development of early modern natural history through new processes of selection, translation, appropriation, and misappropriation.

In chapter 3, "La mirada del ángel," Pimentel dissects some of the interconnections between the emerging field of microscopic medicine and its artistic representation using techniques and conventions common to the Spanish baroque. Among the distinctive qualities of the famous Golden Age of Spanish arts are a refined retrenchment into an orthodox Catholic culture and an accompanying literary disenchantment with the vain concerns of this world. The baroque thus promoted a profoundly moral vision of the world, even at the dawn of "el irremediable ascenso de la tecnología y el materialismo" (137). Such a view remained an intrinsic part of cutting-edge scientific achievements such as the impressive Atlas anatómico (ca. 1689) of Crisóstomo Martínez (1638–ca. 1694), where masterful macroscopic and microscopic images of human bones documenting their growth are accompanied by common moral symbols of life and death, or sin. Like the majority of baroque art, this moralized anatomy helped sustain the Spanish political body. Pimentel demonstrates how a common way of coupling the emerging microscopic view of nature with the all-encompassing Catholic view of the world was through the analogy of the angel's gaze, capable of seeing both the...