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Natural beauty

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Amazing Rare Things
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 28 September

It’s a terrific opening for an exhibition, and a hard act to follow. Would the rest of the show be a let-down, I wondered? Far from it. Moving into the main room of this temporary exhibition (previously shown in Edinburgh at the Palace of Holyroodhouse), the eye is at once tempted by a feast of colour. Here is a tribute to the Italian antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657), who assembled a famous ‘paper museum’, a pictorial encyclopedia which aimed to classify the known world. A pair of multiple images dating from c.1630, of fruits, seeds and legumes on one hand, and gems, stones and amulets on the other, gives a taste of this far from dusty visual record. The European pelican is given a life-size close-up treatment of its head, while the crested porcupine is represented by parts: snout and paws, quills. The three-toed sloth is quite wrong, shown standing on its feet which it is actually unable to do as it spends its life hanging from trees. But the general level of accuracy and detail is extraordinary. Particularly piquant are the curiosity pictures — the deformed melon and the digitated lemon.

Beyond a partition you enter the world of Mark Catesby (1682–1749), a naturalist who made the first attempt to survey the flora and fauna of North America. After Leonardo, he’s the star of the show, painting memorable juxtapositions (nightjar and mole cricket or a flamingo’s head within the branches of soft coral) and surreal profiles. Look at his superb study of a great hogfish, with its wonderfully vivid blue vermiform markings on cheek and jaw. These watercolours are Catesby’s studies for the plates of his book The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, and may be likened to blueprints. As such they were painted in a deliberately ‘Flat, tho’ exact manner’ (as the artist himself observed) and valued for their precision of description rather than for any aesthetic qualities. The latter may be incidental, but they offer a very high return.