If one of the purposes of art is to help us see the world around us, then Sebastião Salgado’s photographs in Amazônia (Taschen, £100) does so in the most spectacular way imaginable. Not only are they ravishing in themselves; they show us sights that very few have ever seen.
To take these shots, Salgado trekked deep into the rainforest, sailed the rivers, visited remote tribes and flew over the vast terrain in the helicopters of the Brazilian air force. During those flights he saw immense vistas over trees, billowing cloudscapes and snaking rivers covering an area larger than the EU. The resulting pictures, all the more powerful for being in black and white, are quite amazing — a combination of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Bruegel’s mountain-top prospects, with a visionary vibe. This is, you might say, the ecological sublime.
Henrietta McBurney’s Illuminating Natural History: The Art and Science of Mark Catesby (Yale, £40) is dedicated to an 18th-century explorer of distant American places. Catesby (1683-1749), the son of a Suffolk gentleman, spent years travelling in what were then the American colonies, sometimes living with native Americans and dining on alligator. After that, he spent years more on the illustrations of his masterpiece, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.
These, and the watercolours he made from living models, are marvellous and loving portraits of plants, fish, mammals and birds, often touched with a charming naivety. They testify to Catesby’s ‘passionate desire’ to see both animals and vegetation in their ‘native abodes’ which, together with a ‘love of truth’, he wrote, had motivated his travels and his art.
If the British cult of nature had a patron saint, it would surely be Catesby’s younger contemporary Gilbert White (1720-93), the clergyman and author of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.
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