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

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.