Next to botanical and zoological illustrations as common to natural history at the time, the picture book series A instrucção da creança also contains images of animals that appear more vivid and dramatic. For example, the pages inhabited by raptors show the birds in action, in movement. Depicted with their prey, as a spectator I am witnessing a short narrative: the raptor snatching its prey. Instead of a blank page as background as it is the case for the zoological and botanical illustrations, the scenes are set in landscapes.
Nevertheless, by arranging disparate species in juxtaposition resemblance to those more traditional depictions of ‚nature’ is continued. The landscapes that frame this ‘impossible encounter’ (not ever will we encounter this gathering of raptors except on these pages) are fragmented: we are not set in one landscape but instead the perspective of various landscapes merge in subtle ways, partially fading into mere colours. The rock formation on which a hawk sits melts into the tops of mountains that the royal eagle flies above. A fiction of isolated entities composed in an impossible landscape on paper. What is the setting of this narrative? What can I understand from the dramatic staging of the image about the ideas of both the subject of the child and the role of images of ‘nature’ that circulated in educational discourse? How do emotions and affects, such as wonder and fear, play into the images and imaginations of ‘nature’ in the picture book series and the object lesson method at large?
Positional note
I am a white, German, able-bodied cis-woman doing a PhD at a university in the South of Europe with the experience of growing up in a working-class milieu. In my work, I commit to the study of visual cultural, critical historiography in education and post-colonial, decolonial and feminist theory. I am particularly invested in images and imaginaries of 'nature' and the ways they are producing a hegemonic relations with the world and its beings.