Voyage into Substance:
Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840
Barbara Maria Stafford
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
7 3/4 x 10 3/4, 380 pp., 197 illus.
ISBN-10:
0-262-69181-7
ISBN-13:
978-0-262-69181-9
"... This is a book that has a permanent effect on one's way of looking at things."
Keith Thomas
St. John's College, Oxford
The New York Times, Book Review, Oct. 14, 1984
Voyage into Substance reopens the whole complex question of how nature was perceived and penetrated during the Enlightenment -- a time when artist-scientists trekked across Egyptian deserts, astronomer-mariners navigated the polar seas, and meteorologist-aeronauts "sailed" through the atmosphere's "waves," all seeking to discover and record the non-human likeness of the phenomenal world.
By examining the illustrated popular narratives and atlases of the period, the book relates the voyagers' attentive, firsthand mode of seeing and their precise copying of the enduring and the ephemeral features of the environment (before the advent of photography) to the major philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic debates of the time. Arguing that these accounts disclose an anti-picturesque tradition of representation, the book opens new doors to establish the persistence of a "plain" (that is, nonanthropomorphizing) style of landscape depiction that culminated in nineteenth-century realism.
Voyage into Substance analyzes a vast repertory of geological, mineralogical and biological treatises on the self-expressive physiognomy of the earth and shows them to be important precursors and allies of the nonfictional travel narrative. Intertwining art, literature, philosophy, geography, and the history of science, with the aid of 270 plates, the book adds significantly to all these disciplines. It is a unique contribution to the history of art and architecture and to modern intellectual history.
Endorsements
"The scope and depth of Stafford's investigations of eighteenth-century travel books are unmatched, and her guiding idea of eighteenth-century vision of the 'world purified of the human component ' is one needed in the history of art. Voyage into Substance is a major contribution to the history of travel."
George Kubler, Sterling Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar,Yale University
"Voyage into Substance,, a book that pursues an original point of view with extraordinary erudition, is certain to make us examine once more the commonality of science and art, imagination and fact, in Europe's vast nonfictional literature of discovery and exploration before photography was invented."
Yi-Fu Tuan, University of Wisconsin
"In the eighteenth century, developments in technology enabled a rapid expansion of knowledge of geography as well as the equally important landscapes revealed by the microscope and telescope. Barbara Stafford gives an account, enlivened with some 270 reproductions of contemporary illustrations, of travelers' reports from all three worlds, but more importantly she discusses the evolution of the mental landscape encompassing all of them. By interweaving travel in space, in time, in ideas, and in social structures she has constructed an unusually interesting account of the human experience."
Cyril Stanley Smith
"Barbara Stafford's Voyage into Substance is a most important book. It will force certain reassessments of our knowledge of the period from 1700 to 1850 and beyond. It is a library of information--its notes alone are that. It helps to open up the field of travel literature, a form of literature and history that has been far too much neglected. And it is beautifully written."
Percy Adams,Lindsay Young Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Tennessee
"Rarely is a book so well attuned to its subject. Barbara Stafford has the same curiosity and passion for research as the travelers she writes about: Voyage into Substance is like the diary of an encyclopedist wandering through vast and diverse domains. A book of marvels."
Yve-Alain Bois,Visiting Associate Professor of Art History,Johns Hopkins University
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