Literatura e historia (natural) del arte

Abstract

Based on the notion musée imaginaire this article aims at recovering series of visual and audio-visual imagery in texts by Virginia Woolf, Roger Caillois, Orham Pamuk, Edmund de Waal and a film essay by Rubén Guzmán in order to explore how these works’ cultural status incorporates serial imagery into an alternative art history which could be defined as a natural art history. As it reestablishes the lack of differentiation between art and natural history --which characterized ancient cabinets of curiosities before the emergence of contemporary museums-- a natural art history enables us to conceive “imaginary museums” where the broad range of things and beings represented in those textual and filmographic images can be stored on the basis of cognitive and aesthetic principles underlying the display of collections into classical cabinets. One central hypothesis on the reasons for that aesthetical transformation of an everyday object, such as a lump of glass or a piece of stone, relies on the fact that the selected literary and filmographic works comprehend an essayistic component.