In the striking exhibit of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid hangs a portrait of a giant anteater (Myrmecophaga jubata) (Figure 1). This splendid painting, 1.05 m high by 2.09 m wide, depicts its monumental subject standing majestically in a mountainous landscape. The anteater’s shaggy black tail billows out behind it and its long tongue protrudes from its tiny mouth, almost touching the ground. The insectivore’s powerful foreclaws are clearly visible on its right foot, and it balances on its knuckles – an accurate representation of the way an anteater walks in the wild. A second anteater, smaller than the first, appears curled into a ball on the right side of the painting, its long snout tucked under its grizzled tail.

The portrait of the South American insectivore was commissioned by King Charles III and painted in the studio of the court painter Rafael Mengs. According to the inscription on the stone plinth to the animal’s back, it was ‘taken from life in the Casa de Fieras in 1776’ when the anteater was 30 months old and still not fully grown. The painting thus represents the first living anteater to reach Europe, immortalising an exotic and little-known creature whose closest relatives are sloths and armadillos. It also depicts an animal that, in the late 18th century, would find itself at the centre of a heated scientific debate over the relative merits of New and Old World fauna.

The anteater depicted in the portrait arrived in Madrid in July 1776. It came from Buenos Aires and was sent to Charles III by the administrator of the city’s postal service, Don Manuel de Basavilbaso. On its arrival in the Spanish capital, the anteater was introduced to the king, who inspected it in a chamber of the Palacio Real. It was then transferred to the Casa de Fieras in the Real Sitio del Buen Retiro, where a special apartment was created for it. A letter to Don Matías Martínez-López, dated 4 July 1776, recorded that the anteater was accompanied by a keeper, who had devised a special diet plan for the animal and would advise fellow keepers at the Casa de Fieras on how best to feed it. According to Spanish naturalist Félix de Azara, this consisted of ‘little pieces of bread, minced meat and flour dissolved in water’.¹

The anteater’s first resting place, the Parque del Buen Retiro, was one of several royal menageries in 18th-century Spain catering to King Charles III’s passion for exotic animals. Set close to the centre of Madrid, the menagerie functioned primarily as a site for entertainment and imperial ostentation, showcasing the various living gifts presented to the Spanish monarch. Along with other Real Sitios at San Ildefonso, Aranjuez and the Casa del Campo, it provided a home for an impressive variety of species, including an Indonesian elephant, presented to Charles III in 1773 by the governor of the Philippines, an African buffalo and a pair of Brazilian tapirs donated by the king of Portugal. It also housed various big cats, including a ‘tiger cub’ (jaguar), presented by the governor of Guayaquil in 1777, and a seal captured by fisherman off Alicante and exhibited in ‘a box filled with water’.² Though it was created primarily for the king’s pleasure, contemporary documents suggest that the Buen Retiro menagerie was open to the general public, allowing for wider contemplation of its inmates. In the case of the anteater, access to the public is not specified, but the buffalo was built a special enclosure with an iron grating ‘so that the curious people of Madrid and other towns can see [it]’; the seal entertained madrileños by eating the fish they threw to it in its tub.³ The living anteater may, therefore, have reached an audience beyond the monarch and his entourage.

The anteater’s novel diet kept it alive for around six months. On 31 January 1777, however, Martínez-López wrote to the king’s minister the marqués of Grimaldi to inform him that the animal had been ‘found dead’ in its enclosure. On hearing of the anteater’s demise, Grimaldi arranged immediately for its corpse to be removed to the newly founded Cabinet of Natural History, or Real Gabinete de Historia Natural, in Madrid’s Calle Alcalá, where it was stuffed by chief dissector Juan Bautista Bru and put on display in the nascent museum (see ‘Creole Cabinet’ in this volume). A series of entries in an account book for the Real Gabinete record the various stages in the anteater’s transformation from cadaver to natural history specimen and the costs associated with each process: on 7 January, ‘an expenditure of [several] reales’ was made ‘to bring an anteater that died in the Retiro [to the museum]’; on 13 February ‘a porter was paid 2 reales for taking the flesh of the anteater to the countryside [after it had been extracted by Bru]’; on 25 June there was a payment ‘of [several] reales for some hangers needed to place the [stuffed] anteater on its plinth’.⁴ Within six months, therefore, the anteater went from royal pet to exotic museum object.

The anteater’s posthumous home, the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural, assembled by its founding director, the Peruvian Creole Pedro Franco Dávila, offered a different environment for viewing the now-deceased insectivore. Founded in 1771 and opened to the public in 1776 – the very year in which the anteater arrived in Madrid – the Real Gabinete was accessible to visitors every Monday and could be visited free of charge. The German traveller Christian Fischer, who toured Spain in the years 1797–8, stated that the Real Gabinete was ‘open two times every week, including for the common people dressed in ordinary clothes’.⁵ The British traveller Joseph Townsend reiterated this view, remarking that ‘any person who is decent in appearance is admitted to walk round the rooms’.⁶ Conceived as part of a wider programme of support for the natural sciences (particularly botany), the Real Gabinete functioned simultaneously as a site for scientific study and a microcosm of Spain’s imperial glory, holding treasures from across the globe. Colonial officials sent natural history specimens to the museum from their respective territories, and animal corpses also arrived from the Buen Retiro and other menageries. The anteater, one of the first creatures to be immortalised in this way, was among the most prized objects in the nascent museum and attracted the attention of several visitors, among them the Briton John Talbot Dillon, who marvelled at its ‘worm’-like tongue.⁷ It was later joined in the cabinet by the skeletons of a male and female anteater (1789) and ‘a recently born anteater’ sent to the museum by the Bishop of Trujillo, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón. Martínez Compañón also sent a fabulous watercolour of a living anteater, busily foraging for insects (Figure 2), and the stuffed cadaver of an adult anteater, its tongue packaged separately and ‘wrapped in paper’ to avoid damage during transit.⁸

As well as appearing in a royal menagerie and a royal natural history cabinet, the Madrid anteater generated two notable artistic representations that outlived its physical body, either living or stuffed. The first of these was the official portrait of the animal commissioned by Charles III, which now hangs in the MNCN (Figure 1). Painted from life, this image captured the anteater’s distinctive silhouette three months after the animal’s arrival in Spain. It sought to highlight the insectivore’s most unusual features, and, to this end, depicted the beast in two different poses, standing and snoozing. Though the painting was originally attributed to Rafael Mengs, its authorship is now uncertain and has been the subject of scholarly debate. Recent research suggests that it may in fact have been executed by the famous court painter Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, who worked as an apprentice in Mengs’s studio during this period and could potentially have painted the animal.

The second image (Figure 3) of the Madrid anteater was produced by the Real Gabinete’s chief dissector, Juan Bautista Bru, and featured in his 1784–6 book Colección de láminas: que representan los animales y monstruos del Real Gabinete de Historia Natural. Evidently painted from the stuffed rather than the living specimen, this plate shows the animal standing stiffly on a piece of generic turf, with one foot raised to better display its powerful digging claws. A scale above the image indicates the beast’s real size, and a short paragraph on the adjoining page provides a textual description of the ‘Osa Palmera’, describing its ‘very long snout’, toothless mouth, ‘small eyes’, ‘long cylindrical tongue’ and ‘curved claws’. The text also references the anteater’s habits and movements, stating (inaccurately) that ‘it climbs with great nimbleness in the trees’ (probably a confusion with its arboreal cousin the tamandua) and that its flesh, though foul-smelling, is eaten ‘with relish’ by the ‘savages’ of Brazil.⁹ Taken from a dead rather than a living animal, Bru’s anteater displays a slightly stilted and contrived posture, which highlights the difficulties of painting animals from stuffed specimens. A painting in such circumstances could only be as good as the original taxidermy and might well perpetuate any errors made by the taxidermist, particularly if the latter had never seen the animal alive.

As well as functioning as an exotic treasure in European collections, the anteater served as a point of contention within two related debates concerning the nature of the New World and the relative value of observations made in the museum and in the field. The first of these debates, referred to by Antonello Gerbi as ‘the dispute of the New World’, centred on the comparative merits of New World versus Old World plants, animals and people. Initiated by the French naturalist Buffon, who claimed that the New World was colder and more humid than the Old World and its fauna correspondingly smaller and weaker, the debate gained traction in the 1770s when Prussian philosopher Cornelius de Pauw wrote a polemical book depicting America as a degenerate continent, filled with noxious insects and ‘pusillanimous’ lions (pumas). This contention aroused the indignation of American Creoles, who questioned the validity of such claims and the assumptions that underpinned them.

The anteater featured prominently in this transatlantic tussle, appearing in the writings of both America’s detractors and its defenders. De Pauw, listing the defects of New World mammals, singled the animal out as degenerate on account of its unusual physique – in particular, the fact that it sported different numbers of toes on its fore and hind feet. On the other side of the debate, the Chilean Jesuit Juan Ignacio Molina rallied to the anteater’s defence, suggesting that its negative image was a product of flawed and misleading naming practices.

A very respectable modern author [De Pauw] who believes the degeneration of the animals of America to be evident, cites as proof of his opinion the American myrmecophaga, vulgarly called ant-bear, denigrating it as a degenerate branch of the bear species. But since all naturalists agree that this small quadruped differs from the bear not only in genus, but also in order, there is no reason to regard it as a bastard variety of a species with which it has never had the slightest affinity.¹⁰

The anteater thus appeared in Madrid at a time when its species was under scholarly scrutiny and became the focus of both critics and defenders of American fauna.

The ‘dispute of the New World’ fed into a deeper discussion of the credibility of different naturalists and the epistemological value of evidence gathered in different places. Should one put more trust in the museum-based scholar, who could inspect dead animals at close quarters, or the travelling naturalist, who could observe his subjects in their natural habitat but might only do so fleetingly and at a distance? Again, the anteater offered a prime example of these contrasting approaches, receiving different appraisals from sedentary and field-based scholars. Buffon, who had only examined dead anteaters in museums, claimed that their hind legs were thicker than their forelegs, that they used their claws to climb trees and that they resembled foxes when seen from a distance. The Spanish solider Félix de Azara, however, who had spent 20 years watching live anteaters in Paraguay, insisted that all the above claims were incorrect. Drawing on personal experience and local knowledge, Azara described how anteaters ‘walk very deliberately, almost kissing the ground’, how they give birth to a single pup each year, which ‘rides on the back of the mother’, and how their fat was used ‘to good effect’ in Paraguay to ‘cure sores on horses’ [backs]’. He also criticised Buffon’s illustration of an anteater in his Histoire Naturelle (Figure 4), which ‘narrows, stretches and disfigures the head so much that it no longer resembles that of the beast’.¹¹

Azara’s comments reflected the differing perspectives of metropolitan and colonial scholars, who had different resources at their disposal. A long-term resident of Paraguay, Azara knew how anteaters moved and behaved in the wild and how local people treated them, but did not know how to classify them according to the latest European systems (he in fact referred to the giant anteater under its Guaraní name – yurumí, or ‘small mouth’, which he believed suited the beast). Buffon, on the other hand, located in Paris, had all the latest scholarship at his fingertips but based his illustration on a disfigured museum specimen and his description on second-hand reports. These divisions were illustrative of a wider tension between European and American naturalists, who prioritised different forms of knowledge and wielded different types of authority.

Today, these controversies have largely been forgotten, and the specimen that provoked them no longer exists. The anteater’s portrait, however, remains hanging in the Museo de Ciencias Naturales’s 20th-century reconstruction of Franco Dávila’s cabinet, a reminder that the ‘dispute of the New World’ has indeed left its mark on art, science and museography.

FURTHER READING

Bleichmar, D. (2017) Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press/Huntington Library).

Cowie, H. (2011) Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

De Vos, P. (2009) ‘The rare, the singular and the extraordinary: natural history and the collection of curiosities in the Spanish Empire’, in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, edited by D. Bleichmar, P. De Vos, K. Huffine, and K. Sheehan, 271–89 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

Dillon, J.T. (1780) Travels through Spain, with a View to Illustrate the Natural History and Physical Geography of that Kingdom (London: G. Robinson).

Gerbi, A. (1973) The Dispute of the New World (Pittsburgh, PA/London: University of Pittsburgh Press).

Gómez-Centurión Jiménez, C. (2011) Alhajas para Soberanos: los animales reales en el siglo XVIII: de las leoneras a las mascotas de cámara (Madrid: Junta de Castilla y León).

Urríes y de la Colina, J.J. (2011) ‘Un Goya exótico, “La osa hormiguera de Su Majestad”’, Goya: Revista de arte, vol. 336, 242–53.

Outram, D. (1995) ‘New spaces in natural history’, in Cultures of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine, J. Secord, and E. Spary, 249–65 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Mazo Pérez, A.V. (2006) ‘El oso hormiguero de Su Majestad’, Asclepio, 58 (1): 281–94.

Pimentel, J. (2017) The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium: An Essay in Natural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

¹ F. de Azara, Apuntamientos para la historia natural de los quadrúpedos del Paraguay (Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de Ibarra, 1802), vol. 1, 16.

² AGI, Indiferente 1549, ‘Animales de Guayaquil’; ‘Noticia de la loba marina que hay en el Buen Retiro’, Variedades de Ciencias, Literatura y Artes, núm 12, 1805, 330–5.

³ MNCN, Fondo Museo, Sección A – Real Gabinete, legajo 259; ‘Noticia de la loba’, Variedades, 330–5.

⁴ MNCN, Fondo Museo, Sección A, Real Gabinete de Historia Natural, legajo 280.

⁵ C.A. Fischer, Voyage en Espagne aux années 1797 et 1798 (Paris: Cramer, 1801), 41.

⁶ J. Townsend, A Journey through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787 (Dublin, 1792), 180.

⁷ J.T. Dillon, Travels through Spain, with a view to illustrate the Natural History and Physical Geography of that Kingdom (London: G. Robinson, 1780), 76–7.

⁸ MNCN, Fondo Museo, Sección A – Real Gabinete, legajo 73.

⁹ J.B. Bru, Colección de láminas que representan los animales y monstruos del Real Gabinete de Historia Natural de Madrid (Madrid: Andrés de Sotos, 1786), vol. 1, 35–6.

¹⁰ J.I. Molina, Compendio de la historia geográfica, natural y civil del Reyno de Chile (Madrid: Sancha, 1788), 304.

¹¹ Azara, Apuntamientos para la historia natural, vol. 1, 61, 62, 67 and 73.