Grażyna Jurkowlaniec: “The Buffalo Shuffle: Taxonomic Confusion and Artistic Templates in Eighteenth-Century Depictions of Caesar’s Aurochs, Frederick I’s Wisent, and the Global Buffalo.”

Abstract:

The paper examines the impact of a single zoological image: an eighteenth-century illustration intended to depict Caesar’s urus or aurochs in the 1712 London edition of the Corpus Caesarianum. Obtained—through Leibniz’s intervention—from Frederick I of Prussia’s menagerie and in fact representing the wisent, the image subsequently became the visual prototype for a range of unrelated bovids, including the American bison, Arctic musk ox, and African as well as Asian buffaloes. The case demonstrates how, in early modern natural history, artistic convention and classical authority frequently outweighed empirical observation. The persistent confusion between wisent and aurochs, and between European and American bison, was sustained by the circulation of authoritative yet inaccurate illustrations. Rather than correcting earlier misunderstandings, such images consolidated them, shaping taxonomic knowledge through visual repetition. The study shows that natural knowledge was structured less by zoological precision than by the inertia of aesthetic tradition, revealing how images, classical reception, and imperial ambition were entangled in producing early scientific authority.