María Negroni has built a museum without walls in La idea natural (Acantilado, 2024), a mappa mundi in perpetual exodus toward writing. Its pages gather forty-nine figures: a curatorship of spirits, an emotional taxonomy of those who have let themselves be swept—with a touch of delirium—by the vertigo of naming things.
This is not, however, a history of science or a biographical itinerary of eccentric naturalists. This book, like the Renaissance Wunderkammer, is populated with wonders, obsessions, and useless exactitudes that lend meaning to the world. Lucretius, Paracelsus, Humboldt, Nabokov: each step onto the stage as evidence of a sensibility that chases mystery and, in doing so, unveils the secret architecture of the world: the Letter.
As the author recalls, quoting Buffon, “the discourse of nature is nature transformed into discourse.” Hence the gesture that runs through the book: reading is privileged over mere observation. “I am interested in recording the discourses woven about nature, in immersing myself in the data of a written nature.” That is the key. The living is reconfigured here into words; it becomes an aesthetic archive, a categorization, a form. The natural world as style.
Negroni composes rather than narrates. Hers is a poetics captivated by the organization of knowledge. Her prose, laden with images and winks, often feels more lyrical than informative, more enchantment than explanation. In her style, there is something reminiscent of Japanese miniatures: economy of space, intensity of stroke, and a care for detail that transforms each fragment into an act of contemplation. As she herself notes, it is about “translating, with plain words, the complexity of the world. Of finding in enumerations an antidote to anxiety and chaos.”
A glimpse of this poetics can be found in passages—postcards, vignettes—like the one dedicated to Lucretius, where the Roman poet emerges as one who “kindles a poem where science sings,” a physicist of the invisible who turns matter into lyrical vision. In the portrait of Maria Sibylla Merian, Negroni resurrects a woman who, in the seventeenth century, left her marriage to draw insects in Surinam, transforming her into an emblem of radical hybridity: artist and entomologist, marginal and pioneer, “someone who practices the art of not belonging.” And in that of John Cage, the composer arises not from music but from The Book of Mushrooms, an uncanny treatise where nature and language blur, “a mycology of chance” that resonates with the structure of the volume itself.
Like the finest tradition of essays that stray—think of Walter Benjamin or Montaigne—La idea naturaladvances by meandering; it allows digressions that, invariably, prove to be the true center. Each portrait evolves into a cabinet of echoes, where “the presences that parade include more than just scientists or naturalists. There are also photographers, painters, illustrators, filmmakers, alchemists, sculptors, philosophers, revolutionaries, composers, poets, and novelists.” We are before a book that constructs its own botany of language, where the realm of the written prevails over mere observation: living matter, turned into text, becomes record, metaphor. And in that gesture, Negroni communes with those she portrays: she writes nature rather than observes it.
Vladimir Nabokov—lepidopterist and novelist (in that order, as he preferred his biographical entries to read)—once interrupted a lecture on literature to correct the taxonomic classification of a butterfly someone had mentioned in passing. The anecdote, recounted with amusement by his students, speaks not only of the scientist’s rigor but of the writer’s devotion. For Nabokov, a misnamed butterfly was a wound in language. In La idea natural, María Negroni channels that same impulse: the imperative not to betray the complexity of the living. And she does so through writing, that other art of classifying the invisible.
