Visual Images of America in The Sixteenth Century: Elaine Brennan

Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1025–1048, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00572.
Visual Images of America in the Sixteenth

Century
Elaine Brennan*
Cardiff University
Abstract
Artists rarely accompanied sixteenth-century voyages of discovery and exploration.1
As a consequence, few first-hand visual representations of the New World were
produced. Despite this, published accounts of the Americas in the sixteenth
century often included illustrations. With some notable exceptions, the voyagers
themselves did not supply the images, or directly supervise their publication.
Accurate or not, these images, together with the texts they illustrated, contributed
to the construction of the Americas in European consciousness. Only a small
number of original first-hand pictorial works survive today, the most important
being John White’s drawings of the Algonquian Indians of Roanoke, Virginia,
from 1585–86. The recent major exhibition of John White’s drawings may provoke
new scholarly interest in sixteenth-century visual images of the Americas, a topic
which offers a rich and relatively neglected area of study.2 This article offers an
introduction to the field together with some suggestions for avenues of further
research.3
Scholars of the period of discovery and exploration will have seen many
sixteenth-century images of the New World, as they often punctuate
historical works; illustrate editions of first-hand accounts; or provide the
departure point for critical or theoretical investigation.4 Frequently,
though, when images are used to illustrate a historical narrative, or the
textual discussion of other texts, little or no attention is paid to the image
itself; a focus predictable in an age of textual primacy. However, visual
representations also carry ranges of cultural meanings which are available
for semiotic analysis, and the role of nonverbal experience in transmitting
and transforming culture and ideology also offers a rich vein of interdis-
ciplinary study for historians and literary and cultural theorists.5 This article
offers a brief introduction to the range of early modern visual materials
relating to the New World, then focuses on the primary sixteenth-century
printed sources, citing selected critical works which indicate a variety of
fruitful avenues of scholarly research followed from these sources.6
A comprehensive overview of European visual representations and artistic
responses to the New World is provided by Hugh Honour’s two synoptical
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1026 Visual Images of America in the Sixteenth Century
studies The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discov-
eries to the Present Time, published in 1976, and the exhibition catalogue
The European Vision of America, from 1975.7 In both books Honour relates
the history of discovery and exploration from the perspective of its
representation in the work of European artists. New Golden Land, as its
subtitle indicates, ranges from illustrations of Columbus’s Letter in 1493,
through to David Hockney’s 1960s paintings of California. The first four
chapters raise major themes: contradictory depictions of natives as either
noble innocents inhabiting a Golden Age, or brutal, cannibalistic savages,
reflecting contemporary debate on their status as ‘true men’; the display
of New World natives brought, often unwillingly, to Europe; visual rep-
resentations of cannibalism; the mediation of first-hand illustrations when
translated into published engravings; the development of natural history
illustration; America represented as an allegorical figure in artworks and
spectacles such as royal entries, court masques and ballets.
The European Vision of America covers, in catalogue format, similar
ground to New Golden Land. The exhibition, to mark the Bicentennial of
the United States, presented European visual images selected to ‘tell
Americans what Europeans saw and felt when confronting America from
1493 to the late nineteenth century’ (vii).8 This wide range of European
artworks and artefacts relating to the New World is catalogued in detail
with contextual notes. Materials include drawings, paintings, printed books,
maps, sculpture, objects d’art, porcelain, furniture and medals. Particularly
interesting are sections on cartography; natural history illustration (including
early published images of turkeys, the armadillo, maize and tobacco plants);
first published illustrated books about the New World; allegorical repre-
sentations of America; the introduction of American dress and artefacts
into masques and carnivals.
More sixteenth-century images are collected in two catalogues of exhi-
bitions marking the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing in
1992: Encountering the New World, 1493 to 1800; and New World of Wonders:
European Images of the Americas, 1492–1700.9 Encountering the New World
catalogues an exhibition staged by the John Carter Brown Library which
focussed on European visual knowledge of the New World before 1800,
presenting items from the Library’s collections to answer the question ‘what
was actually available to Europeans in the way of pictures of peoples, plants
and animals, urban settlement, landscapes and landmasses in the Americas’
(Danforth ix).10 The exhibition focussed on printed works, and the
importance of the new technology of printing as a means of disseminating
information quickly and widely is noted, though the processes involved
are not discussed.11 Seventy-six of the two hundred exhibits are featured
in the catalogue.12 One particularly engaging illustration depicts dog-
headed figures butchering and eating humans. The caption describes the
activity as occurring on an island discovered by Christopher Columbus and
thus relocates cannibal Cynocephali from the Old World to the New
© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1025–1048, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00572.x
Visual Images of America in the Sixteenth Century 1027
World (from Lorenz Fries, Uslegung der mer Carthen [Strasburg, 1525]).
Among natural history illustrations are the first published picture of the
white potato (as distinct from the sweet potato) from John Gerard’s, The
Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes [London, 1597]; and a mermaid,
swimming off the coast of Brazil, included because of her perceived
medicinal efficacy (from Francesco Redi, Experimenta circa res diversas naturales
[Amsterdam, 1675]). Colonial enterprises and settlements are also pictured,
such as the manufacture of silk in Virginia (it did not prosper); and the
apocryphal, utopian, north American city of Melilot (in Charles de
Rochefort’s Histoire Naturelle et Morale des iles Antilles de l’Amerique [Rot-
terdam, 1681]). Encountering the New World has less extensive commentaries
than Visions of America, but provides a useful additional resource, particularly
on printed media.
New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492–1700,
catalogues an exhibition which aimed to illustrate the development of
Europe’s ideas about the New World, drawing on the Folger Shakespeare
Library’s collections of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books and
engravings. Themes are similar to those in the previous catalogues
described, with a focus on printed works, and interesting sections on
tobacco, chocolate and the theatre. Illustrations, with brief commentaries,
are interspersed with articles including: the sources for European imagery
of American Indians, by William C. Sturtevant; the incorporation of
the Americas into European pageantry by Steven Mullaney; and Eng-
lish theatrical representations of American Indians by Virginia Mason
Vaughan.
Online resources for scholars are constantly increasing, and more early
modern images will be reproduced online in the future, though, at the
time of writing, numbers and range remain relatively limited. The ‘Archive
of Early American Images’ online database, currently being compiled by
the John Carter Brown Library, aims to make 6,000 images available, many
not previously reproduced.13 The British Library provides an eclectic selection
from its extensive holdings of printed books, maps and manuscripts.14
Both of these databases are easily searchable and provide excellent biblio-
graphic details. The Morgan Library and Museum (formerly the Pierpont
Morgan Library) Web site provides a limited selection of images from its
literary and historical manuscripts collections; notable here are eight illus-
trations from the Histoire Naturelle des Indes.15 Early English Books Online
(EEBO) reproduces illustrations where they appear in printed books in
English (up to 1700), for example the facsimile of Thomas Hariot’s A
Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia includes the
engravings by Theodor de Bry after John White’s originals.16 The Folger
Shakespeare Library does not have an online image catalogue, however,
many images from the collection are distributed throughout the Web
site.17 The Huntington Library plans to update its online catalogue and
supplement it with images at some point in the future. A Google image
search on keywords or authors usually provides some results for all but the
most obscure illustrations from a wide variety of sources.
From the starting point of these collectively extensive surveys of materials,
it is possible for anyone, even those previously unfamiliar with the field,
to follow up a theme, item or artist of interest very easily. The focus here
now turns specifically to the small number of sixteenth-century published
works containing illustrations based upon first-hand observations, and a
selection of critical studies of them which indicate the variety of available
avenues for research.
Two authoritative, and still most widely cited, sources of information
on sixteenth-century illustrated works relating to the New World are
William C. Sturtevant’s essay ‘First Visual Images of Native America’ from
1976, and Susi Colin’s Das Bild de Indianers im 16. Jahrhundert, 1988,
containing a comprehensive image checklist with descriptions.18 A useful
additional resource is the European Americana: A Chronological Guide to
Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas 1493–1775, a comprehensive
bibliography which indicates where works contain illustrations.19
Sturtevant’s essay identifies 268 separate depictions, representing the
work of around forty artists, produced between 1493 and 1590 (his cut-off
date deliberately excludes works by Theodor de Bry, who published the
first volume of the America series in 1590).20 Sturtevant’s primary concern
is to disentangle the sources of European iconography of native America,
and gauge and indicate the reliability, that is the ethnographical accuracy,
of the representations identified. He provides a ‘preliminary classification’
of twelve types of sources, ranging from field sketches (graded as the most
accurate) to images created from verbal descriptions (unavoidably trans-
formed by visual preconceptions), through to intentionally propagandistic
works. Images, prior to photography and beyond, he states, will contain
some of these ‘distorting elements’, and, when ‘elements anthropologists
can verify as authentically Indian’ are removed, ‘what remains are European
preconceptions and misconceptions’ (Sturtevant 417–19). Sturtevant is
specifically concerned with ethnographic accuracy, but, for other scholars,
‘preconceptions and misconceptions’ may be their focus.21
Introduced below is a selection from the sixteenth-century sources
identified by Sturtevant; his views on relevance and ethnographic accuracy
are noted. Sturtevant indicated areas where, in 1976, he believed more
study was desirable, and here, selected key or interesting examples of
works which have been undertaken since 1976 are outlined.22
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557)

Fernández de Oviedo first went to the West Indies in 1514, and, in a
variety of official roles, made eleven further visits to Spanish colonies in
America over the next 35 years. His first work of natural history was the
brief De la natural hystoria de las Indias (also known as the Sumario [Toledo:
Fig. 1. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, La historia general de las Indias (Seville: J.
Cromberger, 1535).
Remon de Petras, 1526]) which contained only four woodcut illustrations:

a hammock; a tree with three roots and a creeper; a fire drill; and a
plantain leaf. The much larger La historia general de las Indias was published
in two volumes (Seville, 1535; and Salamanca, 1537) and contained
reworkings of the original illustrations, and several new ones, including
the first depiction of a native paddling a canoe (Fig. 1); a gold-panning
scene; a Patagonian wind break; two native houses; and various plants and
animals, including a manatee.
Sturtevant sums up Oviedo’s illustrations as:
Exceedingly important, their value is increased by the lack of artistic talent for
which Oviedo himself apologized in explaining that only drawings could make
his descriptions clear. Their originality is certain; indeed no previous models
are known for any of them. They have not yet been adequately studied,
however, or even completely published. (424)
Although no artist, Oviedo took pains to ensure that his drawings were
faithfully reproduced by his printer; a fact pointed out by Daymond
Turner in one of the few more recent studies of Oviedo’s illustrations.23
Turner’s paper explores the printing history of some of Oviedo’s eighty-plus
drawings, with detailed comparisons of revised illustrations in different
editions of the Historia, their inclusion and alterations in Ramusio’s trans-
lation of the Historia in the third volume of his Raccolta di Navigationi et
Viaggi . . . (Venice: Giunti, 1556) (where, Turner notes, Ramusio appro-
priately adds a woodcut of an ear of maize into a chapter on agriculture);
the evidence of Oviedo’s instructions to the printer found in two extant
manuscripts, one of which, Turner proposes, was Oviedo’s working copy
(the Monserrat Manuscript) and includes four marginal images not known
elsewhere. Turner outlines, approvingly, the eighteenth-century Muñoz
Manuscripts in which copies of some otherwise lost illustrations are
preserved. By contrast, the ‘cavalier treatment’ of Oviedo’s illustrations in
the nineteenth-century Amador de los Rios edition of the Historia is

responsible, Turner asserts, for the current lack of scholarly interest in
Oviedo’s drawings. Turner’s detailed paper alone goes some way to
addressing Sturtevant’s complaint that Oviedo’s illustrations have not been
adequately studied. It also demonstrates that the transmission from manu-
script to printed work, and subsequent history of copies and reprints of
images of the Americas, offers an interesting avenue of study.
Hernan Cortés (1485–1547)

Cortés did not include illustrations in his five published letters to the
Emperor setting out his conquest of Mexico. Yet, when he visited the
court of Charles V in Spain in 1528, he brought with him several Aztecs,
including two princes, eight jugglers and twelve ballplayers (Honour, New
Golden Land 62). The Aztecs provoked great interest at court, particularly
for their acrobatic performances. The acrobats were ‘sketched with vivid
immediacy and directness’ (5), by Christoph Weiditz, a medal engraver of
Augsburg, unconnected with America. Sturtevant describes the illustrations
briefly, and judges them to be ‘obviously accurate representations’ (426). The
eleven illustrations were preserved in a costume book Das Trachtenbuch des
Christoph Weiditz (140). Several are reproduced in New Golden Land (59–61).
Weiditz’s illustrations have not been the object of specific study, but
the topic of exhibition and display of Amerindians in Europe attracts
Fig. 2. Christoph Weiditz, Das Trachtenbuch des Christoph Weiditz (1529).

continuing interest. One example, the importation of fifty Tupinambá

Indians to inhabit the imitation Brazilian village erected for Henry II’s
entry into Rouen in 1550 is often cited as the source for Montaigne’s
‘true witness’ in his essay ‘Of the Caniballes’.24 The spectacle is recorded
in only two surviving images: one watercolour, and one woodcut
‘crowded with details but too small and crudely done to be valuable
ethnographically’ (Sturtevant 428).25 Another example, focussing on visual
representation, is William Sturtevant’s and David B. Quinn’s essay on
the much illustrated Eskimos captured and displayed in England by
Martin Frobisher (1567–77).26 Peter Mason’s recent work, The Lives of
Images, examines the production and transmission of visual images of non-
European peoples over the last five centuries. Its opening chapter provides
a discussion of kidnap and exhibition of Amerindians from the time of
Columbus onwards, then, Mason embarks upon a fascinating examination
of images of Fuegian Indians, from sixteenth-century illustrations through
to nineteenth-century drawings and photographs of them presented as
exhibits in European zoos and concert halls, concluding with their
multiple recontextualisations in the twentieth century.
A related area of study is that of the history of collecting and exhibiting
New World artefacts, such as the Aztec treasure sent to Charles V by
Cortes, displayed in Brussels in 1520, famously seen and commented on
by Albrecht Dürer (Honour, New Golden Land 28). Individual collectors,
such as Margaret of Austria (1480–1530),27 and American material in
Kunst- and Wunderkammern have also been studied.28
Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485–1557)

Ramusio, a Venetian, published compendia of voyages. His third volume,
the Terzo volume delle navigationioni et viaggi nel quale si contengono le navigationi
al Mondo Nuouo . . . (Venice, 1556), deals exclusively with the New
World, and includes works by Peter Martyr, Oviedo and Cortés.
Sturtevant dismisses the illustrations in this volume as ‘largely imaginary
or derivative’ and continues:
There are 21 pictures (including plants) copied from Oviedo, a derivative of
the Cortés map of Mexico, and a much-reproduced plan of the St Lawrence
Iroquoian fortified town of Hochelaga near Montreal that has been proven
imaginary. . . . A map of Brazil includes a view of Indians in a hammock inside
a house, and others cutting and gathering brazilwood with pet monkeys
nearby; these may indicate ethnographic reality. (433)
The map of Hochelaga referred to (see Fig. 3) relates to the account
of Jacques Cartier’s voyage of 1535–36 which included the discovery of
the estuary of the St Lawrence. It is reproduced by Honour, who comments
that it may be based on a sketch brought back by Cartier, but notes that
the local manner of building was not as depicted (Honour, European Vision
of America 88).
Fig. 3. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Terzo volume delle navigationioni et viaggi nel quale si
contengono le navigationi al Mondo Nuouo . . . (Venice, 1556)
Sturtevant’s dismissal of Ramusio’s adaptation of images is in accord

with his parameters of ethnographic accuracy, however, this approach may
exclude equally interesting avenues of enquiry. For example, Ramusio’s
additions of long curly hair and beards to some male figures transforms
them from New World Indians to European Wild Men. This type of
recontextualisation is examined by Susi Colin, who argues that the
iconographic tradition drawn on by illustrators of the early sixteenth
century was that of the Wild Man, popular from the art and literature
of the fifteenth century, who embodied the antithesis of the values of
Christian civilisation (though, as in the legend of Saint Chrysostomos,
he could be brought to civilisation).29 Colin examines the qualities of
the Wild Man evident in Amerigo Vespucci’s descriptions of natives and
demonstrates that these are represented in the images which accompanied
the Mundus Novus and Lettera. The Wild Man (and woman) come
together with cynocephali and cannibalism when they are all relocated
to the New World.30 Colin observes that idealised portrayals of the
Wild Man and Indian functioned as a critical commentary on unsatis-
factory social structure of Renaissance civilisation, though the concept of
the noble savage did not come to fruition until later on in the French
Enlightenment.
Hans Staden
Hans Staden, a German mercenary working with the Portuguese in Brazil,
was captured by Tupinambá in 1553, and held captive by them for nine
months, under constant threat of being killed and eaten. He escaped,
ascribing his release to divine protection, and, in 1557, published an
account of his period of captivity, illustrated by 42 woodcuts. A notable
feature of these woodcuts is that Staden represents himself as a figure in
the action (in Fig. 4, protesting against the cannibal ritual).31 Sturtevant
characterises the illustrations as ‘small and crudely done’ but judges them
to be ‘extremely important ethnohistorical evidence, for they vividly
depict varied activities and were clearly drawn by Staden or under his
direct supervision’ (433).
Staden’s account proved popular, possibly because of its focus on the
rituals of cannibalism. It was first published in Marburg in 1557, and
was later included in Part 3 of Theodor de Bry’s Great Voyages, or
America, together with Jean de Léry’s account of his stay among the
Tupinambá.32 Staden’s original woodcuts provided the basis for de
Bry’s elaborate engravings which are far more well-known today and
have been analysed in detail by Bernadette Bucher (see below).33 No more
recent work appears to have focussed on Staden’s images specifically,
though his text continues to be of interest to scholars due to its focus
on cannibalism.34
André Thevet
André Thevet, a Franciscan friar, spent three months in Brazil (1555–56)
in the French colony founded by Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon. Ill in
bed for much of his brief stay, his observations on the New World were
based ‘partly on his own observations, partly from French sailors long
resident among the Indians, and partly from European and perhaps Indian
voyagers whom he interviewed in France’ (Sturtevant 435). Thevet pub-
lished three books relating to the New World: Les singularitez de la France
Antarctique, autrement nommee Amerique: et de plusieurs terres & isles decouverts
de nostre temps (Paris: Heirs of M de LaPorte, 1557);35 La cosmographie
universelle (Paris: P. L’Huillier, 1575) (the fourth section of which deals
with the Americas [vol. 2, pp. 903–1025]). Les vrais pourtraits et vies des
hommes illustres (Paris: Widow of J. Kerver & G. Chauddiere, 1584), which
includes portraits and biographical sketches of Columbus, Magellan,
Vespucci and Cortes.
Several of the 17 woodcuts in the Singularities, representing various
Tupinambá activities, are described by Sturtevant:
cutting down palm and brazilwood trees, collecting the fruits of four different
kinds of tree, making the fermented maize beer chicha, eating, making fire and
smoking a cigar, engaged in the famous weeping greeting, curing hides, burying
Fig. 4. Hans Staden, Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden,
Nacketen, Grimmingen Menschfresser, Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen (Marburg:
A. Kolbe, 1557).
a corpse, in a warlike process, in two battles, killing a captive, and roasting his
flesh. (435)
Sturtevant judges these illustrations to contain ‘many new details based
on Brazilian reality (one based on a Staden woodcut), while two other
scenes depicting Amazon warriors are ‘entirely imaginary’, and three
views of hunting and warfare in New France ‘have no ethnographic
validity except for some rather distorted snowshoes and long-houses’ (435).
Thevet’s second book, the two-volume La cosmographie universelle, included
many of the Brazilian scenes from Singuliarities and prompted another
Frenchman, Jean de Léry, to publish his own account of the Villegagnon
colony and the Tupinambá Indians (see below).
Fig. 5. André Thevet, Les singularitez de la France Antarctique, autrement nommee Amerique:
et de plusieurs terres & isles decouverts de nostre temps (Paris: Heirs of M. de LaPorte, 1557)
Jean de Léry
First published in 1578, Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of
Brazil (Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil) chronicles the author’s
voyages and twelve-month stay in Brazil between November 1556 and
May 1558. A French Calvinist, Léry sailed to Brazil to develop a
Reformed refuge and mission as part of the French colony founded in
1555 by Villegagnon.36 Within eight months of their arrival religious
tensions split the colony, and Léry and his fellow Calvinists left. For two
months, while awaiting a suitable passage home, they lived with the native
inhabitants, the Tupinambá.37 Léry never returned to Brazil. He published
his account 18 years later, prompted, he states, by a desire to provide a
‘true’ account of his part in the break-up of the colony. This would
contradict the ‘lies’ written by André Thevet in his Singularities (1558),
which had been published, in revised and enlarged form, in 1575 as the
Cosmography.
The first edition of Léry’s History includes five ‘well-done woodcuts of
Tupinambá Indians’ (Sturtevant 442). The image of the famous Tupinambá
‘weeping greeting’, is copied, with improvements, from Thevet, Sturtevant
Fig. 6. Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil (1578).
states, and the others illustrate ‘personal ornaments, weapons, a baby sling,
hammocks, dancers with rattles, and a mourning scene’ (442). The second
edition, published two years later, used the same five woodcuts and added
‘three new, stylistically inferior scenes derived from Thevet: a battle, the
sacrifice of a captive, and a landscape with a strange animal which is the
three-toed sloth’ (442).
In 1996 Claire Farago wrote with reference to these images:

Given the extent to which de Léry’s Voyage has been studied, its acknowledged
role as a foundational text for the discipline of anthropology, and the great
critical interest that has recently fastened onto the history of vision in a
number of fields, it is surprising that no one has ever examined de Léry’s
innovative illustrations. This oversight indicates how writing still exerts its
logocentric power in anthropology. (‘Jean de Léry’s Anatomy Lesson’ 110)
Farago’s article goes on to analyse the relation of text and image in Léry’s
History, tracing a developing ‘visual ethnography’, and noting in the visual
rhetoric a tension between rhetorical and scientific modes of discourse,
evident in differences between Léry’s illustrations and pictures by John
White and Jacques Le Moyne (Farago 117). Farago notes references in
Léry’s text to the appeal of Galen’s method ‘to combine theoretical
knowledge with direct experience’ and to Aristotelian methods of scientific
demonstration (118, 120), and their reflection in pictorial conventions
apparent in the illustrations, the ‘iconic, sculpturally-conceived figures,
modelled in light and shadow, with only a bare indication of setting, are
presented along with clear, conceptual contrasts’ (113), which she compares
to the anatomical dissections pictured by Andreas Vesalius in De humani
corporis fabrica libri septem (Basel: J. Oporinus, 1543). She points out that
‘no one questions the veracity of his images, not even modern revisionist
writers like de Certeau who have studied the expository conventions of
his writing’ (117). Farago has also edited a more extensive study which
examines the effect of cultural exchange between the Old and New Worlds
on artistic practice and discussions of art during the sixteenth century.38
Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues was one of the very few artists of note
who travelled to the New World in the sixteenth century. He was a
member of the French expeditions to northern Florida in 1562 and
1564–65, led by Rene Laudonniere.39 Sadly, only one copy made from
Le Moyne’s original field studies survives. A miniature on vellum, it was
executed some time after his return, consequently, as Sturtevant notes:
the artist had clearly forgotten appropriate colors such as those of Indian skin
and hair and also included some objects with European shapes. However, many
details of Timucua Indian dress, ornament, and artifacts depicted seem
accurate. (438)
Le Moyne’s original drawings are now known only by a few watercolour
copies made by John White, and from the engravings made by Theodor
de Bry to illustrate Le Moyne’s narrative account in Part 2 of America. De
Bry Europeanised the Timucua features and figures (Honour, New Golden
Land 70), however, the engravings provide a detailed view of Timucua
life, of which Bucher gives a flavour:
We see the arrival of the French, the natives’ welcome, and the construction
of the fort by the invaders. The Timucua style of war is described in detail;
we see ceremonial preparation for it among the Saturiba and the Outina;
then the battle line drawn between the two opponents, the march of Outina’s
army, the treatment of the scalped prisoners, and the dances around
the trophies after the victory. Hermaphrodites are used as beasts of burden.
Widows petition the chiefs after the defeat and begin to mourn on the warriors’
tombs. Other plates illustrate hunting techniques, leisure activities, feasts, and
political organization. The plates emphasize the scalp-hunters’ political and
military organization and their various techniques of war: staged battle,
guerrilla warfare, defense of the town, cutting up the scalp and smoke-drying
it, as well as all the ceremonies and rites that surround the preparation for war
and the celebration of victory. Nor are other aspects of native life neglected:
sowing, harvesting, cooking preserving food (smoke-drying and storing in
public granaries), the technique of leaching inedible plants, panning for river
gold, and so forth. (15)
Le Moyne’s complete pictorial works, including his numerous botanical

illustrations, and the de Bry engravings, are fully catalogued by Paul
Hulton in a work which also provides an English translation from the first
edition of De Bry’s America, Part 2 (1591), the ‘Narrative of Jacques Le
Moyne de Morgues’ (6–30); and, Le Moyne’s explanatory texts to his
illustrations which may draw on Loudonniere’s history, though de Bry
attributes them to Le Moyne. Essays include an ethnographical evaluation
of the engravings by William Sturtevant.40
Girolamo Benzoni (b. 1519)

Benzoni, a Milanese, went to Spain and thence to America where he
travelled extensively in the Spanish Colonies between 1541 and 1556,
recording his observations in the West Indies, along the Caribbean shore
of South America, in Central America, and in Peru. He returned to
Milan and wrote his History of the New World (Venice, 1565), which
contains 17 woodcuts: one of plants, the rest illustrating Indian activities.
The woodcuts, apparently based on Benzoni’s sketches, are ethnographically
valuable, according to Sturtevant, and many were engraved by de Bry.
Benzoni’s History was very popular, with over 30 editions recorded by the
end of the eighteenth century. This work helped to enhance the reputation
of Christopher Columbus (whose discoveries Benzoni was keen to have
acknowledged) and also contributed to the development of the Black Legend
of Spanish cruelty. Two images are notable in this regard: a depiction of
Indians killing their children and committing suicide by hanging, jumping
off a cliff and falling on their spears rather than serve the Spanish; and a
scene of Indians wreaking poetic justice by pouring molten gold down
the throat of a Spaniard before butchering and eating him (see Fig. 7)
(Honour, European Vision 90; Sturtevant 438).
Henry Keazor focuses on Theodor de Bry’s engravings for Book 4 of

America which included Benzoni’s Historia. Keazor investigates de Bry’s
often unacknowledged sources, considering the degree to which he
altered and Europeanised the originals, and discusses the classical and
devotional sources used as the basis for many of the engravings in Book
4, particularly those used to illustrate Benzoni’s textual criticism of Spanish
atrocities. Following detailed analysis of several plates, Keazor speculates
that de Bry was particularly expedient in his choice of Catholic icono-
graphic figures to transpose as victims of the Spanish Catholic atrocities.
These images, together with de Bry’s later illustrations for Bartholomé de
las Casas’s Brevisima relación de la destruyción de las Indias, contributed to the
visual representation of the Black Legend and was, Keazor concludes, in
harmony with his Protestant views and abhorrence of Catholicism.41
John White ( fl. 1577–93)

John White was a member of the expedition which founded the first
English colony in America in 1585. He was employed as a cartographer
and draughtsman, charged with making a visual record of the land and its
people (Thomas Hariot compiled a verbal report).42 Sturtevant succinctly
sums up the importance of White’s work:
The 18 surviving watercolors by John White of coastal North Carolina

Algonquians near Raleigh’s short-lived colony are perhaps the most interesting
and important sixteenth-century illustrations of Indians from both an ethno-
graphic and artistic point of view. White finished these versions in England
on the basis of the (now lost) field sketches he made in America in 1584,
1585–6, and 1587. . . . White’s pictures had a significant impact on European
images of eastern North American Indians, at first through engravings
modified by de Bry (but still quite accurate) after now-lost versions by White,
and then via hundreds of more and more debased derivatives by other
artists. (443–4)
The recent major exhibition of John White’s drawings and watercolours

may have brought his work to a new, contemporary audience, but, for the
reasons Sturtevant’s comments indicate, White’s images, and de Bry’s
engraved versions of them, are already the most studied and commented
upon sixteenth-century images of the New World. The volume which
accompanied the exhibition, A New World by Kim Sloan, provides a clear
introduction to White’s life and his period as ‘Governour’ in Virginia.
White’s watercolours are reproduced in full, together with the engravings
by de Bry, and the Sloane Volume of watercolours associated with White.43
Of particular interest are sections on the history of illustration and water-
colour painting, attitudes towards it and its place within the Elizabethan
court; and a short technical section on colour techniques, pigments and
paper.44 Chapters are contributed by Joyce E. Chaplin, Christian F. Feest
Fig. 7. Girolamo Benzoni, La historia del Mondo Nuovo . . . la qual tratta dell’ isole, & mari
nuovamente ritrovati, et delle nuove citta da lui proprio vedute . . . in quattordeci anni (Venice:
F Rampazetto, 1565).

and Ute Kuhlemann, which include an analysis of the roles of White and
Hariot as propagandists for the English colonising project in Virginia
(Chaplin); distinct modes of representation developing during the period
(Feest); and de Bry’s use of White’s work in pursuit of his Protestant
colonising project (Kuhleman).
Sloan acknowledges the scholarship of David B. Quinn and Paul Hulton,
who produced the first comprehensive edition of White’s work including
reproductions in 1964.45 Paul Hulton brought out a shorter, summary
work in 1985 which, together with reproductions, includes sections on
the history and publication of White’s work; its ethnographical accuracy;
and assessment of White’s abilities as a watercolourist.46
Two examples of works which cite and analyse John White’s work in
relation to English culture and scientific thought are provided by Karen
Ordahl Kupperman and Julie Robin Solomon.47 Kupperman’s article
examines gender and class as early modern distinctions which were ‘visible
and emphatic’ measures of the civility of English society and were marked
by dress, gesture and deportment. These markers were extended to apply
to American Indian culture by early English observers who ‘believed they
saw a society that recognized the same kinds of gender and status distinc-
tions as their own’ (Kupperman 218). John White’s drawings are cited as
examples of the depiction of gesture to designate status. The initial belief
that English and Indians shared a common humanity did not endure as
Indian resistance to assimilation combined with competition for resources,
leading colonists to develop a view of the American native as ‘perma-
nently other – and permanently lower’ (Kupperman 228).
Solomon’s article offers a detailed reading of White’s painting entitled
‘The Flyer’ which, she points out, was relabelled by Thomas Hariot as
‘The Conjuror’ in de Bry’s engraving. Solomon situates the image in the
context of her theory of Baconian scientific reading practice, and proposes
that the change of name indicates a duality of representation which
reflects White’s and Hariot’s different modes of thought, each only repre-
senting ‘one aspect of the medicine man’s cognitive totality’ (545).
Theodor de Bry, America Grands Voyages (1590–1634)

William Sturtevant wrote in 1992 that: ‘The whole series of pictorial
works published by the de Brys has not been thoroughly studied. An
important, indicative work is by Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest’
(qtd. in Doggett 33). Bucher’s study is briefly introduced here, as it
remains a key work in a relatively neglected area.
Bucher’s study of the de Bry’s epic series America employs a structural
analysis based on Levi-Strauss’s theories of structural anthropology and the
method of iconological interpretation suggested by Erwin Panofsky. It
aims to ‘grasp the work of art as a document about the culture from
which it emanates’ (Bucher xv). Anyone needing a concise introduction
Fig. 8. ‘The Flyer’ by John White (1585).
to the de Bry family enterprise which constituted the America Grands

Voyages series (published between 1590 and 1634) will find this in the first
four chapters of Bucher’s work which begins with a brief history of their
production; their ‘bricolage’ process of assemblage, in which materials are
assembled, arranged and rearranged from a wide variety of textual and
pictorial sources. The sections were presented in a haphazard order,
dictated by when works became available, not their historical chronology.
The overall effect of the series is ‘a sort of Tower of Babel of the Ame-
ridian peoples’:
At the pictorial level, a real syncretism of ethnic, cultural, zoological, mytho-

logical, and biblical forms is created that does not necessarily exist at the level
of the text taken separately. It comes into being precisely because the de Brys
brought together, more or less arbitrarily, a heterogeneous assortment of
narratives with a view to illustrating them. It is elaborated little by little, by
the process of repeating elements borrowed at times from the Timucua, at
times from the Tupinambá or Peruvians, to which are added others, drawn
from other traditions completely foreign to the American continent. (21)
For those not used to the conventions, Bucher provides a concise
explanation of the different methods of ‘expressing the temporal dimension’
in the spatial terms of the engravings, and a clear explication of the relation
of text and picture in the works. Of particular interest to those more used
to dealing with text is Bucher’s highlighting of some unavoidable differ-
ences when the engraver transfers physical representations from text to
image. There is the loss of the physical attribute of colour (ethnic differ-
entiation was, in the engravings, ‘purely cultural and not racial’ Bucher
asserts). Also, the textual and rhetorical device of negation (describing the
unfamiliar in terms of what it is not) is impossible to transfer: negation is
not possible in figurative drawings, therefore nudity had to be represented
and nude forms canonized in art were used (Roman or Greek statues,
Italian virgins) (Bucher 35). The common descriptive formula of comparison
(something is like this other thing) when employed pictorially, can result
in apparently unconnected insertions (such as the images of British Picts
amongst White’s Indians).48 The second portion of Bucher’s study concerns
the motif of women with sagging breasts. The motif is analysed in terms
of its structural codes, and the relations between codes, which, as they are
employed to portray Amerindian society, uncover deep levels of cultural
meanings in European society.
The sources and critical works discussed above provide, it is hoped, an
indication of the wealth of sixteenth-century visual material connected with
the Americas, and some of the avenues of research so far pursued.49 It should
be clear that there are many areas which have yet to be fully explored.
Acknowledgements
Reproduction of images from the following sources is gratefully acknowl-
edged: Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land (Figs. 2, 4 and 6), and The
European Vision of America (Figs. 1, 3, 5 and 7); J. H. Parry, The Discovery
of South America (Fig. 8). Support for interlibrary loans was generously
provided by Centre for Lifelong Learning, Cardiff University.
Short Biography
Elaine Brennan is a cultural historian and literary theorist whose main
research interests concern early modern textual and pictorial constructions
of the New World. She received her doctorate from Cardiff University
in 2006.
Notes
∗ Correspondence address: Cardiff University, Centre for Lifelong Learning, Senghennydd
Road, Cardiff. Email: brennane@cf.ac.uk.
1
J. H. Parry contrasts the absence of competent artists on voyages from the ‘Golden Age’ of
exploration with the significant role of artists in the voyages of the ‘Silver Age’ of maritime
discovery, such as those of Cook and Fitzroy. Parry, ‘Depicting a New World’, 137–8.
2
The relative lack of concerted study and analysis of visual representations of the Americas has
been commented upon by scholars from the 1970s to the present. See Sturtevant 419; Honour
271; Adams 532; Danforth ix; Doggett 33; Farago 110; Keazor 131; Pratt 4; Sloan 35.
3
‘A New World: England’s First View of America’, British Museum touring exhibition:
London, 2007, Yale and Virginia, 2008.
4
For example: many images are used to illustrate Parry, Discovery of South America; and the Folio
edition of Christopher Columbus, The Journal of Christopher Columbus, trans. Cecil Jane (London:
Anthony Blond & The Orion Press, 1960). Discussion of Jan van Straat’s image of Vespucci
landing in America opens works by Michel de Certeau and Peter Hulme. Michel de Certeau,
The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, NY: Columbia University, 1988); Peter
Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986).
5
See Lacey.
6
Limited space requires that the survey of critical works has been limited to works in English,
and two major areas have not been included: cartography and manuscript illustrations. An
especially important manuscript is the so-called ‘Drake Manuscript’, acquired for public view
by the Pierpont Morgan Library as recently as 1983, and which has still not been extensively
studied. Reproductions of the images and captions have been published as Histoire Naturelle des
Indes, and a very small selection of images are viewable on the Morgan Library & Museum
Web site <http://www.morganlibrary.org/>.
7
Honour, in 1976, observed that ‘[t]here are no books which deal generally with the European
visual image of America’ (271), a deficiency his book goes some way to filling. As recently as
2005 Stephanie Pratt commented that while there has been some extremely important analysis
of ‘first contact images’, no ‘synoptical study of European artistic representations of American
Indians has been undertaken since Hugh Honour’s two important and seminal publications’ (4).
8
Sherman E. Lee, J. Carter Brown, Emmanuel de Margerie, ‘Foreword’ to European Vision of
America.
9
Danforth, Encountering the New World, 1493 to 1800; Doggett, New World of Wonders.
10
Danforth continues: ‘The analysis of such images, of almost any one of them, could be the
subject of many dissertations and could result in a very big and learned work’ (ix).
11
Danforth notes that it ‘became apparent that pictures were needed to emphasize the novelty
of the American experience and to make it understandable, and the publishers and printmakers
of Europe quickly began to fill the void’ (1).
12
The catalogue includes a complete item list at the end, with small black and white images
of each exhibit with its caption and source: author, title, place, date.
13
John Carter Brown Library, ‘Archive of Early American Images’ <http://www.brown.edu/
Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/pages/ea_hmpg.html>.
14
British Library Images Online catalogue: <http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/>.
15
See note 6. Morgan Library and Museum: <http://www.morganlibrary.org/>.
16
Early English Books Online (EEBO): <http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home> (requires Athens
login).
17
Image details can be obtained by right-clicking on the image and viewing ‘File Properties’
(Windows). Folger Shakespeare Library: <http://www.folger.edu/>.
18
Sturtevant, ‘First Visual Images of Native America’; Colin, Das Bild des Indianers im 16.
Jahrhundert.
19
Alden, European Americana.

20
Sturtevant includes cartographic and several manuscript sources in his catalogue, which will
not be followed up in this article, due to limitations of space. To place the number of illustrated
works in context, Rudolf Hirsch gives the total number of West European imprints dealing
with exploration of the Americas between 1493 and 1526 as 124 (Hirsch 539; also qtd. in
Turner 1). Hugh Honour also places printed evidence of the European reaction to the New
World in context: ‘Yet the interest which sixteenth-century Europeans took in America, even
with its promise of gold, should not be exaggerated. In an age when travel literature flourished,
with such compendia of voyages as those edited by Fracanzio da Montalboddo in Vincenza and
by Ramusio in Venice and Hakluyt in England, the discovery of America played by no means
the most prominent part. Many more books were written about other parts of the world. In
France between 1480 and 1609 twice as many books and ten times as many pamphlets were
devoted to the Islamic lands’ (New Golden Land 18).
21
While Sturtevant has good reasons to exclude illustrations with no ethnographic basis, other
scholars may be interested in such images as they also would have contributed to European
conceptions of the New World (the fictional Travels of Sir John Mandeville, for example, were
widely read and more influential than Marco Polo’s more factual account).
22
Descriptions of the works draw on Hugh Honour’s studies (The New Golden Land and The
European Vision of America); bibliographic information from the European Americana; together
with individual works as cited.
23
See Turner, ‘Forgotten Treasure from the Indies’.
24
See, for example, Michel de Certeau, especially ch. 5 ‘Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals”: The
Savage “I” ’, in Heterologies.
25
The watercolour is reproduced, in colour, in Strong’s Splendour at Court.
26
Sturtevant, and Quinn, ‘This New Prey: Eskimos in Europe in 1567, 1576, and 1577’. This
collection contains essays on Amerindians in Europe through to the twentieth century.
27
See MacDonald, ‘Collecting a New World’.
28
See Feest, ‘Collecting of American Indian Artifacts in Europe, 1493–1750’.
29
Colin, ‘Wild Man and the Indian in Early 16th Century Book Illustration’. See also Zika,
for discussion of discursive links between the visual language of witchcraft and contemporary
anxieties about sexuality and savagery; and Bartra on origins of Wild Men.
30
Colin also refers to Lorenz Fries’s, Uslegung der Carta Marina (Strassburg, 1527).
31
By contrast, John White does not include any European figures in his depictions of Roanoke.
32
See Staden, Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden, Nacketen, Grim-
mingen Menschfresser, Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen.
33
de Bry’s illustrations of the Tupinambá in Book 3 of the Great Voyages are discussed and
analysed in detail by Bernadette Bucher in Icon and Conquest especially Chapter 5 ‘The Old
Tupinambá Cannibals’.
34
See, for example, Forsyth; Whitehead, ‘Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism’.
Also, Barker, Hulme and Iversen especially ch. 4. A more recent article focussing on Staden’s
account of cannibalism is by Luciana Villas Bôas. Two feature films based on Staden’s account
have been produced in Brazil, one, in 1999, faithful to Staden’s account; the other, produced
in 1972 by the Cinema Nuvo movement, was less accurate, but more political, commenting
on the construction of history and the political situation of Brazil at the time (see Davis).
35
This text appeared in an unillustrated English translation in 1568: The new found worlde, or
Antarctiche, wherin is contained wonderful and strange things, as well of humaine creatures, as beastes,
fishes, foules, and serpents, trees, plants, mines of golde and silver . . . now newly translated [by T Hacket]
(London: H. Bynneman, for T. Hacket, 1568).
36
For further details of the colony founded by Villegagnon see Whatley, History xx–xxii; Léry’s
own Preface xlv–lix.
37
Hans Staden’s account of his nine months held captive by them in the early 1550s offers a
different perspective on living with the Tupinambá. Neil L. Whitehead summarises the differ-
ences: ‘As a repeated eyewitness to ritual anthropophagy, Staden’s account stands apart from
other French materials of this period which intellectualised Tupi rituals by analogy with Catholic
and Protestant doctrinal disputes. Jean de Léry’s far more extensive account of his travels to
Brazil in 1556–8, likewise intricately described Tupi culture; but it is his position as captive that
invests Staden’s account with particular significance’ (‘South America/Amazonia’ 127).

38
Farago, Reframing the Renaissance.
39
For a brief account of the expeditions and their context, see Fishman. Despite its title, the
article does not make reference to Le Moyne or his visual images.
40
Other essays include: David Beers Quinn on the French colonising attempt; R. A. Skelton
on the Le Moyne-De Bry map; and William T. Stearn on Le Moyne as a plant portraitist and
herbalist. Hulton, Work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues.
41
Keazor cites Bucher, Icon and Conquest 9f, in this context.
42
For a historical account of the Roanoke voyages see Quinn. For details of the instructions
about what was to be recorded see Quinn 37, 51–2. On iconography relating to Elizabeth I
and the New World see: Erickson and Hulse esp. ch. 5; Connolly and Hopkins, includes a
chapter on Elizabeth and Virginia.
43
For an account of the history and publication of White’s work, and particularly Sir Hans
Sloane’s intervention and role in its promotion, see Hulton, America 1585 20–6.
44
Sloan, ‘Knowing John White: The Courtier’s “Curious and Gentle Art of Limning” ’ 23–37;
‘John White’s Watercolour Techniques and Pigments’ 234–5.
45
The reproductions in this edition do not meet today’s standards of quality (Sloan 236).
Publication was followed by the first exhibition of the originals in Raleigh, NC, Washington,
DC and New York City in 1965.
46
Hulton, America, 1585.
47
Kupperman, ‘Presentment of Civility’; Solomon.
48
For example, Paul Hulton notes that one set of pictures by John White includes several
Old-World birds and five Middle Eastern and Oriental costume studies, and observes that ‘this
is very much in line with the work of other contemporaries, reflecting the increasing interest
then shown in comparative ethnology, when races of the Old and New World and of the
ancient historical past had become subjects of intense curiosity and speculation’ (20).
49
Areas not addressed in this article include the development of scientific and botanical illus-
tration, and New World illustrated works within the field of book history. See, for example,
Lowood; and on book illustration and history: McKitterick; Knapp; Landau and Parshall; Bland;
McMurtrie.
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Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1025–1048, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00572.

Visual Images of America in the Sixteenth

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557)

Remon de Petras, 1526]) which contained only four woodcut illustrations:

the nineteenth-century Amador de los Rios edition of the Historia is

Hernan Cortés (1485–1547)

Fig. 2. Christoph Weiditz, Das Trachtenbuch des Christoph Weiditz (1529).

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1025–1048, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00572.x

continuing interest. One example, the importation of fifty Tupinambá

Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485–1557)

Sturtevant’s dismissal of Ramusio’s adaptation of images is in accord

In 1996 Claire Farago wrote with reference to these images:

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues

Le Moyne’s complete pictorial works, including his numerous botanical

Girolamo Benzoni (b. 1519)

Henry Keazor focuses on Theodor de Bry’s engravings for Book 4 of

John White ( fl. 1577–93)

The 18 surviving watercolors by John White of coastal North Carolina

The recent major exhibition of John White’s drawings and watercolours

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1025–1048, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00572.x

Theodor de Bry, America Grands Voyages (1590–1634)

Fig. 8. ‘The Flyer’ by John White (1585).

to the de Bry family enterprise which constituted the America Grands

At the pictorial level, a real syncretism of ethnic, cultural, zoological, mytho-

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1025–1048, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00572.x

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1025–1048, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00572.x

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1025–1048, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00572.x

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1025–1048, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00572.x

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1025–1048, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00572.x

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