purple motes

In sixteenth-century Europe, the Theodore de Bry sold to elite readers expensive books describing foreign lands and peoples. De Bry himself never left Europe. His books were reprints, but he added to his sources many intricate, copper-plate engravings and fold-out maps that he created from secondary sources.  He produced the books in the large, prestigious folio format.  He printed the books in Latin as well as in vernacular European languages, and issued them in multi-part series.  Pictures, vernacular languages, and multi-part book series were well-established commercial techniques for expanding book markets. De Bry thus astutely marketed expensive, prestigious books.

John Rainolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, acquired sometime before 1607 the first nine parts of de Bry’s Descriptiones Americae (also known at Collectiones Peregrinationum in Indiam, Orientalem et Occidentalem / Grands Voyages).  These parts were bound in an expensive (full calf-skin) binding and kept in the Corpus Christi College library.  Underscoring the perceived value of the volumes, they were secured with a chain to prevent readers’ borrowing or taking them.

The above image displays one of de Bry’s engravings from Descriptiones Americae.  A Protestant who lost everything fleeing from prosecution in his native Liege in the 1560s, de Bry despised the Spanish and Catholics.  The engraving shows New World natives cannibalizing the Spanish.  One native pours molten gold into a Spanish soldier’s mouth.  The engraving isn’t a good source of factual knowledge and understanding about people and events in the New World.[*]  It’s mainly a record of an elite representational battle that became the Black Legend vs. the White Legend.

Every representation offers a double relation — a relation to that represented, and a relation to the representation’s source.

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Notes:

Image from German edition dated 1618 (Das sechste Theil Americae oder Der Historien Hieron. Benzo das dritte Buch. Darinnen erzehlet wirt, wie die Spanier die) in the U.S. Library of Congress’s Kraus Collection of Sir Francis Drake.  See America, part 6, German, image 697.

A similar, but less detailed image of Indians pouring gold down a Spaniard’s throat appeared earlier in Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del Mundo Nuovo (1565).  This was probably a source for de Bry’s engraving.

In the Seven Sages / Sindibad corpus, a story known as Virgilius tells of an avaricious Roman king getting molten gold poured down his throat as punishment for allowing Rome’s marvelous, protective mirror to be destroyed.  Here’s an English translation of Virgilius from a 13th-century French Seven Sages / Sindibad manuscript.

The Latin epic Alexandreis, which Walter of Châtillon wrote in northern France about 1175, uses the figure of pouring gold down one’s throat as a figure of avarice for the mother of monsters in Hell:

Before the gates of Erebus, beneath
the Stygian city’s wall, those monsters
dwell, the livid sisters. Their mother hides her coffers
in murky caves and guzzles with dry throat
gold poured from a thousand refining fires,
nor can it sate the ardour of her thirst.
{Ante fores Herebi Stigiae sub menibus urbis
Liuentes habitant terrarum monstra sorores,
Inter quas antris aliarum mater opacis
Abscondit loculos et coctum mille caminis
Faucibus infusum siccis ingutturat aurum,
Explerique nequit sitis insatiabilis ardor.}

Alexandreis 10.31-6, from Latin trans. Townsend, David. 2007. Walter of Châtillon. The Alexandreis: a twelfth-century epic. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press.

[*]  de Bry tended to depict natives with European facial features and give them poses and physiques similar to those in Greco-Roman art. However, many of his engravings do provide valuable historical information about life in the Americas in the sixteenth century.