Seeing a group of Indian women on the shore—Vespucci tells us—the Portuguese sent ashore one of their sailors, who was famous for his handsomeness, to talk with the Indian women. They surrounded him, lavishing embraces and expressions of admiration on him, but meanwhile one of their number hid behind his back and clubbed him on the head, stunning him. The unfortunate man was dragged away, cut into pieces, roasted and devoured.
The first question Europeans asked about the inhabitants of the New World was: are they really human? Classical and medieval traditions spoke of remote areas inhabited by monsters. But the lie was soon given to such legends: Indians were not only human beings, but specimens of classical beauty. That was how the myth arose of their happy life, unburdened by property or labour, as in the Golden Age or Earthly Paradise.
After the crude engravings on wood we find the depiction of Indians in paintings. The first American we see portrayed in the history of European painting is one of the Three Magi, in a Portuguese painting of 1505, in other words barely a dozen years after Columbus’s first voyage, and even less time after the Portuguese landing in Brazil. It was still believed that the new lands were part of the Far East of Asia. It was traditional for the Three Magi in paintings of the Nativity to be represented in oriental garments and head-gear. But now that the explorers’ reports provided direct evidence of how these legendary inhabitants of ‘India’ looked, painters brought themselves up to date. The Indian Magus was portrayed as wearing a feather headdress, as certain Brazilian tribes do, and carrying in one of his hands a Tupinambá arrow. Since this was a painting for a church, this character could not be portrayed naked: he has been given a Western waistcoat and trousers.
In 1537 Pope Paul III declared: ‘The Indians are truly human . . . not only are they able to understand the Catholic faith, but they are extremely keen to receive it.’
Feather headdresses, weapons, fruits and animals from the New World started arriving in Europe. In 1517 a German engraver drawing a procession of inhabitants from Calcutta, mixes Asiatic elements (such as an elephant and its mahout, bulls draped in garlands, rams with huge tails) with details that come from the recent discoveries: a feather headdress (and actually clothes made of feathers that are totally imaginary), an Ara parrot from Brazil and also two corn cobs—maize was the cereal that was destined to play such a major role in the agriculture and diet of Northern Italy, but its American origin would be soon forgotten since the Italian word is ‘granturco’ [literally Turkish grain].
It is thanks to the work of the great cartographers of the sixteenth century that we see not only the new territories taking shape, but also the fauna, flora and customs of these peoples giving us their first true images. Working at close quarters with the explorers, the map-makers had access to information at first hand. The outlines of the Atlantic coasts were largely known when the new lands were still thought to be an appendix of Asia. Thus in a silver globe of 1530 the Gulf of Mexico is called ‘The Sea of Cathay’, and South America is ‘Cannibal Land’.
It is in a German map that the name America appears for the first time, meaning ‘Amerigo’s Land’, because it was mainly through the reports of Vespucci’s voyages that Europe had taken on board the geographical significance of the discoveries. It was only after the arrival of the Florentine merchant’s letters that Europe realized that what was opening up for the old continent was indeed a New World, of enormous dimensions and with its own characteristics.
Now suddenly in maps of the time America is detached from Asia. All that is known of North America (here called ‘Land of Cuba’) is a small strip of coastline, and it is thought to be near Japan (called ‘Zipangri’). The name ‘America’ is applied only to Southern America, also called ‘Terranova’ and inhabited, of course, by cannibals. The continent has by now acquired an autonomous outline, but it is still seen—even in its shape—mainly as an obstacle, a barrier separating us from China and India.
In maps drawn up by Mercator, the inventor of a new method of cartographic projection, the name ‘America’ is now applied to the northern part of the continent as well, and the word is placed alongside Labrador, which was then called the Land of Cod.
The ideas people had of the Indians were polarized for a long time between two opposite myths: the myth of the natural happiness of an innocent life, as in the Garden of Eden, and that of ruthless ferocity: stories of flaying and torturing. But there were signs of a growing outrage at the cruelty of the Spanish, the slaughter and pillage carried out by the Conquistadors.
It is only towards the close of the sixteenth century that we really start to see Indians face to face. And this too was thanks to a cartographer and draughtsman, the Englishman John White, who in 1585 followed the expedition led by Sir Walter Raleigh, founder of the first English colony beyond the Atlantic, Virginia. White’s seventy-six watercolours, now in the British Museum, constitute the first evidence of America drawn from life by a painter. White did not just draw the costumes and activities of the Red Indians, but also the animals of North America: the flamingos, iguanas, land-crabs, turtles, flying fish and the huge variety of aquatic fauna.
That America had a fauna and flora completely different from those of the Old World was a fact that took a long time to be recognized by Europeans. Right from his first voyage Columbus had brought back to Spain some parrots, Ara parrots, which were much bigger than African parrots. These aroused instant curiosity and were inserted by Raphael in the grotesque-style decorations in the Vatican Loggia.
But on the whole the new animals from America do not seem to have aroused much excitement. People soon began to rear turkeys in Europe, but they believed wrongly that they were of Asian origin, confusing them with guinea-fowl.
The animal that most caught the imagination was the armadillo, so much so that in allegorical representations America was portrayed as a naked woman, armed with a bow and arrows, riding on an armadillo.
The truth is that in this immense and fertile continent Europeans perhaps expected to find fauna of mastodontic proportions and were rather disappointed. America has plenty of strange animals but most of them are of modest size. That is why the makers of the Gobelin tapestries felt the need to add to their luxuriant vision of the flora and fauna of Brazil animals that have nothing to do with America. They contain the most typical zoological representatives of the New World, such as the anteater, the tapir, the toucan and the boa constrictor, but also an African elephant, an Asiatic peacock and a horse of the kind that the Europeans imported into America.
Just as slow, but with much more important consequences, was the conquest of Europe by American plants. The potato, the tomato, corn and cocoa, which were to have a key role in the agriculture and diet of the whole of the West, as well as cotton and rubber, which would dominate so much of our industrial production, and tobacco, which was to play such an important part in behavioural habits, all took a long time to be recognized as new plants. In the sixteenth century the study of nature was still based on Greek and Latin authors: it was not the new and the unusual that attracted scholars but only that which, rightly or wrongly, could be classified using the names handed down by classical texts.
In the exhibition we see a Flemish or German watercolour dated 1588 which has extraordinary historical value since it is the first known representation of a potato (which had been imported from Peru to Spain a few years previously), and a print which was the first illustration of a tobacco plant ever to be published, in 1574, in Antwerp. The small head of an Indian exhaling clouds of smoke through a strange, vertical pipe records that curious custom which no explorer had ever failed to note, and to which were attributed sometimes therapeutic and sometimes toxic properties.
A painting by Franz Jansz Post, today in the Louvre, marks the moment when Dutch landscape painting comes into contact with Brazilian nature. And here it is really an other world that opens up before our eyes, giving us a sense of vertigo: a military fort that is almost lost amid the broad, calm expanse of a river; in the foreground stands a cactus that has as many branches as a tree, a strange animal (it’s a capybara, the largest extant rodent); and all around is heat that intensifies the heaviness of the air.
Through the seventeenth-century paintings of Franz Post in Brazil we can still experience the sense of anxiety in discovery, the upheaval caused by the encounter with something undefined, something that does not fit neatly within our expectations. The first thought suggested by the exhibition in the Grand Palais is that the Old World catches the imagery of the New most forcefully when it still does not know precisely what it is dealing with, when information is scarce and incomplete, and it is difficult to separate reality from mistakes and fantasy.
In that same seventeenth century when Dutch painters discovered Brazil, America became an allegorical personage in the works of other artists: it was classified as one of the four parts of the world, and it was accorded a series of attributes like any other mythological figure.
The internal differences within America are recorded in turn in a summary categorization of the various colonies. In order to teach the young Louis XIV geography, he was made to play with geographical-allegorical maps drawn by Stefano Della Bella.
For other painters America offered, almost without mystery any more, a series of stunning views that would enhance the European tradition of landscape painting.
From the eighteenth century America becomes for Europe the embodiment of political and intellectual ideas and myths: Rousseau’s noble savage, Montesquieu’s democracy, the Romantic fascination with Red Indians, the struggle against slavery.
This allegory corresponds to Europe’s need to think of America through its own structures, to make conceptually definable the thing that was and remains the difference, perhaps one might say the hard core of America, in other words the fact that it always has something to say to Europe—from Columbus’s first arrival there to today—something that Europe does not know.
The allegorical constant is stressed by the final piece in the exhibition, a French painting from the end of the nineteenth century reminding us that the Statue of Liberty was designed and built in Paris between 1871 and 1886. In order to complete the project the restorer of Notre Dame, Viollet-Le-Duc, and the engineer Eiffel, the tower’s architect, worked alongside the sculptor Bartholdi. Just as today it stands against the backdrop of skyscrapers, so then it towered above Paris’s mansard roofs, before being dismantled and transported to New York by ship.
At this point the exhibition ends, and maybe it could not have gone any further, because in the last hundred years the terms of comparison have changed. There is no longer a Europe that can look down on America from the height of its past, its knowledge and its sensibilities: Europe now contains within itself so much of America—just as America carries within itself so much of Europe—that the interest in looking at each other, which is just as strong and never disappoints—resembles more and more what one feels when looking into a mirror: a mirror that is able to reveal something of the past or the future to us.
[1976]
The Traveller in the Map
The simplest form of geographical map is not the one that seems most natural to us today, namely the map representing the earth’s surface as though seen by an extra-terrestrial eye. The earliest need to fix places on a map was linked to travel: it was a reminder of the succession of stops, the outline of a journey. It was thus linear in form, and could only be made using a long scroll. Roman maps were rolls of parchment and we can understand how they were made thanks to a medieval copy which has come down to us, ‘Peutinger’s Table’, which contains the entire road-system of the Empire from Spain to Turkey.
The whole of the known world at that time is on it, in flattened, horizontal form, as in an anamorphosis. Since the important element is the system of land roads, the Mediterranean is reduced to a thin, horizontal, wavy strip, which separates two broader belts, namely Europe and Africa, so that Provence and North Africa are very close, as are Palestine and Anatolia. These continental strips are streaked with lines that are always horizontal, and almost parallel, which are the roads, interspersed with meandering lines, which are rivers. The spaces around are dense with written names and indications of distances; the cities are shown as clusters of little houses of various shapes.
However, these linear types of maps were not restricted to antiquity: there is an English map on a strip from 1675 showing the journey from London to Aberystwyth in Wales, which allows you also to orientate yourself through weather-vanes marked on every segment of road.
On the borderline between cartography and landscape and perspective painting is an eighteenth-century Japanese roll, over nineteen metres long, representing the whole journey from Tokyo to Kyoto. It provides a detailed landscape where you can see the road climbing over high ground, going through woods, running alongside villages, crossing rivers on little arched bridges, following the gentle ups and downs of the terrain. This is a landscape that is always pleasant to look at, devoid of human figures even though it is full of signs of actual life. (The points of departure and arrival are not marked: the image of the two cities would certainly clash with the uniform harmony of the landscape.) This Japanese roll invites us to identify with the invisible traveller, to follow that road curve after curve, climbing and descending the hills and bridges.
Following a road from beginning to end is particularly satisfying both in literature and in life, and one might ask why in the figurative arts the theme of the journey has not enjoyed similar popularity but instead appears only sporadically. (I now remember that an Italian painter, Mario Rossello, has recently completed a very long painting, also in the form of a roll, representing one kilometre of motorway.)
The need to contain within one image the dimension of time along with that of space is at the origins of cartography. Time as the history of the past: I am thinking of Aztec maps, which are always full of historical and narrative representations, but also of medieval maps such as the illuminated parchment made for the King of France by the famous Majorcan map-maker Cresques Abraham (fourteenth century). And time as the future: like the presence of obstacles one will meet on the journey, and here the weather that is forecast is linked to chronological time; this need is met by climatic maps, like the one drawn up as early as the twelfth century by the Arab geographer Al-Idrisi.
In short, a geographical map, even though it is a static object, presupposes an idea of narrative; it is conceived on the basis of a journey; it is an Odyssey. The most striking example of this is the Aztec codex of Travels [the Boturini codex]. This manuscript uses human figures and geometric outlines to tell the story of the Aztec exodus—which took place between 1100 and 1315—all the way to the promised land, which is today Mexico City.
(If the Odyssey-map exists, then there has to be an Iliad-map, and in fact all the way from ancient times maps of cit
ies suggest the idea of encirclement, of siege.)
These thoughts came to me while visiting the exhibition on Maps and Images of the Earth at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and while leafing through the accompanying catalogue.
In an essay in the catalogue François Wahl notes how the representation of the terraqueous globe begins only when the coordinates used to represent the sky are applied to the earth. The celestial parameters (the polar axis, the plane of the equator, meridians and parallels) all meet in the sphere of the earth, in other words at the centre of the universe (‘a fertile error if ever there was one’, says Wahl). Already Strabo saw geography as a way of bringing the earth closer to the heavens. The roundness of the earth and the grid of coordinates would gain prominence in that they are a projection of the layout of the cosmos on to our microcosm. As Strabo said, ‘We have been able to describe the earth only because we have projected the heavens on to it.’
The spheres of the firmament and of our terraqueous globe are put side by side in many Oriental and Western representations. Two gigantic spheres, each 12 metres in circumference—a globe of the earth and one of the sky—are the high-point of the exhibition and occupy the whole of the ‘Forum’ of the Pompidou Centre. These are the largest globes ever constructed, and were commissioned by Louis XIV from a Franciscan monk from Venice, Vincenzo Coronelli, who was cosmographer to the Serenissima (and author amongst other things of a catalogue of the islands of the Venetian lagoon, with the beautiful title Isolario). These globes had been dismantled and placed in chests in Versailles as long ago as 1915: the fact that they have been transported to Paris, restored and remounted on their monumental pedestals and sculpted baroque supports of marble and bronze is on its own enough to make this a truly memorable exhibition.
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