Construir una imagen: Visión europea del indígena americano

Abstract

This book presents a well-documented, clearly written account of the various images of the American Indian that circulated in Europe from the end of the fifteenth century through the beginning of the seventeenth century. Although the brief theoretical introduction on the nature of images and imagery does not break new ground, it does underline the constructed character of all representations and the importance of the social and cultural factors that mediate the production and perception of images.The author’s main goal is to show how the first representations of American reality do evoke, in a direct manner, the belief and memories of classical and medieval imagery. She starts by setting the study of the selected images within the sixteenth- century convergence of three communication developments: the invention of printing, the improvement of engraving and printing techniques, and the development of artificial perspective in the visual arts. All these events facilitated people’s access to both narrative and visual images and turned perspective into the model for iconic representations of modernity.Furthermore, the discovery of America through traveler’s contact with an unknown reality brought about classical and medieval traditions now retranslated in the letters, chronicles, and other stories that these travelers wrote for a European public. The author analyzes this material more thoroughly in the second and third chapters of the book. The fourth chapter exams a series of engravings of American Indians printed and published in Europe between 1493 and 1613. Both narrative and visual images drew primarily on preexisting cultural representations and much less on their producers’ direct experience of the American reality.The main themes discussed in chapters 2 and 3 range from the medieval imagery regarding the roundness of the earth to the various European myths about Paradise and the Fountain of Youth, to the fantastic mythical creatures who came to represent the “real” inhabitants of the Americas for a European audience. All the appropriate chroniclers and relevant sources are carefully discussed in this section. The author groups engravings representing Native Americans according to five themes: first contacts, dress and adornments, cannibalism, idolatry, and allegories of the American continent. The European public of the sixteenth century was able to grasp the reality of the American continent through images generated by a double mediation: the first one made by the travelers and chroniclers in their texts and the second by those artists and editors who produced them.Historians, anthropologists, and other scholars in the areas of art, literature, and cultural studies have given extensive coverage to the topics addressed in this book. The merit of Construir una imagen is its well-documented scope in terms of the amount of authors and images covered. In that sense, it is a good introduction for the general public to this fascinating topic.