Images of Animals in the Early Modern Spanish Empire

Abstract

By exploring popular illustrations, courtly paintings, bureaucratic documents like the relaciones geográficas, and the works of intellectuals like Oliva Sabuco and José de Acosta, we can still see and hear a representation of animal agency that affected women and men from the late fifteenth through to the early nineteenth centuries. In the 1970s, John Berger reminded us that ‘seeing comes before words’, but then ‘we explain that world with words’. The imagination of the early modern Spanish empire was filled by images which evoked both wonder and dread, and they were captured by brush and pen alike. Subject to human displays of dominance and acts of compassion, nonhuman animals fascinated by reminding the Spanish empire's human actors that they remained part of nature, and that we still have not mastered nature, from our bodily needs to the animals who do not always obey. Living in a sensory and sensual world, the humans who imagined the Spanish empire were also animals living in that multispecies social organism. Embodied as they were, and as we are, their experiences resonate with us today.