Slide Sets

In 1558 Pierre Boaistuau – chronicler, translator, writer in the French court, and collaborator with the cosmographer François de Belleforest – published a book of wonders under the title of L'théatre du monde. About 70 editions circulated in France over the next sixty years. A mass of lurid marvels, a mix of observation, lore and monstrosity, the book signals how cartography and literature tend to converge in the second half of the sixteenth century. New information is received from the four corners of the globe, but the contemporary public is at odds about how to receive, classify, represent, and assimilate it. The "Theater" of the world, known to the tradition of the atlas, was coextensive with compendious narrative literature. Knowledges were being reorganized, mapped, charted, and coded in ways that the medieval "mirror" or reflection of the God-given world, the speculum mundi, could no longer handle. New accounts of individual experience had to be registered as "singularities." By the time Shakespeare compared the world to a stage, the figure of the cosmic theater had long been familiar both to graphic artists and poets.

The change in cultural focus that came with the sheer mass of new materials brought new fears over the world's order in time. One topic in literature evincing these dilemmas includes the "world in decline." It became a pictural allegory of universal travail, representing God's order to let the European hemisphere die and the New World grow. In the second of his Essays on the New World ("Of Coaches"), Montaigne coined it thus: "The universe will topple into paralysis; one member will be shrivelled, the other in full growth." The convention was fraught with fears of apocalypse. Hence, with the expansion of the world's borders, the established elements of what European culture could not bear to see, that is, the bases of its religious practice, were projected upon the population of the New World. They were refashioned to reflect and give perspective to the turmoils of the Reformation at home. Figures from the New were brought "back" to the Old, perhaps to kindle fear and desire about the cause and purpose of man on the horizon of History. Much of the material was manifest in what might be called a "theatre of cruelty," a convention that comes with the French civil wars, the impact of Spain's "Black Legend," and the aftermath of the Inquisition. It designs images constructed from accounts of the New World; depictions of alterity, or what is unnameably "other," on early modern maps; the figuration of "prodigies" and "monsters" in the disciplines of teratology, surgery, and medicine; finally, representations of violence that are fundamental to the origins, continuity and iconography of Christian religion. The materials pervade literature, pictures, and almost all memorabilia of the second half of the sixteenth century.

In The Body in Pain, a book that summarizes many of the relations that hold among the fine arts and social theory, Elaine Scarry has underscored how much the practice of religion emerges from torture and cruelty. Torture, she notes, can only operate in a theatrical mode, where a complicity extends between its actors (the torturers and their victims) and spectators (those who read and see the works, whether, it can be added, in 1590 or 1990). Her study is emblematic of the theatre of cruelty of early modern times.

In this slide set the themes of cruelty and discovery are taken up in their mix of history, propaganda, aesthetics, and ethnography. Representative scenes of mutilation, bodily scatter, penetration and anthropophagia delineate the limits of what can be known and seen and what cannot. The images at once repel and attract while keeping deep cultural moorings in Judeo-Christian culture. They also threshold exploration of new and different information and experience about the world and the body. Theaters of cruelty take up anatomy, style, dress, alimentation, and division of labor, that is, what ethnographers have called "total social facts" that cultures use to assign themselves their own spatial and mental limits.

It appears that the relation of cruelty to ideology (roughly, the imaginary relation that a society holds with the ways it orders life) has a clear historical parabola. The early impressions of anthropophagia and dismemberment take form in decorative areas of maps of the New World. In his 1540 edition of Ptolemy's Geographica (see slide 3 of John T. Day's "The New World in Maps," Newberry Slide Set 9), South America is adorned with a picture of human members hanging from a thicket of branches and thorns. Guillaume Le Testu's Terre du Brésil (1556) illustrates a man amputating the left and right legs of a prisoner on a table. Such images appear destined to entice and repel. As exotica, they spur a desire to "see and travel" (voir et visiter), to go beyond one's confines with the thrill of danger. By the time André Thevet publishes his Singularitez de la France antarctique (1557), the iconography of nude forms, hermaphrodites, and strange bodily congress had been current in the work of Italian artists residing at Fontainebleau. Their twisted perspective, no doubt inspired by anamorphosis, a product of mapping that cartographers had known, turns the body into movement and torsion. The influence of the Fontainebleau style makes the woodcuts of Thevet's work retain currency in his great compendium of cartography, history, and memorabilia, the Cosmographie universelle (1575).

The impact of the Wars of Religion that officially began in 1562 quickly turned experiment and curiosity about the representation, habits, and practices of the other into self-serving allegories. Protestants and Catholics alike took up materials that had depicted the social function of war and anthropophagia in order to impugn their adversaries. For his America, or "Grand Voyages," Theodore de Bry (1528-98), an accomplished engraver and a Protestant from Liège, who took exile in Strasbourg (a Huguenot center of the book trade) and then Frankfurt, acquired travel accounts and pictures from the New World. He used those of French Protestant origin – such as Jacques Ribault's and René de Laudonnière's Histoire notable de la Floride (1565), Urbain Chauveton's Histoire du nouveau monde (1579, a translation of Benzoni's Historia del mondo nuovo), and Jean de Léry's counterpart to André Thevet's relation of the Villegagnon episode in Brazil in the Singularitez…, the Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578) – for his cause.

These accounts provided a rich empirical base for a detailed, extensive representation of other practices into which he folded an allegorical view of human life and salvation. De Bry no doubt capitalized on Thevet's images no less than he did on de Léry's less elaborate woodcuts. The result is one of a hardened but richer elaboration of earlier figures that convey a biased encyclopedic vision of the New World. The engraver's talents took firm hold in the European imagination when they read Bartolomé de Las Casas' Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552, later translated into French in 1579) to depict atrocity in emblematic form. The information was filtered through depictions by popular engravers, such as Richard Verstegen, to capitalize on excess and cruelty. By 1598 de Bry effectively-or unwittingly-shows that the sale of icons of horror, like flesh or slaves, has become quite a commodity. Thus depiction of alterity and archaic symbolic practices turns into violence illustrated for the sake of economic and religious gain.

Perhaps the ultimate act in the tragedy of cruelty takes place two centuries later, when Goya, etching the Disasters of War, ostensively arches back to de Bry and retracts from their memory fragments of images in his black view of the Napoleonic conquest. Goya succeeds in voiding violence of its past ideological aura. He makes it so ineffable that the illustrations put to an end all allure of cruelty. Whatever comes after Goya's rendition of cruelty – and there have been many in our time – only reiterates what had been done in the first encounters with the New World. Hence, in the distance we take from the "theater of cruelty" in early modern time, we gain a diacritical view that calls into question all contemporary images of violence.

This image of the ways "the savages roast their enemies" appears first in Thevet's Singularitez and is later reprinted in his Cosmographie universelle of 1575. Its origins are unknown. Paul Gaffarel surmises that Jean Cousin, a noted French exponent of the Mannerist style, illustrator of Gilles Corrozet's popular book of emblems, the Hécatomgraphie (1544), and keen theorist of Euclidean perspective (in Le Livre de perspective, 1560) first conceived and executed it. It bears traits common to engravers and draftsmen who had been working at Fontainebleau since the 1530s. The artist has designed a picture with both a central and dispersed focus. Figures are amassed around a central object, the boucan, a wooden grill on which the natives were reported to roast their meat. To the left, babies play with a decapitated head to anoint themselves with blood and roll the object as if it were a toy. A woman unwinds an intestine from the belly of a decapitated enemy in the style of a spinner in Ariadne's sweatshop; one Indian resembles a woodcutter (see a similar depiction in slide 5 of Gayle Brunelle's "France and Brazil in the First Century of Contact: The Lure of Brazilwood," Newberry Slide Set 11) as he wields his axe above a torso cut in pieces. The icon of cutting also bears resemblance to Jean Malouel's depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Denis of the fourteenth century. Others tend to roasting an arm on the grill over a fire that, below, a native kindles with his breath (in a pose that cannot fail to recall the convention of expectoration that other Mannerists depicted in representations of the Seven Deadly sins or, in the Singularitez, of the Indian women spitting in order to ferment their caouin, f. 46 v.). The smiling face of an enemy trophy is perched on a lance thrusting from a window. One native, standing in perfect contrapposto, hands a leg to a friend over the obstacle of a tree. Since the woman's head in the foreground blocks the lower torso of the Indian gathering the leg that is passed to him, he is clearing acquiring what his body lacks. And the double contrapposto of the detached right leg and left member of the native to the left of the tree forms a chiasm, or a nascent X that cues the presence of subliminal letters elsewhere in the image: the axe-swinging Indian forms a whorl of an elongated S, rhyming with the pose of the native just behind him; the intestines and body of the supine corpse in the foreground seen in conjunction with the front leg of the grill, yield an L; superimposed, the two babies evoke a sort of Siamese M; the relation of the Indian directly behind the boucan over the detached arm suggests a T. Letters and humans are so animated that a profusion of forms seems to grow from the visual relation of bodies and their parts. Even the tree seems to have a human physiognomy in the overall montage of shapes.

It has been argued that the artist varies freely on ethnographic evidence (such as the shape of the boucan, the ossature of the bodies, and the native coiffure that the Protestant de Léry likened to tonsured monks.) Contrary to de Bry, who will take up the same scenes, no European is present in the frame to relay the view of the conqueror or European as voyeur. All misrepresentation excepted, the scene possesses a narrative verve in the sinuous junctures of bodies. Paradoxically, the mannered style that alters its field of representation tends to allow the viewer to gain a visual, intellectual and ethnographic freedom through an implied play with information. Through a distorting lens the picture offers a view to be studied as universal variation on the body and world.

The surrounding text explains that collective consumption of the flesh will strengthen and give identity to the members of the group, thus "à chacun son morceau," or "to each his own piece." Thevet uses the image to confirm the barbarity of what he reports. The figures lend a veracious – also obviously false – look to his discourse that insists on the "ocular" or primary evidence of his construction. Thus the relation of text and image purports truth, but the style of the depiction is clearly ironic. In 1577 the Indians are seen free of the ways that de Bry and later copyists will use to allegorize the scene of cannibalism. Close view shows how the boucan is a perspectival object that allows the eye to glide into the picture anamorphically, as in Holbein's famous "Ambassadors," and also to imply that the scene treats of visual perspective no less than of anthropophagia (as in the detail of the gridded snowshoes of the lower left corner of slide 1 of Roger Schlesinger's "Sixteenth Century Images of North America: The Woodcuts of André Thevet," Newberry Slide Set 7). The picture may entail butchery, but more important, it deals with the cutting and tracing of a perspective of oddities and singularities.

On cursory view this depiction of Indians at war, reprinted from the Singularitez of 1557, is typical of Thevet's style and sustained authority in the French court. Thevet (1504-92), whose longevity impressed his century's peers, had been named the "Royal Cosmographer" for Charles IX and Henry III. In the Cosmographie he altered some of his earlier writing for the glory of his encyclopedic magnum opus. Here two compressed groups oppose and attack each other from opposite sides of the frame, while an act of violence takes place ceremoniously in the center. The relation of highly articulated areas to gaps of white is balanced. Reverse curves of an hourglass – an evanescent figure of Time, Saturn, and the allegory of the New and Old Worlds – seem to emerge along the two white edges that run from the lower to the upper corner on each side of the picture. The shape is emphasized by the alluvial flame at the top of the image. The bodily figures follow the curvilinear style of Fontainebleau. An archer to the left, in the middle ground, swings his torso in the line of an S as he readies to release his arrow. His pose is reversed by a left-handed archer in the background, while on the right, in the foreground, an Indian extends his arms and leans his twisted body forward, following a course established by the outline of the conch-like horn a kneeling Indian trumpets in the middle ground. Plasticity and variation of human size make the image flow through its great depth of field.

Described as "The Countenance of Savages before Coming to Battle," the woodcut appears to reverberate Thevet's transcription and translation of the warriors' shouts: "We are (they say in their patois) valiant, and have eaten your kin: now we'll eat you and take your women and children, we'll reduce you to misery, as our Caraibes have prophesied, who are better men than you…retreat, retreat: otherwise you're dead!" The picture adds violence to the narrative exchanged threats. One native heroically wield his club over a fallen enemy, holding a broken lance in his right hand, whom the victor thrusts down with his right leg. The victim's head, one of several vanishing points in the image, seems to be detached from the body (in accord with the style of Fontainebleau, such as the floating head in Primaticcio's "Ulysses Contemplating Penelope" and other works of similar optical play). The victim's head is twisted inhumanly, to the degree that it seems to be an anamorphic death's head (as in Holbein's woodcuts of 1538, the Simulachres de la mort for which Gilles Corrozet wrote quatrains). The conventional coiffure of the natives serves the purpose of illusion. A grisly, monstrously wizened stump looks across and down at the spectacle of murder while, to the left, beneath a genuflecting nude female, a fallen shield resembles an elliptical view of a world map. The oneric quality of the woodcut is everywhere: a strange fish reptates below the nude, while a miniscule soldier in the background presses lightly with his finger the belly of a dead comrade, and all the while the picture collects textual details adumbrating how the Indians fight in the nude; how the roofs of their houses are thatched with palm fronds and take fire; how the men fight with massive clubs bearing thick ends. Although the text reports that the space separating the initial contact of the Indians is "the distance of a harquebus shot," the impression of flowing forms tells more about the art of a style of spontaneous creation, that Montaigne, an accomplished reader of Thevet, sees emerging like music, when air, pushed and "constrained in the narrow channel of a horn, comes out clearer and stronger" and strikes with a lively blow (Essays, I, xxvi). The picture celebrates the birth and triumph of its style over violence.

In the rhymed prologue to this book of emblematic propaganda, the author (signed I.B.S.) states that viewers must "harden their hearts" before looking at the 29 images of cruelties that Protestants have enacted upon the Catholic population of Europe. The book aims at correcting violence through images of violence. It uses a dialectical process that claims loathsome images must be administered to a public for the sake of promoting avoidance of what they show. This mode of reasoning is, we know, no less specious today than in the time of the Wars of Religion (1562-98): the duplicity of the program is betrayed by the fact that the book summarizes most available and conceivable means of torture the West has known. Under a pious mantle the illustrated book has another, systematic purpose and taxonomy. A practice illustrating various kinds of torture, the book shares affinities with treatises of surgery (such as that of Ambroise Paré) as well as Alciati's Emblemata, common on the European horizon since the early 1530s. The latter were used to impart strong moral behavior upon their users by combining superscriptions, pictures (inscriptions), and legends (explications in subscription) in carefully arranged order. Some were highly literary and of platonic appeal (such as the emblems in Maurice Scève's Délie of 1544), while others, such as Gilles Corrozet and Jean Cousin's Hécatomgraphie of the same year, digested iconography, current illustrative style, grotesques, and rhymed proverbs. Verstegen follows Alciati's didactic method by placing the title, Horribles cruautez des Huguenots en France, over every image in the chapter reserved for "French" atrocities. A space is reserved for a lithograph below and, below that, six lines of alexandrines. As in contemporary broadsheets (such as Tortorel and Parrissin's Grandes scènes historiques du XVI siècle), alphabetic letters adjacent to detailed scenes refer to textual glosses on the page opposite. A simultaneous view of a variety of cruelties is afforded neatly and efficiently.

The montage moves counterclockwise, beginning (a) with two soldiers winding a victim's viscera around a stick; (b) three others burying a living priest; (c) two men, as the gloss explains, "cutting little Catholic babies into pieces;" (d) three others opening an old priest's belly, after having cut away his "shameful parts," roasting them on the adjacent grill, and forcing him to eat them. They are shown opening up the belly to see "how he was digesting them" prior "to have him thus end his days." The circular or "rotative" pattern of the visual narrative, that turns about the image, is common to the comic-strip of horrors elsewhere in the book. Its effects promote shock, terror and, above all, ambivalence. The grill bears reminiscence of the literature of the New World, as does the obsessive desire to display the human anatomy of the "other" in one's own realm. Preparation of the entrails for cooking in clay pots, a practice reserved for women as seen in literature of the New World, folds into a tradition of torture reminiscent of the travails of Catholic saints of times past.

Somewhat unlike the woodcuts in Thevet's work, where the pictures are not so systematically connected with the narratives, a concerted effort is made to act on the spectator's memory. The superscription sells the image – as in contemporary billboard and televised advertising – by "freezing" it into an allegory. (Protestant could use the same engravings for their cause by putting "Catholic" in the place of "Protestant.") The heading is combined with the easily-memorized alexandrines to imprint – or literally engrave – the image of cruelty on the viewer's senses and soul. The lines appeal first to the imagination and then, through the textual explanation, to reason. Visual and textual systems are self-enclosing and self-legitimizing. Using the alibi of a "moral" stance in relation to its topic, the emblem is an effective example of the action of ideology. The figure tells the viewer precisely why, in "Of Cannibals" (1580), Montaigne notes how Europeans, who condemn barbarity in the New World, are blind to their own. "I think there is more barbarity in eating a living than a dead man…in torturing the body of a man still full of feeling…(as we have not only read, but seen within fresh memory, and between old enemies, but between neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, under the cloak of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead" [quoted by Marvin Lunenfeld, 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter (The Newberry Library, 1989): 43].

Several operations are at work in Theodore de Bry's reproduction of a painting or drawing – now lost – that Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues executed during or after René de Laudonnière's attempt to settle in Florida. Born in 1533, Le Moyne accompanied the Huguenot expedition for the purpose of recording information in visual form. The Protestants attempted to colonize in 1562 at Charlefort, at Port Royal, and then at Fort Caroline at the May River. Charlefort was abandoned, while the Spanish seized the colony from Laudonnière. Le Moyne escaped the massacre by slipping away to England, where he settled in 1572. He left maps and drawings at the disposition of Sir Walter Raliegh. The artist's widow, it is said, soon sold his manuscripts to de Bry. Hakluyt had published an English translation of Ribaut and Laudonnière's history (L'histoire notable de la Floride) in 1586, to which the Protestant Urbain Chauveton, in his Histoire du nouveau monde (1579), appended his account of the French venture in his adaptation of Girolamo Benzoni's relation of the New World. De Bry's image filters through this mixed history.

Turning about the axis, marked by a torso lacking its arms and legs and with an arrow plunged in its rectum, three scenes take place both simultaneously and progressively. First, three Indians have scalped a dead enemy; one cuts through the muscles of the left arm to reach the humerus; a second wields a club in order to crack the femur below; a third introduces an arrow into the victim's anus. To the right, four Indians work around a fire. They prepare a scalp and a leg to be erected as signs of victory that they will brandish on their lances. One dries the skin by holding the scalp over the flame; another readies to do the same with a scalp and a leg; a triumphal, classically depicted Indian displays the trophy of hair and skin in his left hand and holds a leg tied to the lance. Six Indians recede in a montage over the horizon in the background.

The picture functions as the inscriptive part of an emblem in a narrative serial that begins with maps and leads to scenes of war and everyday life. The superscription reads Outlinae milites ut caesis hostibus utantur, or "How Outina's men treated the slain of the enemy." In subscription is the ample description that supplements the image and, through the mediation of the sight of the picture and its textual legend, an impression of truth is fashioned. The format pertains to a didactic tradition based on Alciati's division of text and image. A detail is not glossed in the subscription: rather, the torso is the center toward which, like a vanishing point, the perspective converges. It appears to be the cause and effect or axis and circumference of the space depicting ritual dismemberment and scalping. The position of the body, recalling that of the sick Indian on his belly in plate XX, conflates the cause and effect of the practice of war. The representation alludes to classical antiquity (for example, Herodotus' representation of Scythian warfare, in Book IV of the History, where Captains make a show of the heads and scalps of their enemies). Thus the Indians are both far less and more "barbaric" than the engraving first appears: they are engaged in a practice known since the beginnings of history, but they are also aligned with the unknown, the "other," or the ferocious Scythians. At the same time the narration tells of the French collaboration with Outina (beginning with Plate XI, "Ceremonies Performed by Saturioua before Going on an Expedition against the Enemy") that takes up four emblems and then shifts its focus to description of Indian life in peacetime.

The engraving yields both fable and fact. On the one hand, it ends an account of the French collaboration with Holato Outina, literally the "head of heads," at the same time, on the other, the details confuse archaic practice with the lurid attraction of images of torture and dismemberment. The text assuages the violence of the image in its will to convey elements of military practice. In this sense they plate is a turning point – a literal "trophy" – that marks a passage from war to peace. One violent sequence ends and a new, peaceful representation begins. Le Moyne's legend cannot report why the Indians violate the corpses as they do, adding that the inhuman act of penetrating the dead enemy cannot be done without an escort of soldiers nearby. Implied is that the spectator becomes a harbinger of the enemy. Juxtaposition of cultural activity on the right (pursued in plates XX-XXV) and torture on the left betrays an ambiguity common to images of violence. The overall aura reflects de Bry's and Le Moyne's Protestant ideology that offers a temperate view of the Indians to offset what it implies to be Catholic and Spanish dogma. In the legend to plate XXVIII, "Preparation for a Feast," the text reports that Le Moyne "saw a man 350 years old," evidence that puts to shame Christians, "who are so immoderate in indulgence in both eating and drinking" and, in order to be taught sobriety, who "richly deserve to be put under the authority of these savages and of brute beasts." Text and image produce a double bind.

Illustrated here is information taken from chapter nine of Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, autrement dite Amérique (La Rochelle: Chuppin, 1578 and Paris: Chuppin, 1580). As in the woodcut illustrating the boucan and the preparation of human bodily parts in Thevet's Singularitez, natives strut around a grill as they cook and savor their barbeque. Because no similar woodcut is found in de Léry's Protestant version of the French experience of Villegaignon in the 1550s – perhaps because of the Huguenot's restraint about the iconic power of the image – de Bry may have consulted the Catholic cosmographer's illustration in order to lend force to his new version. Twelve figures turn about the boucan and are seen from an elevated viewpoint almost identical to the perspective in Thevet's original. De Bry emphasizes the voracious orality of the practice of anthropophagia. Eight figures put human parts in their mouths; a sober backdrop of thatched huts makes the scene resemble the space of Renaissance or Elizabethan theater. More creatural detail – ten members or racks of ribs are grilled, their juices dripping into the fire that a kneeling native whisks with a fan (and not, as in Thevet, with his breath). Apparent ethnographic detail – men to the right and women to the left, the men feathered (one wears a plumed belt), as described in other chapters of de Léry's account – is included.

The style is rectilinear. The movement of Thevet's mannered style is calmed, a far more classical view of the native (as in the pose of the young woman's feet and bent knee in the left) prevailing. A somewhat desperate and lurid facial expression is emphasized, and in a manner that invites comparison with Charles Le Brun's portraits of the Cartesian passions that will soon dominate seventeenth century iconography. Although it follows the conventional depiction of the Indians' receding hairlines, the physiognomy is closer to the images in de Léry's woodcuts in the 1578 and 1580 editions of his Voyage that convey the natives in sober, static, heroic, and allegorical pose.

De Bry's image takes up de Léry's description that mixes accounts of alimentation with cannibalism. De Léry underscores how the boucans in every village serve to cook venison and fish. But also: "you will find them covered with as many thighs, arms, legs, and fat pieces of human flesh of prisoners of war that they kill and ordinarily eat;" they do not keep these structures "when they wish to boil their meats" (1580: f. 136v). De Bry's attention to detail is noteworthy in the way he juxtaposes roasting, here, to boiling, that women oversee (in the preceding engraving, p. 174, whose anthropology is taken up in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners, Part 7, ch. 2). De Bry summarizes a wealth of information that he gathers from disparate sections of de Léry's account. He tells how old women (218-19) exhort men to bring meat as they lick their fingers, crying Yguatou: the three women to the left confirm the description by virtue of their pendant breasts that contrast the maiden who is assigned to eat the tricep of an arm. The observation is not, however, entirely taken from Brazil. Collective delectation of human flesh, "like some piece of veal or mutton" sold at a market and eaten, is taken up in Boaistuau's Théatre du monde (180-82) that may have been cribbed. In fact, in the same context de Léry takes Thevet, the author of "universal maps," to task for having shown men butchering flesh with metal instruments (as in slide 1 above). Clearly de Bry is "correcting" the model he uses by eliminating what has been assumed to be a "false" representation of reality and replacing it with a more veracious account, whose final effect (a) calms the style and play of the paragon and (b) uses an allure of veracity to pass a far more deeply invested allegory into the image. There is thus less truth where there seems to be more: a highly ambiguous representation provides a grounding for a double view of the Indian as the object of a conqueror's weapon, his omniscient look and weaponry, and as the motive of a religious interpretation of universal – or Protestant – history.

In this slide, the second of two illustrations of Spanish depravities in central America ("De Regno et Provincia Guatimala"), blends of ethnographic report, depiction of wanton horror, and unconscious representation of the economy of image-making are mixed. The Protestant de Bry could only take allegiance with Las Casas' account that impugned the worst Iberian colonial practices. His book had seen many editions since its initial publication, in Seville in 1552 under the title of La Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, and notably in France four versions were circulating before the close of the sixteenth century.

De Bry puts Las Casas' prose into a compartmentalized or prismatic type of montage-image, in which the elements of several narratives unfold at the same time in different areas within the frame. Like Verstegan's and de Bry's "rotative" articulations, to the lower right an infant is roasted on the familiar boucan that formerly had been seen assuring the symbolic efficacy of the ritual of cannibalism. Now it functions, as a reminder of the Spanish Inquisition, merely for the sake of murder. An Indian, clasping a knife between his teeth as if he were a native buccaneer, dissects the headless torso of a fellow victim reposing on a table. The scene is viewed under the inspection of a Spaniard (and by extension, ourselves) in the costume of a conquistador. He is apposed to an Indian eating the index finger of a hand he holds over his head: thus the former practice, seen as a "manner" in Thevet, is now turned against itself to induce shock. Four scenes of torture fill out the background around a central market stand: counterclockwise, the spectator first sees four Indians forced to bear a culverin while being flogged; then, two Spaniards lead a mass of natives, all future slaves, to a skiff readying to transport them to a ship at anchor in the bay to the right; to the upper left, two conquerors assail a native who has fallen – like the scene of a Christ bearing the cross to Calvary – while, just below, another native carrying a heavy load is beaten by a Spaniard behind him. In the foreground to the left, an Indian wilts under an anchor he bears on his left shoulder as a conqueror appears to draw him forward by the ear he pulls with his left hand.

In the center, where the boucan would have stood, a butcher's stand of European aspect puts human parts on sale. Members hang from hooks in the shadow while roasts and legs are piled on the counter. A native woman trades a necklace for a piece of flesh. Behind her another woman, in shadow, eats flesh. The Indians must swap their precious objects for what had been their right and symbolic privilege. Ritual practice that sanctifies the ingestion of flesh is now heralded as market-consumerism. Seen apart from its effect of shock, the engraving shows how the first world appropriates the social practices of the natives by commodifying them for the gain of goods at the cost of themselves and their own social systems.

In the Grands Voyages stories were told through the sum of juxtaposed details in and through different eicones or images. Now there is only a simultaneity of random violence set in circular format. In a very revealing way the figure of the booth and its butchers implies that, like flesh itself, de Bry's images and Las Casas' text are also a pound of meat sold to readers desirous of seeing excess. Frank Lestringant suggests that the same engraving depicts the collapse of meaningful religious practices that are not distant from Catholic liturgy. Nefarious elements of the other or enemy are eaten and, in being digested, assimilated and neutralized. The cycle assures the continuity of a group's common space and time. Here, however, the marketplace inverts elements that had assured and maintained social order. The image combines a number of details taken from the account that tell of the Spaniards subjugating the Indians and refusing to give them food, in order thus to force them to eat each other. "Thus an ordinary butchery of human flesh was placed in the camp, where in their presence children were roasted and killed."

Beyond the allegory that interprets the strategies of colonial violence, de Bry's depiction offers uncanny elements, seen in advertising today, used to induce unconscious impressions of fear. First, the anchor which the native bears in the foreground, in a scene miming a sacred religious moment in the life of Christ, arches its hook down over the native's genitalia. The sharp iron point, an analogue of the engraver's stylus, is confused with the penal region. Eros, religion, and violence are combined in the ambiguous detail that is aimed at confusing the viewer. Second, the staff, to the left of the anchor, that a Spaniard holds in his right arm, points up to the same scene duplicated in the background. Its thrust indicates that any number of tortures can be counted all the while its line splits the head of a native who bears a charge in the medium background. So pervasive is the violence that even the number of the engraving (seen as 50 in the lower left corner) appears to be a mark branded on the landscape. The image-maker, like the viewer, scarifies in the very act of representing cruelty.

The narration includes 18 engravings. The first three are signed by Jodo[cus] de Wigne, whose work, like that elsewhere of Le Moyne, White, and Bruegel, de Bry follows. Newberry holdings of the text include a German edition with a text abbreviated to make an emblem-book (Frankfurt, 1599), and an Oppenheim reprint of the 1598 edition, dated 1614. Las Casas' account was widely translated and circulated. Jacques de Miggrode's French translation appeared in Anvers in 1579 and in two Parisian editions in 1582. At that moment during the civil wars, the book was ready to be illustrated. De Bry took full advantage of the possibility and appears to have exceeded his best intentions.

1. André Thevet, Les singularitez de la France antarctique, autrement nommée Amerique: et de plusieurs terres & isles descouvertes en notre temps. Paris: chez les heritiers de Maurice de la Porte, au Clos Bruneau, à l'enseigne S. Claude, 1557. [f. 77 r]
2. André Thevet, La cosmographie universelle, illustrez de diverses figures des choses plus remarquables veuës par l'Auteur, et incogneuës de noz Anciens et Modernes. 2 v. A Paris: Chez Pierre l'Huilier, rue sainct Iaques, à l'Olivier, 1575. [v. 2, f. 943, v.]
3. Richard Verstegen, Theatre des cruautez des Hereticques de nostre temps. Anvers: Chez Adrien Hubert, 1588. [p. 53.]
4. Theodore de Bry, Brevis Narratio eorum quae in Florida, Americae Provincia Gallis acciderunt, secunda in ilam Navigatione, duce Renato de Laudonniere classis Praefecto. Quae est secunda pars americae. Frankfurt, 1591. [plate XV.]
5. Theodore de Bry, Americae Tertia Pars Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae Historiam contines (…) Addita est Narratio profectionis Ioannis Lerij in eamdem Provinciam, quañ ille initio gallicè conscripsit, postea verò Latinam fecit. His accessit Descriptio Morum & Ferocitatis incolarum illius Regionis, atque Colloquium ipsorum idiomate conscriptum. Frankfurt, 1592. [Ch. IX, p. 179.]
6. Theodore de Bry, illustration accompanying Bartolomé de Las Casas, Narratio Regionum indicarum per Hispanos Quosdam devastatarum verissima. Frankfurt, 1598. [p. 50, ill. 50.]

Bucher, Bernadette. Image and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of de Bry's Grands Voyages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

History of de Bry's work and keen structural analysis of ideology of domination. Studies theme of the "woman with sagging breasts" through optic of Lévi-Strauss to locate ambivalence in de Bry's depictions. Contains further bibliography.

Chiapelli, Fredi, ed. The First Images of America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Invaluable book of sources in English. Ample bibliography.

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series), 1973.

Comments upon the tradition of the emblem; rhetoric; topics such as the world inverted, the allegorical landscape, and the book as symbol. A wealth of background for studies of art and literature.

Dubois, Claude-Gilbert. Le maniérisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979.

Crucial reviews of categories in art, history, and philosophy; backgrounds Thevet's illustrations and documents history of distortion in art and social form. Complements the works of Arnold Hauser and Erwin Panofsky.

Duchet, Michéle, ed. L'Amérique de Théodore de Bry. Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherché scientifique, 1987.

Includes four studies (by Duchet, Daniel Defert, Frank Lestringant, and Jacques Forge) of de Bry's sources and transformations. Most complete and telling modern study of the Grands Voyages. Good bibliography.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Origin of Table Manners. Tr. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper, 1978.

The third volume of the Mythologies, the study uses logical oppositions to explore the infinite braids of Amerindian myth. Bucher (supra) uses the method that, itself, also theorizes anthropophagia and cooking in the last section. A crucial study devolving from Tristes Tropiques (1955), still the most contemporary and profound study of the question of European encounters with the Americas.

Parent, Alain and André Marchand, eds. La Renaissance et le nouveau monde. Québec: Bibliothèque nationale, 1984.

Great illustrated compendium of European artifacts and art pertaining to the Age of Discovery. Sections on French Florida and the Théâtre de cruauté recoup conclusions in discussions above. Exhaustive bibliography.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Monumental study of cruelty, torture, and reconstruction; shows how violence has theatrical underpinnings but is invested in invisibility; explores relations of violence, religion, and social forms.

Zerner, Henri. The Drawings of Fontainebleau. New York: Abrams, 1971.

Outstanding collection of artists – Fantuzzi, Primaticcio, Rosso, and others – whose studies of the body and perspective foreground the depiction of the native, of the space of the New World, of physical torsion, and anatomy. Crucial for comparisons of Thevet and de Bry.