Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World [1 ed.] 9781861897480, 9781861894373

Citation preview

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

Images of exotic animals and plants in the early modern world PETER MASON

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

before disenchantment

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment Images of exotic animals and plants in the early modern world

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

peter mason

reaktion books

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

for Sandra Solivetti, in memory of David McKnight, who showed the way

Published by reaktion books ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2009 Copyright © Peter Mason 2009

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press Group, Trowbridge, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Mason, Peter, 1952– Before disenchantment : images of exotic animals and plants in the early modern world 1. Exotic animals 2. Animals in art – History 3. Exotic plants 4. Plants in art – History 5. Natural history illustration – History I. Title 508’.0903’022 isbn: 978 1 86189 437 3

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Contents

Foreword 7 Introduction 11 1 Marvels of the Canaries 37 2 Birds that Grow on Trees 61 3 Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races 87 4 Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem of Charles de l’Écluse 124 5 Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

dei Lincei, Rome 149 6 The Camel-sheep 173 7 The Sloth Proceeds 197 Epilogue 221 references 223 acknowledgements 265 photo acknowledgements 266 index 267

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Foreword

In certain ways, Before Disenchantment represents a continuation of the project that resulted in the publication The Lives of Images (London, 2001).That work set out to document the vicissitudes of representations of non-European peoples, particularly from the Americas, over space and time, showing how they could find their way into strange and unexpected contexts, irrespective of the intentions of their makers. In the course of that inquiry, it proved necessary to delve into many works that were considered, or proclaimed themselves to be, works of natural history, even though the subject at issue was that of human beings rather than the natural world. Several of the images considered in Before Disenchantment are connected with or derived from similar works of natural history, but this time the focus is on representations of exotic animals and plants, with an emphasis on the former, although it will be seen that the human dimension is by no means lacking. In fact, given the doubts about the very existence of many of the plants and animals discussed here, it is primarily to the imaginative capacity of the human brain rather than to acute observation of the natural world that our attention will be drawn. The geographical area to which the plants or animals are endemic extends from the Canary Islands to the Pacific coast of South America. The chronological focus is on the early modern period, with a rough breakdown into three sub-periods: from about 1500 to the late sixteenth century (Part One); the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries (Part Two); and the mid-seventeenth century (Part Three). After an introductory chapter which stresses above all the importance of going beyond the printed page when considering the 7

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

representation of animals and plants, the parameters of approaches to the natural world in early modern Europe are established in Part One. In particular, how did scholars and artists deal with anomalous cases that seemed to defy straightforward classification as either plants or animals? What if a tree produced birds, or if dragons and trees became inextricably intertwined? And how to describe a multiple hybrid that partook of the human, the zoological, the botanical and the inorganic realms? Part Two examines European responses to first-hand experiences or reports on the fauna and flora of exotic regions, particularly the Americas. The twin scrutiny of how the famous botanist Charles de l’Écluse and the distinguished circle of inquiring minds gathered in the Accademia dei Lincei attempted to digest the latest information that reached them from the New World brings out some surprising parallels between two endeavours that have not usually been considered together in the literature. Finally, no history of perceptions would be complete without its counterpart, the history of misperceptions. The detailed analysis of improbable images of hump-backed or four-clawed South American camelids or of surprisingly robust South American sloths that were made in connection with the Dutch expeditions to Brazil and Chile in the seventeenth century yields a variegated panorama of images verging on the fantastic produced by both amateur and professional artists who had nevertheless ‘been there’. Where possible I have gone back to unpublished sources or the earliest editions of printed sources in the original language.The spelling of proper names has not been standardized, in accordance with sixteenth-century usage. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. Bibliographical references to secondary material have been limited as far as possible to the literature that I have found most useful and reliable, rather than seeking to be exhaustive. For instance, irrespective of their merits, there is no reference at all to recent publications on the science of describing, the naming of plants, the nature of the scientific revolution and so on, because none of those subjects is directly relevant to the topic of this book. Chapter One incorporates some material from ‘A Dragon Tree in the Garden of Eden: A Case Study of the Mobility of Objects and their Images in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of the History of Collections (2006). Chapter Two is a revised version of an article, originally cowritten with Florike Egmond, published as ‘Report on a Wild Goose 8

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Foreword

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Chase’ in the same journal in 1995. Chapter Three is an almost unrecognizably revised version of ‘Half a Cow’, Semiotica (1991). Chapter Four is a revised version of ‘Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem of Charles de l’Écluse’, in Carolus Clusius:Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist, ed. F. Egmond, P. Hoftijzer and R.Visser (Amsterdam, 2007). Chapters Five and Six are published here for the first time. Chapter Seven appeared as ‘Il contributo dei Libri Picturati A. 32–38 alla comprensione dell’iconografia del Brasile olandese nei dipinti di Albert Eckhout e di Frans Post’ in La natura e il corpo. Studi in memoria di Attilio Zanca, ed. G. Olmi and G. Papagno (Florence, 2006) and appears here in English for the first time.

9

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Introduction

Arriving at the plague-ridden port of Caldera, Costa Rica, in 1840, the New Jersey-born lawyer, explorer and us Minister for Central America John L. Stephens noted:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The last stranger at the port was a distinguished American. His name was Handy; I had first heard of him at the Cape of Good Hope, hunting giraffes, afterward met him in NewYork, and regretted exceedingly to miss him here. He had travelled from the United States through Texas, Mexico, and Central America with an elephant and two dromedaries as his file leaders! The elephant was the first ever seen in Central America, and I often heard of him in the Pueblos under the name of El Demonio.1 This may have been the first elephant ever seen in Central America.2 One of the first Europeans to visit the Maya site of Palenque in Chiapas, however, the artist and adventurer Jean Frédéric Maximilien Waldeck (1766–1875), who in later life passed himself off variously as an Austrian, British, French or German citizen, sometimes adding the title of baron, was convinced that fossil evidence proved that there had been elephants in ancient Mexico.3 He saw elephants in the glyphic inscriptions that were found at Palenque, and he distorted Mayan imagery to bring it into line with his hypothesis that Palenque had been founded by the Chaldeans.4 Even as late as the 1920s, the distinguished anatomist but cranky archaeologist Grafton Elliot Smith revived Waldeck’s view and seized eagerly upon what he took to be 11

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

1 A. L. Dick, front of idol at Copán, Honduras, engraving after a drawing by Frederick Catherwood, in John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (New York, 1841).

elephants’ heads in the Maya sites of Palenque and Copán to substantiate his claim that Indo-Chinese culture had been diffused to Central America in the eighth century ad.5 Stephens was more circumspect: in his account of the monuments found at Copán, he describes a twelvefoot-high statue of an idol with two ornaments at the top that ‘appear like the trunk of an elephant’ (illus. 1), but he sagely adds ‘an animal unknown in that country’.6 The elephant’s trunk that European travellers thought they could see among the Maya ruins was in fact the long nose of the rain god Chac as represented, for example, at Uxmal (illus. 2), or no less than 260 times on the façade of the Palace of Masks in Kabah, both in the Puuc region of Yucatán.7 12

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Introduction

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

2 Northern Building, Nunnery Quadrangle, Uxmal,Yucatán, Mexico.

But the unreliable Waldeck and the barmy Elliot Smith were not the only ones to attest to the presence of elephants in America. A seventeenth-century casket from Augsburg decorated with allegories of the five senses contains a representation of the four continents inside the lid. America, clearly identified holding a bird in one hand and an ear of corn in the other, wearing a feathered skirt and headdress, stands in front of not only a quiver with arrows but also an elephant (illus. 3).8 In another allegorical work painted a couple of decades later, the Flemish artist Jan van Kessel – a descendant of the Brueghel family whose aleatory geography will appear more than once in these pages – included a number of elephants in a small panel labelled ‘Veracruz’.9 13

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

3 The ‘Four Continents’, inside of lid of an Augsburg cabinet, c. 1640-50, painted straw, parchment and gems on silk and wood.

We find not only an elephant but also lions in another work produced in Augsburg, this time an allegory of America published by Johann Georg Hertel in the middle of the eighteenth century. In this case, however, their presence in America is the result of a printer’s error: the allegory of Africa in the same series includes a caiman, a hammock and other American attributes.10 The absence of such incongruities in the allegories of Africa and America that appeared in a later edition by the same publisher shows that this was merely a case of the wrong labels having been attached to the illustrations.11 We can find elephants in America even as far back as the sixteenth century. A copper engraving produced around 1585 shows Magellan discovering the strait that bears his name, while an elephant is carried through the sky by a gigantic bird (the mythological Roc) (illus. 4).12 Central and South America thus provide the scene for the appearance not only of historical elephants (the one brought by Handy), but also of elephants that are located in the Americas by several European explorers and artists as the product of their lively imaginations. Many of the artists in question had never visited the Americas, and thus might not be expected to know any better, but travellers like Waldeck, who spent a decade in Mexico, were still prepared to countenance and eager to document the presence of elephants in the southern hemisphere to buttress their preconceived ideas on, say, the origins of Maya civilization. 14

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Introduction

4 Adriaen Collaert, Americae Retectio, c. 1585, copper engraving after a design by Jan van der Straet.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

In the history of exotic natural historical illustration, then, representations by or based on the evidence of someone who had ‘been there’ offer no guarantee that they accurately portray the local fauna, any more than representations of non-European peoples by or based on the evidence of someone who had ‘been there’ necessarily portray those individuals accurately.13

the song of the sloth It is not just the elephant that finds itself displaced from its natural habitat in Africa or India to America.An Italian set of allegories of the four continents from around 1760 includes two rhinoceroses in a coastal American scene.14 Another rhinoceros, closely modelled on Dürer’s famous woodcut of 1515, appears in a German plaquette from the late sixteenth century showing a personification of America, though it has been suggested that the rhinoceros here served as a model for another scaly animal, namely the giant armadillo.15 Confusion between the two is, after all, easy to understand; Sir Walter Ralegh, for instance, described the armadillo as being ‘barred over with small plates somewhat like to a Renocero’.16 15

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

In a well-known article published more than half a century ago,17 F. J. Cole documented the way in which Dürer’s rhinoceros came to dominate illustrations of this creature in zoological works for some two centuries, and today one could add many more examples besides those cited by Cole. Following in Cole’s footsteps, William B. Ashworth Jr has devoted several articles to charting the very long lives of many Renaissance illustrations of other animals.18 The detailed analyses contained in those articles are of great value, but some critical remarks are in place here. In the history that Ashworth traces, he singles out the Historia naturalis Brasiliae of 1648 by Willem Piso and Georg Marcgraf as marking a turning-point. In his view, Marcgraf ’s ‘objective descriptions’ in what was ‘the first book devoted to the natural history of one localized region in the New World, in this case the Dutch colony in Brazil’, were ‘in strong contrast to the highly emblematic and mythladen accounts of Aldrovandi and Gesner’.‘The face of natural history’, he concludes, ‘was altered forever.’19 Was it? In his chapter on ‘The Animals, Kinds of Venison, Big Lizards, Snakes, and Other Monstrous Beasts of America’, the Huguenot Jean de Léry describes one of them as follows in 1578: The bigger of these, which the savages call hay, is of the size of a big spaniel, with a face rather like a monkey’s, approaching the human; it has a belly hanging down like that of a pregnant sow, a gray coat with a smoky-brown tinge like the wool of a black sheep, a very short tail, hairy legs like those of a bear, and very long claws. And although when he is in the woods he is very wild, once he is caught, he is not hard to tame. It is true, nevertheless, that his claws are so sharp that our Tupinamba, who are always naked, do not take much pleasure in playing with him. Now this may sound like a tall tale, but I have heard not only from the savages but also from the interpreters who had lived a long time in that country, that no man has ever seen this animal eat, either in the fields or in a house; so that some think that he lives on air.20 This was all the information that de Léry provided on the sloth in the first edition of his Histoire d’un voyage. Two years later, in the second edition of the work (Geneva, 1580), he added a woodcut, depicting the 16

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Introduction

5 Demonic vision, from Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil (Geneva, 1580).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

demonic visions of the Tupinamba, that included a representation of an oversized sloth in the landscape (illus. 5)21 It is based on the woodcut of a gigantic sloth tethered to a tree (although the two sloths in the tree are of normal proportions) in La Cosmographie universelle (1575) by André Thevet (illus. 6)22 Thevet had been in Brazil at the same time as de Léry, and claimed to have kept a wounded sloth for twenty-six days.23 Almost a century later, de Léry’s image of a sloth was still serving as the basis for

6 Gigantic sloth, from André Thevet, La Cosmographie universelle (Paris, 1575).

17

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

7 Brazilian fauna, from Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en onbekende weereld: of beschryving van America en ’t Zuidland (Amsterdam, 1671).

an engraving of the fauna of the New World in Arnoldus Montanus’ De Nieuwe en onbekende weereld of 1671 (illus. 7). This sloth has a very human-looking face; indeed, it recalls the half-human mythological figures that people Piero di Cosimo’s famous The Forest Fire (c. 1500–5, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).24 Moreover, it has been labelled ‘Papio’, the word not for a sloth but for a baboon. So much for the progress of scientific illustration: almost a hundred years after de Léry’s sloth, the animal looks more mythological and less realistic than ever, and it has been given the wrong name into the bargain. The voluminous Musurgia Universalis (1650) by the prolific and prolix Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680), who claimed to have just received a description of this marsupial from a fellow Jesuit in New Carthage who kept a sloth in his home for several weeks, repeats the same image (illus. 8). Kircher also includes the song of the sloth in musical notation. The ascending and descending six-note scale (curiously resembling the threne ‘heard by Watt in ditch on way from station’ with which Samuel Beckett concluded his novel Watt) is set to the words ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’.25 18

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Introduction

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

In this case we would seem to have a maximum of information to enlighten us as to the nature of the sloth: a written account of its behaviour drawn from a first-hand source; a graphic illustration; and a transcription of its song – word, image, transcription.Yet the illustration is one hundred years out of date;26 the text, for all its claims to veracity, has little to add to de Léry’s account; and the musical transcription conveys practically no information at all. After all, without any indication of pitch or tempo, it would be impossible for anyone today to give a personable or convincing imitation of the song of the sloth on the basis of this musical score alone. As for the accompanying text, the sequence of ‘ha’, Kircher claims that the sloth owes its native name, which he gives as Haut, to its singing of the six notes of the scale, but the reverse could just as easily be the case, with the sequence of ‘ha’ being derived from the creature’s name (Hay in de Léry).What at first sight seems to be a plethora of information – word, image, transcription – turns out to tell us very little at all. In fact, it might be argued that the more information we are offered about the sloth, the less we understand about it. The sequence of eleven times ‘ha’ seems to be mocking us, its mimicry emerging as an effective strategy of elusiveness.27

8 Sloth with song, from Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650).

19

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

a world with many mansions Clearly, one case alone will not be sufficient to overthrow Ashworth’s argument.Yet most of the cases presented in this book run counter to it, and at some point the evidence piles up. The kind of neat and tidy watershed envisaged by Ashworth, who unconvincingly refers to the philosopher Michel Foucault rather than to a historian in support of his case,28 simply fails to do justice to the historical record. The representations of the sloth in the works of Kircher and Montanus from as late as the second half of the seventeenth century show not the slightest awareness of any epistemological rupture.29 As Giuseppe Olmi has noted on the Italian situation, ‘under certain aspects, in the midseventeenth century, America seemed more remote from our country than it had been in Aldrovandi’s time’.30 Examples abound of ‘progress’ in the art of scientific illustration that is moving in a backwards direction. For instance, in the history of the illustrations to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s De la natural historia de las Indias, the woodcuts to Ramusio’s 1556 edition of the work are fantastic constructions, far removed from the accurate images that accompanied the editions of Oviedo’s works published in the 1520s and 1530s.31 Or again, a serious difference of quality can be detected between the copper plates that were originally prepared by the expert German engraver Antoni Eisenhout in the late 1570s to illustrate one of the largest museums of mineralogy in the world at the time – the Metallotheca vaticana, organized in nineteen cabinets by Michele Mercati, physician and naturalist to Pius v, Clement xiii and Sistus v – and the first printed edition of that work by Giovanni Maria Lancisi, done using not the original engravings but new ones based on the original designs, which did not appear until 1717. The difference in quality, however, is in favour of the Renaissance engraver: In the sixteenth century, every natural element, in the fervour of the discovery, is felt to be something exceptional, irreplaceable; it preserves, in its appearance, the aesthetic refinement of what is rare, precious, magical.The minerals are articulated and animated like liana; they are excrescences in action in a singularly lively world.The eighteenth century, even in registering and cataloguing them, is more sceptical, more arid, more banal.32 20

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Introduction

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

In fact, if we adopt a longer time-span, a similar picture emerges. It has been pointed out that ‘it is wrong and substantially useless’ to search for a line of evolution from the schematic to the naturalistic in not only botanical but also zoological illustrations from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, and illuminated and printed scientific texts of the fifteenth and early years of the sixteenth century follow the same pattern.33 Yet if we extend our inquiry down into the second half of that century and the first decades of the seventeenth century, little appears to have changed. Emperor Rudolf ii had a horned hare among his collection of curiosities in Prague, and when the French antiquarian Nicolas Peiresc visited Louvain in 1606, he is said to have visited a doctor’s widow who had two horned hares in her possession, and to have tried to obtain the skeleton of one of them and drawings of both. Perhaps this was the same hare that Jan Brueghel the Elder saw and included in a painting by him and Peter Paul Rubens of the Madonna and Child in a Garland of Fruit and Flowers, painted around 1620 and now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid (illus. 9).34 Other artists, including Joris Hoefnagel, also depicted the horned hare. But Brueghel is the only one to have added horns to the head of an ass as well, this time in a painting on copper done in collaboration with Hendrick de Clerck in the last decade of the sixteenth century, The

9 Detail from Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, Madonna and Child in a Garland of Fruit and Flowers, c. 1620, oil on panel.

21

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

10 Detail from Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick de Clerck, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, c. 1597-8, oil on copper.

Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man (illus. 10).35 Increasing proximity of an illustration to our own time does not guarantee increased accuracy in its portrayal of local fauna or flora.36 A tunnel vision of a different kind is implied in those accounts of European responses to the flora and fauna of the New World that present a progression in stages from an initial sense of wonder to a more utilitarian approach focusing on their economic or medical potential.37 Once again, the coexistence of both attitudes may be more of a rule than an exception. For instance, when the English painter John White, who travelled with the British colonists to Roanoke in 1585, represented inedible marine creatures such as the lookdown, the trigger fish and the hermit crab, it must have been their exotic appearance that attracted his attention, since their use value was negligible.The greater flamingo, although it is edible, was apparently not a significant part of the diet of the inhabitants of the Bahamas or West Indies through which White passed, so his purpose in recording them will have been for their exotic appearance too. Flying fish and certain terrapins, on the other hand, were both exotic and edible, and could therefore be considered useful as provisions or commodities.38 It is the coexistence of different attitudes within the same person or within the same culture that renders approaches in terms of watersheds or of some implicit or explicit teleology so inadequate. In a 22

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Introduction

critique of Foucault somewhat along the lines of the present one, but focusing on the exemplary figure of the Italian doctor, natural philosopher and mathematician Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), Anthony Grafton has written: For Foucault, Cardano exemplified the dreaming Renaissance sage, obsessively commenting on new shades of influence and antipathy but never able to see any of the disciplines he practiced – much less their underlying assumptions – from a critical distance. Modernity could arrive only when the surrealistically coherent structure in which Cardano and others lived finally collapsed, so that a new, classical one could take its place . . . In fact, however, Cardano – like most of his contemporaries and many of us [emphasis added] – inhabited a mental world which had many mansions . . . He moved with ease, if not with comfort, from one set of assumptions to another, as the requirements of a subject or the facts at hand seemed to dictate. No overarching system unified all his beliefs and arguments. And no single language, no prose of the world or anything else, spoke through him.39 It is the capacity to accommodate that is at issue here, the ability to inhabit a world with many mansions.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

off the printed page The discussions of the illustrations of exotic fauna and flora presented in the pages of this book bear out the nuanced position advocated by the author of a pioneering study of the impact of the Americas on Italian naturalists of the sixteenth century, Giuseppe Olmi: And, therefore, if that symbolic vision of reality and that necessary dependence on the ancient authorities on which sixteenthcentury natural history was largely based gradually lost their hold, this did not take place without the different political, economic and religious situations of the different countries determining more or less evident décalages.40 23

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

Paying attention to such nuances also requires us to pay more attention to the nature of the source in which the illustration is embedded.The learned discussions by William Ashworth Jr, for instance, unfortunately tend to play down or ignore the evidence of non-printed sources. For instance, his discussion of the iconography of the marmoset commences with the Exoticorum libri decem of Charles de l’Écluse, published in 1605,41 and thus ignores a portrait in oils by Sofonisba Anguissola of Catalina Michaela, one of the daughters of the Spanish king Philip ii, holding a Brazilian marmoset, dating from 1573.42 Indeed, what is probably the earliest European representation of a marmoset from the Amazon region – the platyrrhine monkey (Callithrix jacchus) in the painting Portrait of a Cardinal (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) by the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo – may date from as early as 1512–14.43 The presence of the marmoset has even made it possible to establish the identify of the sitter as Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte, later Pope Julius iii, the only prelate in the Roman Curia known to have had a passion for this kind of animal.44 If we turn to the sloth, Ashworth’s account concentrates mainly on the images in Dutch (and German) printed sources to which we shall return in chapter Seven, but it should not be forgotten that other images existed outside this mainstream. For instance, in the period between the first European printed illustration of a sloth by André Thevet in 1557 and the appearance of a ‘canonical’ print in 1605 in the Exoticorum libri decem of Carolus Clusius, we find the unique image of a sloth walking upside down along the branches of a tree in a manuscript illustrating the fauna, flora and people of America from the end of the sixteenth century.45 Since this manuscript was not published until a facsimile edition appeared in 1996, this image of a sloth based on direct observation failed to have any further repercussions, but it still belongs to the history of European representations of the sloth. A key figure who, like the sloth, will reappear at various points in the following chapters is the Roman collector and antiquary Cassiano dal Pozzo. During a visit to the Palacio de El Pardo, near Madrid, in 1626, he saw a room with paintings of a variety of birds and animals, including ‘the portrait of the sloth of Brazil, ironically named nimble puppy’, which he goes on to describe minutely: ‘having curly hair, between faded tawny and grey, long forelegs, while the hind legs are far shorter, a thin body, beaver-like teeth, and small eyes’.46 Whether 24

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Introduction

this painting derived from the images of animals of New Spain that Philip ii’s physician Francisco Hernández had brought to the Iberian peninsula in 1577 or not, it does indicate the existence of another image of a sloth that lies outside the Dutch-German printed tradition. Particularly important figures for the distribution of exotic animals and their images in courtly circles in the second half of the sixteenth century are the imperial agents and ambassadors, such as Adrian von Sittinckhausen in the important port of Genoa, who served as agent for the Bavarian Duke Albrecht v, or Hans Khevenhüller, ambassador at the Spanish court for Rudolf ii.47 Khevenhüller regularly sent drawings and paintings of exotica to the imperial court, such as a ‘large, long bundle of papers with certain portraits of animals of the Indies’ dispatched to Mary of Austria and others in 1576.48 The South American aplomado falcon that Archduke Wenceslas is holding in an oil painting by Alonso Sánchez Coello done in 1574 (now in Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck) probably derives from an animal portrait of this kind.49 Many of Dürer’s drawings of animals were copied by other artists, in fact on a larger scale than was earlier assumed.50 But besides drawings and printed works, we can find animal representations that go back to Dürer’s model in a surprising variety of media and distributed over vast distances. For instance, the majestic head of a rhinoceros carved towards the end of the sixteenth century to decorate the Michelangelo cloister in the Baths of Diocletian in Rome51 faithfully reflects the morphology of the animal in the German woodcut (illus. 11).52 So does the rhinoceros on one of the bronze west doors of the Duomo in Pisa, which were made in or soon after 1600 to replace the original ones that had been destroyed by fire in 1595 (illus. 12). In the background, beside a palm tree, we can see the famous duel between the rhinoceros and the elephant held in Lisbon in 1515 (illus. 13).53 Still by the end of the twentieth century, Dürer’s rhinoceros had lost none of its charm for European artists (illus. 14). Even further afield, the rhinoceros recurs in the sixteenthcentury frescoes in the mansion of Juan Delgado de Vargas y Matajudíos in Tunja, the capital of the Colombian province of Boyacá.54 Dürer’s works also had a strong influence on the artists of the Moghul court in Kabul at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, such as Ustad Mansur.55 Among the few representations of a rhinoceros in the same century that do not go back to the German model, we can mention a watercolour of a rhinoceros on a loose leaf in 25

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

11 Cloister of Michelangelo, Baths of Diocletian, Rome.

the diary of the travels of the archducal chamberlain Adam Hochreiter; he claims to have seen the beast together with an elephant in Madrid in 1584 and to have had its portrait painted in his presence.56 As these examples show, the distances over which images could travel might be enormous. Around 1580 an anonymous author, probably an Ottoman Turk, compiled a manuscript called Tarih-i Hindi-i garbi (‘A History of India and the West’) in which he summarized information on the Americas taken from Italian editions of the works of four important writers on the early Americas.A number of manuscripts based on the holograph are known, all by different hands, but the first printed edition of the work (with illustrations) did not see the light of day until 1730, by which time the information it contained was considerably out of date. Even so, it was the oldest book about the New World to be published east of Italy and the Holy Roman Empire and the first to be published in an Oriental language. The manuscript (generally) includes thirteen illustrations, including such American creatures as the tapir, the manatee, the armadillo, the pelican, the bison, the jaguar, the anteater, the sloth and the opossum, as well as various plants, 26

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Top: 12 West door, Duomo, Pisa, c. 1600, bronze. 13 Detail of the West door.

including the banana tree and the prickly pear cactus, although the obvious lack of familiarity with these flora and fauna on the part of the Turkish illustrators makes many of them virtually unrecognizable (illus. 15, 16).57 27

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

14 Valeriano Trubbiani, Mater Amabilis, 1995, bronze, nickel-plated bronze, Corten steel, in the Piazza Pertini, Ancona.

Similar problems of translation can be found in the reverse direction: from Turkey to the New World. The animal fables attributed to Aesop, a slave of the west central part of the Anatolian highland, known as Phrygia in antiquity and now forming a part of modern Turkey, were among the works translated into Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire, around the middle of the sixteenth century. Although neither of the two extant manuscripts of the forty-seven Aztec fables is illustrated, we can observe the attempt to convert the strange into the familiar by such textual renderings as ‘deer house’ for stable, or ‘palm cherries’ for dates.58 There was a two-way traffic between images that appeared in printed works of natural history and images of the same plants or animals that appeared in, say, the painted or even sculpted decorations of Renaissance courts.Thus the decoration of the ceiling of the ‘Stanza degli Uccelli’ of the Villa Medici in Rome with a pergola and birds was entrusted by Ferdinando de’ Medici to the artist Jacopo Zucchi, but the models for the varieties of birds depicted were provided by the pages of Conrad Gesner’s Historia animalium of 1555.59 The movement was therefore from printed page to painted pergola. Examples of the same movement can be found in the painted decorations of the southwest tower of the Palacio de El Pardo by Gaspar Becerra, who could 28

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Introduction

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

15 Jaguar, anteater, armadillo and hunter, from Tarih-i Hindi-i garbi, manuscript, c. 1580.

draw not only on the birds that populated the wooded grounds of the palace, but also those to be found in the third volume of Gesner’s work.60 The Villa Medici, however, also provides us with an example of the same movement, but in the reverse direction: when Ulisse Aldrovandi sought an illustration of the vervex aethiopicus, a sheep without horns, with a white body and a black head and hooves, that he had not seen but which his nephew in Rome had mentioned to him, he appears to have drawn on a marble sculpture of the animal, perhaps from the second century ad, to be found in Fernando’s collection of sculptures of animals in the Villa Medici.61 Of course, besides falling back on first-hand experience or on printed books, artists could draw on the work of other artists too. 29

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

16 Sloth, opossum chasing a hen from a coop, two monkeys and a hunter, from Tarih-i Hindi-i garbi, manuscript, c. 1580.

A painting on wood of Moses Striking the Rock by Francesco Ubertini, called Bacchiacca (1494–1557), now in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, which may have been painted for a triumphal arch in 1525, includes a genet, a serval, a giraffe, a boar, dogs, an African grey parrot and a small bird (perhaps a goldfinch) in the scene (illus. 17). The list can be expanded to include a porcupine, donkeys, cows, a horse, a goat, a monkey, a bear, a sheep, a rabbit, red-legged partridges, camels and a woodpecker if we add the same artist’s later painting 30

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Gathering of Manna (National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc). If the artist had access to Pope Leo x’s zoo in Rome, several of these exotic animals may be based on first-hand observation.The giraffe, on the other hand, is anatomically unconvincing and probably derives from an earlier Florentine painting.62 A few years later the same artist was painting birds and rare plants for Cosimo de’ Medici, as well as cartoons on similar subjects for tapestries.63 As these examples show, a history of natural historical illustration that confines itself to printed books and fails to take relevant paintings and three-dimensional works into account will be a very one-sided affair. Though the big names in the history of science like Ulisse Aldrovandi and Conrad Gesner have already cropped up, it will also be necessary to include the work of those who were either lower or higher than them on the social scale. Their quality as artists is not relevant to the present purpose.64 Hence the humble Dutch beachcomber Adriaen Coenen will put in several appearances in these pages, irrespective of the fact that he can hardly be considered to have been a mainstream artist. Despite the amateurish, if appealing, quality of his watercolour illustrations, his works can tell us a lot about the circles in which natural historical illustrations circulated in the early modern period. To cite just one example, an engraving of a beached sperm whale from 1577 served as the model not only for Coenen’s watercolour of the same scene (illus. 18), but also for a version in tempera now in the library of the University of Pisa.65 Like the cosmogony of the humble Friulian miller Menocchio made famous by Carlo Ginzburg, such sources can tell us a lot about the circulation of ideas and images among different social strata in the same period.66 In the upper circles of courtly life, names that are less familiar to historians of science are also relevant to the present inquiry. As we shall see, the German physician Johannes Faber was still puzzled by the nature of the civet cat’s musk-producing gland in the 1620s. Civet cats and their musk, which was used in perfumes and medicines, were very rare and costly, making them prestigious gifts, like the one presented to Cardinal Francesco Barberini in Madrid by Francesco of Braganza in 1626.67 Yet in the middle of the sixteenth century Catherine of Austria (1507– 1578), the youngest sister of the Habsburg emperor Charles v, already owned ten civet cats in Lisbon, which were cared for by a certain Cristovão Carmones, a specialist in the care of such cats.68 Evidently 31

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

17 Francesco Ubertini called Bacchiacca, Moses Striking the Rock, c. 1525-30, oil and gold on panel.

there must have been detailed knowledge about the nature of the civet cat for this experiment to have been a success.

intermingling realms Finally, a few words on classification, although the history of scientific taxonomies and other systems of classification is largely foreign to the concerns of the present work. Divisions between animal, vegetable and 32

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Introduction

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

18 Beached sperm whale, from Adriaen Coenen, Walvisboeck, 1585, watercolour.

mineral were by no means clear-cut in the early modern period. The European cabinets of curiosities, in particular, thrived on such ambiguity.69 A stone with an animal bone growing inside it, for instance, in the collection of curiosities of the fifteenth-century Duke of Benavente, Rodrigo Alonso Pimentel, bordered on the line separating the animal from the mineral.70 Reports of the finding of live animals found trapped inside stones, which came to the ears of the circle of naturalists concentrated in Lime Street in Elizabethan London, were equally baffling.71 The Roman collector of curiosities Virgilio Spada was presented with a reptile that was still alive inside a large hollow stone without any openings.72 Petrified plants and animals seemed to partake of both the animal or vegetable and the mineral world. The etymology of the word ‘fossil’ referred to something that had been dug up, and the term could therefore denote both organic and inorganic specimens.73 In fact, a consensus on the origin of fossils, and with it a more or less clear dividing line between the organic and the inorganic, did not emerge until after 1700.74 These links in the Chain of Being could even extend to the human world, as can be seen from the case of the 33

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

petrified child acquired by Frederick iii of Denmark in 1654.75 Coral, which featured prominently in many collections, both in elaborately worked carvings and in two-dimensional representations, was variously classified as animal, vegetable or mineral.76 One of the objects in the earliest collection of the Botanical Garden in Pisa, a petrified human skull with a branch of coral growing from the top, was admired by many visitors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; only later was it shown to be a hoax.77 Indeed, the distinction between (vegetable) algae and (animal) corals was still vexing natural scientists in the nineteenth century.78 As for the eagle-stone, folklore associated it with eagle nests, thereby linking the animal and mineral worlds again. The mandrake seemed to be both human and vegetable, while the barnacle goose and the Tartary lamb straddled the boundary between plants and animals. The present volume includes representations of the barnacle goose (although it grew on trees, was it a bird or a fish?) and of the dragon tree (was it a dead dragon?), while chapter Three focuses on hybrids that straddle the human/animal divide.79 But it would be as anachronistic to classify them as ‘zoological’ as it is to classify representations of non-European people as ‘ethnographic’ in this period.80 It cannot be repeated often enough that, in the early modern period, the human, social and natural sciences as we know them had not crystallized out into separate disciplines and practices. So whether we are concerned with the representation of humans or of animals, we cannot consider one without considering the other. Dead or alive, many of the fauna and flora discussed in these pages correspond to identifiable objects that can be found in the natural world today – though we cannot find a dragon, we can find a dragon tree. In this respect – though once again it would be hard to draw a hard and fast boundary – they differ from the category of the mythological or the monstrous. While they might be capable of provoking wonder, they are not wonders in the sense of the medieval and early modern mirabilia.81 Though each of them presents a certain singularity, they are by no means unique, and exist as groups, types or classes. In the 1991 Frazer Lecture, David Parkin concluded his defence of the exotic as the major exemplar of cultural difference with the challenge to ‘excavate the bizarre, unfamiliar and irreducibly different in us all’.82 And in the passage from Grafton quoted above, it was stressed 34

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Introduction

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

that the mental world with many mansions of Cardano was shared by most of his contemporaries and many of us.Though the representations considered in the following pages can be placed chronologically in the early modern period, the phenomena under discussion are prior to disenchantment in that they possessed, and may still possess, the ability to shock, to astonish and even to enchant. Early collectors were fascinated by cut mother-of-pearl, its iridescent, almost magical lustre, and when Cardinal Francesco de’Medici included not only Turkish bows, Mexican idols and a rhinoceros horn but also ‘an Indian gaming board composed of mother-of-pearl’ in a consignment of gifts to Albrecht v, founder of the Kunstkammer in Munich, he expressly noted in the letter that accompanied the dispatch that the items were offered ‘for the delight and enjoyment’ of the Bavarian Duke. As Sigrid Sangl puts it, ‘This shows the immediate pleasure at possessing something rare and curious, in which neither scientific-encyclopaedic pretension nor representation played an essential role’.83 Even if there is a prose of the world, it can still be poetic. It is such a ‘Baroque’ reading of images of the natural world that is advocated in Before Disenchantment.84

35

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

19 Exhibit in the exhibition San Borondón: la isla descubierta, La Recova, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 14 January–26 February 2005.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

1 Marvels of the Canaries

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

san borondón In the north-eastern part of the Atlantic off the coast of Morocco, where the Canary Islands are situated, the Ebstorf map from the first half of the thirteenth century is the first to indicate a ‘lost island: it was discovered by St Brendan, and after he left it, no one has been able to find it since’.1 The Italian engineer Leonardo Torriani, who was in the Canaries from 1586 to 1593, included a map of the island, which he referred to alternately as San Borondón or Antilia, in his Description and History of the Kingdom of the Canary Islands.2 Belief in the existence of an eighth Canary Island prompted many to make the vain attempt to find it. The travelling exhibition ‘San Borondón: la isla descubierta’ (St Brendan, the island discovered), organized by Tarek Ode and David Olivera, rescued the Scottish discoverer Edward Harvey from oblivion.3 Photographs, drawings and three-dimensional representations of the fauna and flora, a herbarium, documents and a scale model of the magical island all commemorated the discovery of the island of San Borondón by Edward Harvey in 1865 (illus. 19, 20, 21). According to the exhibition catalogue,4 which includes a translation into Spanish of Harvey’s diary, this Edinburgh-born scientist was funded by the Royal Society to investigate the islands of Madeira and the Canaries. During his stay on Tenerife, Harvey’s imagination was kindled by the legend of the island of St Brendan and he decided to devote all his efforts to finding it. After eighteen months of study and investigations on the islands in the Atlantic, he returned to Tenerife in September 1864. In January of the following year he set off for the island of La Palma, but 37

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

20 Exhibit in the exhibition San Borondón: la isla descubierta.

after being driven off course by a storm, he was forced to land in uncharted territory. For seven days, Harvey and his crew explored the island, sketching and taking photographs. Upon returning to London, Harvey isolated himself from the world to prepare the presentation of his findings. However, already weakened by an illness that he had contracted during an earlier journey through the interior of Africa, he was ridiculed by the scientific establishment and never received due recognition for his discovery of the mythical island. It was the era of the great scientific expeditions.The photographs of Harvey’s camp on St Brendan, for example, with his technical equipment, recall the photographs taken by the doctor Paul D. J. Hyades and other members of the French Scientific Mission to Cape Horn in 1882–3.5 On Tenerife, Charles Piazzi Smyth conducted his successful astronomical expedition in 1856; his photographs were published a few years later. In fact Canarian photography has a long history: Louis Compte, who introduced photography to Brazil in 1840, passed through Santa Cruz de Tenerife in October 1839, launching the era of the daguerreotype in the Canaries.6 But a closer examination of Harvey’s photographs, especially those of some trees with gigantic fruit, are too reminiscent of the exotic trees that can be found in Canarian botanical gardens today.The case recalls that of the famous photographs of two English girls with fairies taken near their home in Cottingley, Yorkshire, reproduced in The Strand Magazine in 1920 by the spiritual (and spiritualist) father of Sherlock 38

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Marvels of the Canaries

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

21 Exhibit in the exhibition San Borondón: la isla descubierta.

Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Although Conan Doyle defended the authenticity of these photographs, we know from the ‘confessions’ of the women in question in 1983, by which time they were no longer girls, that the photographs were fakes.7 The spectacular animals painstakingly reconstructed for the exhibition and seeming to have escaped from a science fiction film appear to be distant descendants of the prehistoric animals with which Conan Doyle had populated his The Lost World. Was Edward Harvey a traveller or a travel liar?8 There was no Mr Harvey. The St Brendan that the artists Ode and Olivera and their collaborators recreated (María Teresa Febles did the drawings) is not a reconstruction, but a construct. Deploying various techniques of image manipulation, they played with a Canarian legend to fabricate a journey and a life that never existed but which, with exceptional refinement, become real in the mind of the spectator. As they themselves say, the destiny of the island is waiting to commence. This artistic project, the result of a serious work of investigation, coincides with how José de Viera y Clavijo – who regarded the existence of the island as the result of the refraction of light – characterized the island, ‘which has the ability to present itself to our eyes and then to slip away between our fingers’.9 The Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, the tale of an abbot from Galway in the west of Ireland who sailed into the Atlantic in search of the Island of Paradise, has led many – most famously, Tim Severin – to attempt to retrace that voyage. It has been claimed that the story of Brendan ‘had arguably a most profound effect upon Columbus’s 39

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

explorations, and especially upon his claim to have found the Terrestrial Paradise’.10 The Isles of the Blessed referred to by the archaic Greek poet Hesiod,11 the Fortunate Isles and Plato’s Atlantis were all situated in the western Atlantic. It was therefore natural for the link to be made between the Canary Islands and these mythological predecessors, as well as the Hesperides, the Elysian Fields, the island of St Brendan and the Garden of Eden.12 The particularly benign climate of the Canaries and the small fluctuations in seasonal temperature by comparison with other regions caused later travellers to echo the praises of what seemed to be a paradise on earth. The Franciscan André Thevet, for instance, who passed through the region on his way to Brazil, considered the islands to be ‘so fertile and pleasant that they surpass the Greek islands in delightfulness, even Chios, which Empedocles, Apollonius of Rhodes and several others have so highly praised’.13 In the nineteenth century, the members of the British elite who could afford to flee the smog brought on by the Industrial Revolution sought out the health resorts of Tenerife and Gran Canaria for their beneficial effects.14 It is small wonder, therefore, that we find two marvellous trees located on Canarian soil: the ‘sacred tree’ or ‘tree of water’ of El Hierro and the equally sacred millenarian dragon tree of Tenerife.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

the tree of water Writing in New Spain in 1589–90, the young Spanish physician Juan de Cárdenas defended the truth of the assertions advanced in his Problems and Marvellous Secrets of the Indies with the following words: I know that many will not believe what I say here, but I reply, like Pedro Mexía in his Silva, that, whoever does not believe this will be even less likely to believe what everybody says about the tree on the island of El Hierro, whose leaves drip enough water every morning to supply the whole island.15 Early travellers to El Hierro, the westernmost of the Canary Islands, mentioned the lack of springs on the island. The original inhabitants, the Bimbaches – and after the conquest of the island by Jean de Béthencourt in 1405 the European invaders too – were said to be 40

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Marvels of the Canaries

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

22 The tree of water, from Girolamo Benzoni, La Historia del mondo nuovo (Venice, 1565).

entirely dependent for their water supply on this seemingly miraculous tree.16 Although the Italian engineer Leonardo Torriani, who spent several years in the Canaries in the last decades of the sixteenth century, predicted that the tree was incorruptible and would last ‘for the duration of the centuries to come’,17 it was uprooted during a storm in 1612. (The present-day tree, Ocotea foetens, on the site of El Garoé in the northern part of the island was planted in 1949.) Printed illustrations of it, however, began to circulate, starting with a woodcut in the History of the New World by the Milanese Girolamo Benzoni showing a tree in the centre of a walled pond, from whose leaves or branches water is seen dripping into the pond.Two men are filling pitchers or buckets from this water supply (illus. 22).18 Since this work went through more than thirty editions in a variety of languages, the impact made by the woodcuts it contained should not be underestimated. However, an even wider circulation of the image was guaranteed after it had made its appearance as the last plate in the sixth volume of the monumental America, published by Theodor de Bry in Frankfurt in 1596 (illus. 23).The pond has lost its circular wall; the number of natives has increased to fourteen, including one woman; the men are naked except for three who wear girdles; and the pots they carry have become ornate Mannerist pitchers. In writing his History of the New World, Benzoni, who had spent fourteen years travelling in the Americas and had lived for some time in 41

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

23 On the island of El Hierro, from Theodor de Bry, Americae VI (Frankfurt, 1596).

Puerto Rico, Haiti and Cuba, drew on earlier chroniclers as well as on his own experiences. The fourth, fifth and sixth volumes of De Bry’s America were explicitly based on Benzoni’s account. Since De Bry’s sixth volume, in which the plate depicting the miraculous tree of El Hierro is found, is actually a history of Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, the plate seems strangely out of place. It should be borne in mind, however, that the conventional route from Europe to the Americas passed from Seville via the Canary Islands. Columbus had landed on the island of La Gomera – which is the closest to El Hierro of the seven main islands of the Canaries – in 1492, and the Canaries provided him with a mental template by which he could assess the New World. Thus when he caught his first glimpse of a New World people (the Taino of the island of Guanahaní, which he dubbed San Salvador) on 12 October of that year, he described them as being ‘of the same colour as the Canarians’.19 Since, according to his own calculations, the admiral had sailed due west from La Gomera, the correspondence in skin colour may have been attributed to the fact 42

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Marvels of the Canaries

that they shared the same latitude.Two months later, it was once again the Canaries that served as the frame of reference when Columbus tried to describe the view from a port situated between the island of San Tomás and the Cape of Caribata: ‘From that port could be seen a vast and cultivated valley . . . and no doubt there are mountains there higher than the Canarian island of Tenerife, which is considered to be one of the highest in existence’.20 (When Charles Darwin caught his first glimpse of the peak in January 1832, he could not repress his admiration: ‘It towers in the sky twice as high as I should have dreamed of looking for it’.)21 A report read in the Venetian senate in 1497 stated that the former ambassador in Spain, Francesco Cappello, had brought with him presents from the Spanish king that included not only several parrots of diverse kinds and colours but also ‘a dark-skinned king, or more precisely brown like a Canary islander, from those islands newly discovered by the king of Spain’.22 The ‘islands newly discovered by the king of Spain’ is how Amerigo Vespucci described the Americas;23 the ‘king’ with a Canarian complexion is from South America.24 And when one of the earliest accounts of Columbus’s discovery, the letters sent from Granada by the Venetian Angelo Trevisan in 1501, describes the Canarians as ‘naked and without any religion’,25 it makes use of the phrase that was to become the standard way of describing the natives of South America. In other words, Europeans travelling to the New World regarded the Canaries and the Americas as belonging to a pan-Atlantic world. If De Bry’s artist chose to render the natives of El Hierro in a manner that is hardly different from the way he depicted the natives of Brazil, this is because, in his eyes, they were effectively members of the same New World. Representations of the miraculous tree of El Hierro were not confined to texts or to two-dimensional renderings. On Shrove Tuesday 1599, Duke Friedrich i of Württemberg and Teck introduced the running at the ring at the court in Stuttgart with an unusual procession.26 The central figure in the event was the duke himself, representing the ‘Queen of America’.27 Behind three European horsemen came Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, who were followed by four figures in American dress and a tree from whose leaves dropped a copious supply of water. The brightly coloured procession that followed them consisted of a variety of figures in different kinds of American dress.28 43

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

24 Procession of the Queen of America at the Stuttgart Court on Shrove Tuesday 1599, brushwork on paper with watercolour, bodycolour and gold.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The details of this procession are known not only from archival court records but also from a series of eight coloured drawings. The Garoé tree (illus. 24) is not the only item that is not strictly American, for the figure of a Pict in the procession betrays the same lack of geographical precision.29 The explanation for the presence of both extraneous elements is the same: both the Garoé tree and Picts – like Columbus,Vespucci and the various American figures in the procession – had appeared in the pages of De Bry’s America.30

the millenarian dragon tree of tenerife A tree with an even longer tradition is the dragon tree (illus. 25). Endemic to the Macaronesian Islands (the region in the eastern North Atlantic consisting principally of the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands), the dragon tree (Dracaena draco l.)31 owes its name to the resemblance it bears to the monstrous mythical creature.32 The family resemblance is well brought out in the device of La Orotava on the island of Tenerife, which dates from 1905 (information about the earlier device was lost during a fire in the Archivo Municipal in 1841) and shows two live dragons, symbols of vigilance, flanking a dragon tree (illus. 26).33 44

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Marvels of the Canaries

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

25 Flowering dragon tree, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2005.

26 Device of La Orotava, Tenerife.

The dragon tree is said to have played a role in the cultic life of the native peoples of those islands, for the Guanche council of nobles used to meet beneath its branches to administer justice, and it featured in their burials. In his description of the island of La Palma, written in 45

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

27 Dragon tree on tile, Little’s Place (Sitio Litre), Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife.

28 Dragon tree of Icod on wine label.

the 1580s, the Azorean chronicler Gaspar Frutuoso mentions that it was forbidden to chop them down because they were considered royal trees; although the trunk was used to make basins and the bark for shields, only those exemplars that had been blown down during a hurricane could be used for these purposes.34 The official plant symbol of the island of Tenerife since 1991, it is now a protected tree under various regional and international provisions,35 thus enjoying a form of ‘secular sacrality’ that rejoins its cultic past. Less official representations of the dragon tree abound throughout the region (illus. 27, 28). The first historical mention of the dragon tree of Tenerife dates from 1503 and is to be found in the deeds to land conferred on a native of Gran Canaria, Pablo Martín, who had taken part in the conquest of Tenerife. He was given a plot of land ‘behind the big drago’ in Icod de los Vinos.36 The drago entered the world of science, however, with the first botanical description of Draconum arbor by Charles de l’Écluse (Carolus Clusius). In fact, Linnaeus owed his first knowledge of the tree to Clusius’s description.37 Clusius travelled through the Iberian peninsula in 1564–5, and it was in the course of this journey that he saw the dragon 46

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Marvels of the Canaries

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

29 Dragon tree, from Charles de l’Écluse, Rariorum aliquot stirpium per Hispanias observatarum historiae (Antwerp, 1576).

tree behind the twelfth-century Augustinian convent of Nossa Senhora da Graça in Lisbon.38 The Flemish botanist kept a branch, a piece of its bark and some of the ‘dragon’s blood’ that exuded from its trunk in his home. As for the growth of its fruit, he noted that it seemed to grow at the topmost points of the tree, like a date-palm – an association that will recur in the discussion of the iconography of the dragon tree below. In fact, he was so impressed by this exotic tree that it was the first plant to be described in the first of his original works: Rariorum aliquot stirpium per Hispanias observatarum historiae (Antwerp, 1576) (illus. 29).39 Both the preliminary drawing and the woodblock used to print the woodcut are still extant.40 47

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

According to another botanist, Mathias Lobel, author of the Kruydtboeck (Antwerp, 1581), another dragon tree, imported from Spain, grew along with 600 other exotic plants in the garden of Pieter van Coudenberghe on the outskirts of Antwerp. However, when it came to illustrating the dragon tree, Lobel fell back on a process that is typical of the European reception of the New World: the new information was combined with an image that was already familiar, namely the woodcut that had been used previously by Clusius.41 In fact, the Clusian image was to be reused by others too, not only by Duret and Gerard, but even in the eighteenth century in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert.42 Far away from the Canaries, not all dragon trees survived the change of climate, as can be seen from the sad case of Simón de Tovar, who had two botanical gardens in Seville. In the period extending from the publication of Clusius’s monograph on the plants of the Iberian peninsula to that of a more comprehensive work, the Rariorum plantarum historia (Antwerp, 1601), Tovar and Clusius corresponded with one another. In a letter to Clusius dated in March 1596, the physician of Seville, who had sent lists of plants to Clusius, complained about the severity of the recent winters (it was in the last decades of the sixteenth century that the Small Ice Age reached its peak): Last year, these, as well as many Indian plants, perished because of the severe cold of a winter such as I do not remember, surviving only two plants of this species. One Draco arbor, coming from a seed received from the Canary Islands, died on that occasion, as well as many palm shoots, but for two, still too young to produce fruit of fertile seeds.43 The same fate befell some small dragon trees which had been transported from the Canaries to the royal gardens of Philip ii at some time before 1572.44 In the second decade of the following century, the German annotator of a book on Mexican plants going back to Francisco Hernández, the Mexican Treasury (on which see chapter Five), recorded on hearsay that there was a dragon tree in the garden of the Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany in Pisa.45 It is likely, however, that the days of the tree in a North Italian city were numbered. Long-lived though they often were, at least if not transported to 48

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Marvels of the Canaries

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

harsh climates, not even the dragon trees of the Canaries themselves could resist the tooth of time indefinitely.The oldest recorded dragon tree, which was twenty metres or more high when Alexander von Humboldt saw it, is that in the gardens of the Irish trader Don Juan Cologán de Franchi, Marqués del Sauzal, in La Orotava,Tenerife, where it stood opposite a pre-conquest palm tree.46 A late eighteenth-century illustration of the gardens by Simon Cattoir, based on a drawing by Sigmund Freundemberg, shows that it was large enough to accommodate twelve guests for a dinner given in honour of Lord Macartney in 1792 on a table set among its branches. A branch of the dragon tree was already broken off by strong winds in 1819, half of what remained was carried off by a hurricane which swept over the island in November 1826,47 and the trunk had been damaged when part of it was taken to the Botanical Museum in Kew, but the tree was finally destroyed by a hurricane in 1867. It is known today from written accounts, from

30 Louis Bouquet, Dragon tree of La Orotava, Tenerife, in 1810, engraving after a drawing by Pierre Antoine Marchais, in Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris, 1810), folio 69.

49

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

31 Dragon tree of Icod de los Vinos.

engravings (illus. 30), and from stereographic photographs taken in 1856 by the British astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth.48 With the assistance of his wife, Jessie Piazzi Smyth, he produced at least seven images of the dragon tree of La Orotava, two of which were published in his book Teneriffe, An Astronomer’s Experiment (1858).49 But the dragon tree belongs to more histories than just the history of botany, botanical illustration and its frustrations. The oldest dragon tree in the world today is the so-called drago milenario in Icod de los Vinos on the north-west coast of Tenerife (illus. 31). Although its exact age is disputed, it is at least 500 years old, and some consider it to be between 900 and 1,000 years old. After the ‘rediscovery’ of the Canarian archipelago in the fourteenth century subsequent to the expeditions from Catalonia, Mallorca and Genoa, there was a growth of interest in the Canaries and their products, including dragon’s blood. Charles de l’Écluse mentions a piece of solidified gum that he received from Peter Garet which was so pure and clarified that he was convinced it must be dragon’s blood.50 Sanguis draconis continued to feature amongst the materia medica down to the seventeenth century.51 As we have seen, the Canaries were often connected with the Garden of Eden or even with Paradise. It is therefore appropriate that 50

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Marvels of the Canaries

32 Michel Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, in Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik (Nuremberg, 1493).

one of the earliest images of a dragon tree is found opposite a date palm in a scene representing Adam and Eve inside the walled Garden of Eden. It is one of the 1,809 woodcuts made by Michel Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff to illustrate the Weltchronik of the humanist, astronomer and physician Hartmann Schedel of Nuremberg (illus. 32).52 This work is one of the best known and most widely disseminated publications of the fifteenth century; first published in 1493, it was issued in editions of 1,000 or more. Landau and Parshall have compared this woodcut from the Weltchronik with a woodcut of the same subject by Stephan Fridolin for a devotional text, the Schatzbehalter, published 51

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

33 Detail of left-hand panel from Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1500, oil on panel.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Marvels of the Canaries

only two years earlier in 1491, to bring out the differences in style,53 but most important for our purposes is that the date-palm and dragon tree of the Weltchronik woodcut have no parallels in the less specific greenery of the earlier print. Another version of the dragon tree in the Garden of Eden can be found on the left-hand panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid and dated to around the year 1500 (illus. 33). Bosch probably spent the whole of his working life in the family workshop in ’s-Hertogenbosch where he received his training; nothing is known of any travels, near or far. Both the theme and the composition of this painting recall the engraving in Schedel’s Weltchronik. Given that Bosch had a fairly extensive knowledge of the literature of his day, it is quite likely that he drew on the German engraving as a source for his representation of the Garden of Eden, including the dragon tree.54 The dragon tree in the engraving to the Weltchronik is not the earliest representation of that tree in European art. Credit for this should probably go to Martin Schongauer.55 An engraving of his dating from around 1470 shows the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, more particularly an episode taken from chapter 20 of the apocryphal Gospel of Mary’s Birth and the Saviour’s Childhood (illus. 34). On the third day of the flight into Egypt, the Holy Family came across a date-palm bearing fruit, but it was too tall for Joseph to reach. The problem was solved when the infant Jesus told the tree to bow its branches. In some versions of the subject, such as a miniature by Jean Colombe from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (fol. 57r), dating from 1485–9, the tree is shown bending of its own accord, as it were; in Schongauer’s print, a group of angels lend a hand.The exotic quality of the Egyptian landscape is conveyed not only by the presence of the date-palm, but also by that of three lizards (‘little dragons’) on the left-hand side of the composition, one running up a tree trunk and the other down it, while a third approaches the trunk from the ground. Perched in the leafy top of the tree is a parrot, another icon of the exotic. But most striking of all is the fact that the trunk and the tree-top belong to a dragon tree in flower. The association between dragons and the Flight into Egypt can already be found in the apocryphal gospel mentioned above. On the first day of the flight, the following episode is related: 53

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

34 Martin Schongauer, The Flight into Egypt, c. 1470, engraving.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Marvels of the Canaries

And having come to a certain cave, and wishing to rest in it, the blessed Mary dismounted from her beast, and sat down with the child Jesus in her bosom. And there were with Joseph three boys, and with Mary a girl, going on the journey along with them. And, lo, suddenly there came forth from the cave many dragons; and when the children saw them, they cried out in great terror.Then Jesus went down from the bosom of His mother, and stood on His feet before the dragons; and they adored Jesus, and thereafter retired.56

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

We find both elements – a dragon and the date-palm – in a carved Flight into Egypt on the façade of the Duomo of Orvieto, in which the dragon is lurking menacingly close to the hooves of the Virgin’s donkey (illus. 35).The work is attributed to a follower of the sculptor Lorenzo Maitani, who had been appointed ‘caputmagister universalis’ of the design and execution of the carvings in 1310, and was carved soon after the Sienese master’s death in 1330.57 Attention has been drawn to the contrast between the lifelike quality of the birds sculpted in the trees and vine tendrils, on the one hand, and the dragon, which seems to have walked out of the pages of a medieval bestiary, on the other.58 However that may be, the presence of both a date-palm and a

35 The Flight into Egypt, sculpted façade of the Duomo, Orvieto, c. 1330.

55

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

dragon in a representation of the Flight into Egypt may have paved the way for the replacement of that dragon with a dragon tree.The Schongauer print, with both dragons and dragon tree, appears as a crucial hinge in this transition. Schongauer’s engraving soon made an impact. It served as the iconographic source for a representation of the theme of the Flight into Egypt painted on the reverse of the left wing of a Flemish triptych of the miracles of Christ, dated around 1492 and now in the National Gallery of Victoria.59 Somewhat later than the Schongauer print, a painting in oils on a panel by a sixteenth-century artist of the Cologne School, now in the Courtauld Institute in London, is based on that print, and also features the dragon tree with a bird in its branches.60 At about the same time that Bosch was painting his dragon tree in the Garden of Eden, Albrecht Dürer included a dragon tree in his version of the Flight into Egypt (c. 1503–5), taken from the series of seventeen woodcuts entitled Life of the Virgin,61 and from now on the dragon tree was to become ‘an almost compulsory item in renderings of the subject’.62 A striking example features in the rendering of the Flight into Egypt in the Book of Hours of Don Manuel António da Holanda, a work that was begun in 1517; made for King Manuel of Portugal, the illustrations of an elephant, rhinoceros and camels in the border painting of the same page betray the monarch’s intense interest in the exotic animals that came from within the expanding borders of his realm.63 In Warburgian spirit, we can note the recurrence of the dragon tree of Icod de los Vinos and Mt Teide in combination with a palm tree and the Three Kings on the Christmas 2005 edition of a Canarian beer label (illus. 36). The dense vegetation of the forest through which the Holy Family moves and the tropical lizards do not seem to have much 36 Combination of dragon tree and to do with Egypt, but they serve to denote a Pico del Teide with the Three Kings setting of a more general and generic type: and palm tree on beer label, Christthe exotic landscape.64 ‘Exotic landscape’ is mas edition, 2005. 56

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Marvels of the Canaries

also probably the best way to describe a Flemish verdure tapestry from around 1600 featuring both a (North American) bison65 and a (Macaronesian) dragon tree.66 Incidentally, it is worth noting that zoological illustration did not always keep pace with botanical illustration: the flora depicted in the large collection of Flemish tapestries dating from around or soon after the middle of the sixteenth century and now in Wawel Castle, Kraków, are closer to reality than the unicorn or basilisk that populate the same works.67 Besides the biblical settings of the Garden of Eden or the Flight into Egypt, the dragon tree is also found in a religious setting in connection with another subject: St John on Patmos.68 In an oil painting by Hans Burgkmair the Elder of 1518, St John on Patmos, a dragon tree appears on the right-hand side of the panel (illus. 37), rendered very accurately except for the small branch protruding on the right to function as a perch. It is not the only exotic element in the composition; among the profusion of European plants, birds and reptiles, both the coconut palm and the South American macaw (Ara nobilis) are equally out of place in a Mediterranean setting (Patmos is a Greek island).69 In none of the three themes considered here, which span the whole bible from Genesis to Revelation, is the presence of a Macaronesian tree appropriate. Its function here, like that of some of the other animals and plants depicted, is to mark out the scene of the composition as an exotic place. Geographical precision is subservient to the creation of a composition in what has been called the exotic genre.70 Each of the themes is of a religious nature and, curiously enough, they are all marked by mobility: the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, the banishment of St John to Patmos. As an exotic marker, the inclusion of the dragon tree within such a theme is functional, not geographic. A later instance of the opposite process, by which the dragon tree is not functional but geographic, can be illustrated by a painting of a non-religious subject that was labelled at Sotheby’s in 2001 as A View of an Italianate Coastline. It has now been identified as a work by William Hodges, artist on board Captain Cook’s second voyage, dating from 1777 and representing, albeit in a topographically inaccurate way, the island of Madeira. The identification rests on the inclusion of a dragon tree in the painting.71 To sum up, whatever function and significance the dragon tree may have held for the Guanche, the aboriginal inhabitants of Tenerife, 57

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

37 Hans Burgkmair the Elder, St John on Patmos, 1518, oil on panel, central panel from an altarpiece.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Marvels of the Canaries

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

its first entry into the world of European images is in a religious (Christian) context. As an extraneous, exotic import into that imagery, its role is not so different from that of, say, a crocodile suspended from the vault of a European cathedral, such as the one that hung, along with an elephant’s tusk, from the ceiling of the Capilla del Lagarto in the cathedral of Seville,72 or the one suspended in the sanctuary of S. Maria delle Grazie, Curtatone (Mantua).73 Only later does it enter the (secular) field of botanical illustration, at the same time as its seeds were entering the collections of European botanists and at about the same time as the earliest princely Kunst- und Wunderkammern were being established in Europe. It may therefore be said to have first entered a religious context and then to have moved on to a secular one. But it would be hazardous to suppose that this move from religious to secular is a fixed pattern, let alone a form of disenchantment of the world. After all, the years around 1470 mark not only Schongauer’s introduction of the dragon tree to Western imagery, but also a watercolour study of peonies whose attribution to the same artist has brought about a small revolution in the study of the early history of illustrations of the natural world: The discovery of this study places in a new light all that was previously believed regarding the observation of nature and the changed attitude of man towards nature, the environment and the universe at the beginning of the Renaissance . . . More than a generation before Dürer, Martin Schöngauer’s study of peonies anticipates the beginnings of modern scientific representations of nature, which until now had been dated around 1500.74 This entirely secular study was thus created by the same artist at more or less the same time as his early rendering of the dragon tree in a religious setting. But it is not that there is something inherently religious about the dragon tree, nor something inherently secular about the peony. Indeed, Dürer appears to have copied the arrangement of the peonies in Schongauer’s watercolour for the peonies that appear in his own drawing of an unmistakably religious subject: the Madonna with a Multitude of Animals (Albertina, Vienna), and Schongauer himself had included peonies, though arranged differently, in his oil painting of 59

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

the Madonna in a Bower of Roses from 1473 (St Martin, Colmar).75 Clearly, these flora move effortlessly from a secular to a religious context and back again. There was nothing definitive or irreversible about either of these moves; there was no progressive ‘disenchantment’ of the world.

60

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

2 Birds that Grow on Trees

In his The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, the English herbalist John Gerard(e), who had a garden in Holborn, wrote about the berries of what he called a ‘strange and admirable tree’ as follows:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

berries, of the bignes of Cherries, of a yellowish colour, round, light and bitter, covered with a threefolde skin or filme, wherein is to be seene, as Monardus and divers other report, the forme of a dragon; having a long necke, or gaping mouth; the ridge or backe armed with sharpe prickles, like the Porpentine; it hath also a long taile, & fower feet, very easie to be discerned.1 Gerard juxtaposed the woodcut of this little dragon inside a berry with the woodcut of the dragon tree that Clusius had published in the first chapter of his Rariorum aliquot stirpium per Hispanias observatarum historiae (illus. 38).2 The Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes, from whose work Gerard borrowed the woodcut of the dragon inside the berry (illus. 39), has more to say about it, or rather, he relates the words of the bishop of Cartagena spoken during a visit by the latter to Monardes: I have brought the fruit of the tree from which they extract dragon’s blood, which is a marvellous thing to behold, because it is like an animal. I wanted to see it, and we opened a leaf of this seed, and when the leaf was open, a dragon appeared, made with such skill that it seemed alive, with a long neck, open mouth, spiny back like a porcupine, long tail, and standing on 61

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

38 Dragon tree and fruit, from John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597).

its feet: certainly, no one who sees it can fail to admire the sight of its shape, made with such skill that it seems to be of ivory. There is no craftsman so perfect that he could make it better.3 In his Latin translation of Monardes’s Spanish text, Clusius added the words ‘by nature’ to the phrase ‘made with such skill’ to remove any doubts about the natural origin of the dragon.4 Monardes goes on to list some of the theories about where the name of dragon’s blood came from, before concluding that the name of the tree must come from the dragon in the fruit: ‘Upon seeing the fruit that it bears, in the form of a dragon, it removed our many doubts and confusions’.5 He intended to sow the seed to see if it would grow in Seville. If dragons could grow inside the fruit of trees, might there not be other cases in which the boundary between animal and vegetable was 62

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Birds that Grow on Trees

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

39 Dragon fruit, from Nicolás Monardes, Primera y segunda y tercera partes de la Historia medicinal, de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales . . . (Seville, 1574).

not respected? In different illustrated versions of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Turk manuscript Tarih-i Hindi-i garbi (‘A History of India and the West’) that was discussed in the introductory chapter, although the work itself emphasizes that it is based on accurate knowledge, we find a tree from which hang the bodies of several naked women like fruits waiting to be plucked – ‘a remarkable subject for the first printed picture to appear in the prudish World of Islam’ (illus. 40).6 Another creature that straddled the boundary between animal and vegetable was the Lamb of Tartary. In his account of ‘the lands and countries that are beyond Cathay’, Sir John Mandeville described ‘a kind of fruit as big as gourds, and when it is ripe men open it and find inside an animal of flesh and blood and bone, like a little lamb without wool’.7 Mandeville was not the first to describe the Tartary Lamb, for the account of the travels in the Orient and in China by Odoric of Pordenone already 63

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

40 Wak-Wak tree with fruit in form of young girls, Tarih-i Hindi-i garbi, manuscript, c. 1580.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Birds that Grow on Trees

mentions a large fruit which, when it matures, opens to reveal a small lamb inside.8 This plant or animal continued to intrigue travellers for centuries.9 Conrad von Uffenbach, a visitor to the collection of Dr John Woodward in London in 1710, was able to admire his Muscovy vegetable sheep.10 Woodward’s great rival Sir Hans Sloane also had a specimen in his collection, which he described to a meeting of the Royal Society in 1698 as deriving from a large sub-arborescent fern.11 Nevertheless, there are entries to the Lamb of Tartary in the catalogue of the exhibition devoted to Sloane in The British Museum in 1994 under both ‘Mammals’ and ‘Plants’.12 Similar to the Lamb of Tartary are the trees that bear wool that Mandeville situates in the land of Bactria.13

the myth of the barnacle Mandeville claimed not to have been terribly impressed by the Lamb of Tartary:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

for in my country, I said, there were trees which bore a fruit that became birds that could fly; men call them bernakes and there is good meat on them. Those that fall in the water live and fly away, and those that fall on dry land die.14 Once again, Mandeville was preceded by Odoric of Pordenone. Though the friar declared that he had not himself seen a Lamb of Tartary, he considered the possibility of its existence to be like that of another creature that was supposed to grow on trees: It is said to be true that in Ireland there are trees above the water whose leaves turn into small birds as soon as they fall into the water.15 These birds, known as barnacle geese, are the subject of a myth that goes back to the eleventh century. In what must be regarded as the locus classicus on the subject, E. Heron-Allen’s Barnacles in Nature and in Myth, the author summarizes the myth as follows: The Myth is subject to a number of smaller or larger variations, but, broadly speaking, it runs that the fruits (or leaves) 65

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

of certain trees, falling into the sea (or on land), become Barnacles (or birds); or that the Barnacles themselves grow upon a tree (or upon a log, or upon ship timbers), and, when developed to a certain point, fall off into the sea and become geese (or ducks).16 He draws on almost three hundred authorities for the compilation of a volume of which he writes in the preface that it ‘has no reason whatever for existence, it serves no useful purpose, and supplies no want, long-felt or otherwise’. Indeed, the spirit of his enterprise is perhaps best captured in the introductory ode: ye ballade of ye barnacle

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

They sought through mazy woods and ways For weeks and months in days agone, Led by the lure of mystic lays That whispered ever, ‘On, on, on!’ No floods might stay their headstrong pride, No earthly ghouls nor fiends of hell: ‘We’ll find or perish first,’ they cried, ‘The Secret of ye Barnacle!’ ‘’Twere well,’ quoth one, ‘if all else fail, We turn our steps some other where – To the Heron-haunts or Allendale, And the Necromancer wonning there.’ ‘Agreed!’ they said, ‘the road lies here’:– And lo! or ere you’d number three, Arose a figure, sage, austere, Y-clad in the robes of wizardrie. ‘Heed not the panelled gems you see – The Drinking Queen and the Fisher Maid – That line my lurid walls,’ said he, ‘The pictured emblems of my trade: Your quest I know – for dreams have told How Odd men would come to where I dwell’: 66

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Birds that Grow on Trees

And then he read from a script unrolled The Secret of ye Barnacle. Heron-Allen’s array of the sources is an invaluable aid to research, even if, amid the author’s ineradicable passion for verifying references and hobby for footnotes, it sometimes becomes very difficult to see the wood for the trees. However, with the exception of a highly speculative excursus on barnacle geese in Mycenaean art,17 Heron-Allen’s account is above all a literary one, detailing the complex ways in which various authorities drew on texts by others to produce their own texts.When he does reproduce illustrations, they are precisely that: illustrations to a text.The aim of the present chapter, indebted as it is to Heron-Allen’s pioneering endeavour, is different. In examining the texts dealing with the barnacle goose and the images of that strange creature contained in the pages of a sixteenth-century Dutch manuscript, the focus is immediately narrowed, and priority will be given to explaining the images rather than entering into the intricacies of the texts and their sources.18 At the same time, like the Lamb of Tartary, barnacle geese were not only written about and illustrated; they were physical objects that could end up in collections. Hence the collecting activities of the author of that Dutch manuscript will have to be included in the discussion as well.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

barnacle geese in the Fish Book of adriaen coenen Barnacle geese seem to have adhered particularly closely to the life and work of a sixteenth-century beachcomber from Northern Europe, the colourful figure of Adriaen Coenen. As his life and work have been sufficiently documented and discussed by now, a brief introduction will be enough at this point.19 Adriaen Coenensz. van Schilperoort was born in Scheveningen on the coast of Holland in 1514 to a fisher man from the same village and a fisherman’s daughter from a neighbouring coastal village. Like most Dutch children, he attended the village school, but that was all the formal education he received. The rest of his education was obtained in practice. He served as an apprentice to the auctioneer of the Scheveningen fish market and worked his way up to become clerk of the auction, wholesaler in dried and fresh fish, official ‘beachcomber’ of a stretch of the Dutch coast in the province 67

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

of South Holland and village dignitary. He spent most of his life in The Hague or Scheveningen, apart from a spell in nearby Leiden between 1576 and 1582, and a few business trips to Flanders, Brabant and the district of Cologne. However, Coenen’s limited geographical radius did not prevent him from being touched by the dramatic political and military events of the early phases of the Dutch Revolt that broke out in the late 1560s. The turbulence of the times affected his financial situation as well as his personal safety, career and collection. During the summer of 1573 he had to flee from freebooting Spanish soldiers and leave his house in Scheveningen, fully expecting to find only the ransacked ruins upon his return. Coenen’s largest work, a 412-folio manuscript known as The Fish Book, written and illustrated in the course of 1577–9 and preserved today in the Royal Library at The Hague,20 is indeed about fish, even if it ranges over a variety of topics that cannot all be linked directly or indirectly with the sea. It is above all the curiosities of the natural world that attract Coenen’s attention: American armadillos and a Brazilian sea monster,21 mermaids, a tuna fish found off the coast of Gibraltar whose body was decorated with ships, and so on. Among these curiosities we find the ‘tree-goose’ (boomgans in Dutch).There is a delightful drawing of these creatures emerging from the fruit of two trees beside a stretch of water (illus. 41) accompanied by the following text: Of birds that grow on trees. Trees standing on the sea-shore in Scotland. These trees bear fruit like apples, some write plums. And the fruit that falls into the water becomes tree geese, while the fruit that falls on the ground wastes away, decays and shrivels.22 The author does not claim to have his information on the evidence of a personal visit to Scotland (though he may have sailed at some time with the fishing boats which left Scheveningen for the northern tracts of the North Sea). Indeed, the words ‘some write’ indicate that his source is a textual one. It is no difficult task to identify his source, for below the illustration we find the following text: In Scotland there are trees which produce fruit conglomerated or enveloped in their leaves: and this fruit, when in due 68

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

41 Tree-goose trees in Scotland, from Adriaen Coenen, Visboock (1577-81), folio 103r.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

time it falls into the water beneath it, is endowed with new life, and is converted into a living bird, which they call the treegoose.This tree grows in the island of Pomonia, which is not far from Scotland towards the North.The ancient cosmographers, especially Saxo Grammaticus, mention this tree, lest you should imagine it to be a figment of modern writers. This text is taken word for word from the immensely popular Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster, first published in 1544, which had run to 46 editions in a variety of languages by 1650.The 1550 German edition, published in Basel, stops at this point, but later editions23 continue with the following text:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

We had once heard that there is a tree in Scotland, which grows above the river bank and bears fruit in the form of geese: and when they approach maturity, some fall by themselves to the ground, and others fall into the water and are cast up on land, and these rot; but those which are covered by the water soon quicken and swim under water, and fly in the air with their feathered wings.When eager to investigate the matter we made inquiries during our visit to King James in Scotland, a sturdy and exceedingly well-built man, we learned that wonders always recede further away, and that the famous tree was not to be found in Scotland, but in the Orkney islands. The author of the Fish Book transcribes this passage in its entirety, as well as its attribution to Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the later Pope Pius ii, from Münster. Dependence on Münster is also evident from the illustration. The tree on the right, whose fruits are at various stages of development, and the group of water birds beneath it, clearly derive from the woodcut that is repeated in the various editions of the Cosmographia (illus. 42).24 At a later point in Münster’s text, the woodcut recurs, this time incorporated in a larger scene illustrating the wonders of the sea (illus. 43). Münster’s goose tree was to provide the standard iconography of the barnacle goose for the sixteenth century, and was repeated in later publications, such as the slightly more elaborate version found in Het Wonderlycke Schadt-Boeck der Historien of 1592 (illus. 44).25 The Münster woodcut is not the earliest representation of a barnacle goose, 70

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

42 Goose-bearing tree, from Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia (Basel, 1552), folio 52.

43 Marine wonders, from Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia (Basel, 1552), detail from folio 1004.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment 44 Goose-tree, from Pierre Boaistuau, Het Wonderlycke SchadtBoeck der Historien (Dordrecht, 1592), folio 34.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

by the way, for there are woodcuts in the herbal compilation known as Hortus Sanitatis (illus. 45 and 46), but the latter follow a different iconographical pattern. The left-hand side of the illustration in Coenen’s Fish Book, depicting the luckless fate of those fruits which fall to the ground instead of into the water, has its basis in the text of the Cosmographia. The iconography is presumably the artist’s own invention in view of the lack of a visual model in his immediate source.

45 & 46 Tree-geese, from Hortus Sanitatis Gart der Gesuntheit (Strassburg, 1536), folio 50v (left) and folio 52v (right).

72

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Birds that Grow on Trees

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The second illustration of barnacle geese in their natural habitat in the Fish Book can be found a few pages further on from the one with which this discussion opened (illus. 47). As in the previous case, the illustration is surmounted by a brief text and followed by a longer extract: Isidore says, as can be found in the Dierenpaleis Chapter 14 in the treatise on the birds, about the barliata, that these are birds which grow out of the wood that stands on the water on the sea-shore. These barliate are birds which grow out of the wood. It is said that they grow on wood or trees called abyetes [silver fir] which stand on the sea-shore, and these trees often keel over into the water and then the wood begins to rot and many green humours and moistures exude from the wood. And when these humours accumulate small birds like larks are formed by the heat of the sun and these are naked and without feathers at first, later they grow and sprout feathers, and they hang with their beaks from the wood and float with the wood in the sea until they fall off, and then they grow strong and attain their rightful shape. Of these birds bishop Jacobus Athonensis says in the Oriental History as it is said in this same treatise: on the sea-shore there are trees on which these birds grow, and they hang with their beaks from the trees and when they are complete and perfect they fall from the trees, they develop and become full-grown, and then they fly like other birds. It is also known in Germany that these birds do not originate by any generative process. Philosophus says: the bird berneca which originates from the wood can be found in some parts of Flanders. Albertus says in the Book of the Nature of Animals that some say that Curbates are birds called treegeese, that they originate and grow out of the green humours which can be found between the bark and the trunk of the trees called abietel. And they say that these birds do not lay eggs or raise their young, but this is very much like a lie because we have seen that these birds which are called tree-geese do lay eggs and nurture their young, and many other people have seen that they lay and hatch eggs, and have offspring. Albertus says that tree-geese are somewhat smaller than ordinary geese and 73

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

47 Barnacle geese, from Adriaen Coenen, Visboock (1577-81), folio 106v.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Birds that Grow on Trees

have a head like a peacock and black webbed feet like a swan in order to swim, and the colour of their back is greyish black and their belly is white.26 In a concluding and separate entry to this section Coenen quotes a text in German:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Among us in England geese can be found which are somewhat smaller than wild geese, black from the neck down to the belly, whose nest or eggs have never been seen by anyone, because they originate by themselves without parents; when a ship or a yard in poor condition after a long time out at sea slowly rots away, it is at first covered with an indeterminate growth, which looks somewhat like small fungi. Gradually these take the shape of birds, grow feathers and then come alive and fly away.They are called brenthe or bermele in English, but Pliny appears to have called them chenalopeces.27 The illustration on this folio shows a type of barnacle goose that does not emerge from the fruit of a tree, but hangs directly from the branch of a tree by its beak. On the right is an upright tree, with birds hanging by their beaks from the trunk and branches.The tree is situated on land at the water’s edge. On the left-hand side of the illustration we see a log floating on the water.28 Two birds are attached to it by their beaks, while a third is detached and swims on the water. This part of the illustration is in conformity with the type of barnacle goose that is a product of spontaneous generation from rotting timbers which float in the sea.29 Elsewhere in his manuscript, in a section dealing with the types of fish to be found in the seas surrounding Ireland, Coenen includes yet another description of the barnacle geese, though this time he refrains from adding illustrations to the text: On tree-geese, which grow out of trees and on their nature. In this land there are many birds which are called berinacien or bernecte, which means tree geese, which nature brings forth against nature. And they resemble domesticated geese except that they are smaller, because they evolve from 75

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

the white wood of trees near the sea and they first become like gum, then the frost makes them stick to the wood enclosed in mussel-shells, and then they hang by their beaks from the trees and stay there hanging until their feathers and plumes have fully grown. And then they either fall into the water or fly away together, all of them. They derive their food from the sap of the wood that grows by the sea (the describer of the strangeness of the things and wonders that exist in Ireland says further). I have further (he writes)30 seen more than a thousand times with my own eyes at least a thousand of these small birds hanging from a piece of wood on the sea-shore enclosed in shells or pods which by now had been warmed. These birds do not lay eggs or hatch them. Nor do they build nests in any corner of the world nor do they mate. Hence bishops and religious men in some parts of Ireland are accustomed to eat these birds at the time of fasting because they are not flesh nor born from flesh.31 To sum up, the pages from the Fish Book under consideration present three types of barnacle goose: the ones that develop from the fruit or leaves of trees; the ones that hang by their beaks from riverside or seaside trees; and the ones which grow on rotting timbers at sea.32 Many of the authorities cited claim to have witnessed the phenomenon with their own eyes, though it should be noted that these claims all refer to the second and third types and not to the geese that are born from fruit or leaves. Albertus Magnus (the ‘Albertus’ of Coenen’s text), who had set down his grave doubts about the existence of any type of tree-geese in his De Animalibus (c. 1256), recorded the verdict ‘all this is completely absurd’.33 He disproved the theory of spontaneous generation from trees by claiming to have seen the geese in question laying eggs and hatching them out. The earliest evidence for an attempt to test the theory of the barnacle goose empirically would appear to be the expedition to the north ordered by Frederick ii, who kept a large menagerie of exotic animals, including camels, dromedaries, elephants, big cats, monkeys, bears, gazelles and a giraffe at his court in Sicily and displayed a keen interest in such matters.34 In one of the earliest treatises on hawking,35 De arte venandi cum avibus, written shortly before 1250, we find a 76

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Birds that Grow on Trees

combination of dependence on Aristotle and other treatises on animals with the results of personal observation. It concludes that the myth of the barnacle goose arose from ignorance about the actual nesting-places of the geese.36 Of course, not everyone enjoyed the same resources for inquiry as Frederick; Gerald of Wales, who claimed to have seen more than a thousand of the small birds, was content to leave the matter at that.37 Some two hundred years later, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini engaged in empirical inquiry into the existence of a goose-bearing tree. This libertine humanist and author of a Latin prose work translated into English as The Tale of the Two Lovers was sent to Scotland in 1435 by Cardinal Niccolò Albergati on a mission whose purpose still remains a mystery,38 and while engaged on this visit to King James he made inquiries about ‘the tree that bears fruit in the form of geese’.39 The answer he received – miracula semper remotius fugere (wonders always recede further away) – conforms to a standard pattern for reports of the extraordinary: they are always located somewhere more remote than the inquirer.40 The empirical urge, if not the ability to satisfy it, was still alive in early modern Italy. In Naples – where Ferrante Imperato complained that he seemed to be at the ends of the earth41 – the elderly botanist, pharmacologist, mathematician and astronomer Nicola Antonio Stelliola, who joined the Accademia dei Lincei of Federico Cesi in 1612,42 must have felt himself to be too far away from Scotland for any direct observation, so he wrote to the famous Antwerp cartographer Abraham Ortelius for fuller information in the hope of being able to resolve the question of whether barnacle geese had two or four feet.43 At the other end of the Italian peninsula, the museum of Francesco Calzolari in Verona was the site of a debate between a professor of natural history at Pisa and his Veronese counterparts on whether barnacle geese should be relegated to the realm of fiction or not; but the discussion centred on no more than the branch of a tree covered with almond-shaped barnacles preserved in the Natural History Museum at Pisa.44 Thus, besides the literary traditions passing through the hands of the late medieval encyclopaedists, we find traces of isolated attempts to confront the account of the barnacle goose, whether substantiated by alleged eyewitness accounts or not, with the results of first-hand inquiry.The Fish Book, as we shall now see, bears witness to the same 77

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

interest. The time has therefore come to move on from Adriaen Coenen’s verbal and visual descriptions of the barnacle goose to the loss of his own treasured tree-goose.

adriaen coenen and his tree-goose

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Adriaen Coenen and his manuscripts were welcome guests at the tables of local dignitaries in or near The Hague. One such patron was Cornelis Suys, lord of Rijswijk (a village near The Hague), jurist and president of the provincial court of Holland. He regularly invited Adriaen Coenen to his home and lent him books on natural history, and was very fond of fish himself. It was during a dinner at his house in the course of the late 1550s or early 1560s that the subject of treegeese was raised. Coenen writes: This Fish Book was often at the house of my lord the president of [the court of] Holland, who took pleasure in it so that it was often at his house. And I frequently dined with him because we enjoyed fishing around in it, which pleased him. And so it happened that I was invited for a meal at his house at the same time as a priest from the monastery of Saint Barbara at Delft. Before we went in to dinner this priest said to me, ‘You have written there about birds which grow on trees, have you ever seen them?’ I said, ‘No, but I write my authors’ [i.e., mention my sources]. Then he said ‘I have one at my place in the monastery.When you come to Delft I will give it to you’, whereupon my lord the president said ‘Aerge,45 this is something that is useful to you’. And he [the monk] told us how he had come by it, and said how it had once occurred that a small barrel containing salted tree-birds had been sent from the east as a present to lady Maria our governess and Queen of Hungary, the sister of our emperor Charles both of blessed memory. And this queen had sent these birds to some monks who do not eat meat; that they might eat these as a refreshment because they had grown in the water and originated from the water. And as he told me further, the Carthusians outside Delft had received some of these birds, one of which they had given to him, and this was 78

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Birds that Grow on Trees

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

the one he gave me when I visited him in Delft. And he entertained me and did me proud, and when I made to go home he called a sister and said to her ‘go to the cellar and there you will find a jar with a salted bird, and bring me this’. And when she had done so, he gave me this bird which was plucked and salted like a salted bird. Its size was like a widgeon. And I kept this bird for a long time in a small net in the smoke, and regarded it as a great rarity and valued it because it had been given to me in friendship. And during the troubles I lost it, as I and others have lost many other things. Almighty God protect us from such troubles in the future, us and other countries. Amen.46 In 1578, when Coenen included this story in his (second, extant) Fish Book, the troubles were by no means over in the Low Countries. As he notes in a postscript to the report on his lost tree-goose, both Spanish and Dutch troops were at that moment despoiling the southern provinces of Brabant and Flanders, the larger part of which was eventually to remain under Habsburg rule. In the province of Holland, too, the political and military situation was precarious. Yet, for the moment, there was no fighting going on in this part of the Northern Netherlands, support for the rebel Prince William of Orange had grown, and there was increasing agreement among the parties in the north on important political and religious issues. It is in this context that the pious wish with which Coenen concludes his postscript should be understood: ‘God will deliver them [the southern provinces] as he has delivered us’. It is only slightly marred by the final sentence:‘Mind you, had they stood by us, their troubles would have been over by now’. The smoked and salted barnacle goose must be counted among Coenen’s major war-time losses.These also included a four-foot shark, which had been dried and stuffed by Coenen himself, together with the 24 young sharks found in its belly; it had been left hanging in his garden when plundering Spanish soldiers approached. Besides being the temporary owner of the rare tree-goose, this inquisitive inquirer into the wonders of the world about him also possessed a branch with nine of the mussel-like excrescences from which the bird was believed to emerge. Both the bird and the branch are illustrated (illus. 48) and accompanied by the following text: 79

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

48 Branch of goose-tree and tree-goose, from Adriaen Coenen, Visboock (1577-81), folio 104r.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Birds that Grow on Trees

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Jan Baen sent me from Wijk op Zee to Scheveningen a stick or a piece of wood, on which had grown and developed many things similar to mussels, as depicted here. And these were hard shells like mussels and somewhat bluish in colour, like the nail of a human thumb or big toe. And inside these shells was something like the feathers of chicks as can be found in eggs with full-grown chicks. And some people said that out of these shells came tree-geese, but others said smaller waterfowl because of the small size of the shells. And yet others said no [i.e., that these shells produced no birds at all], because the size and smallness of mussels or eggs is of a different nature than the size of bird’s eggs found on land, as we do indeed find in other examples of nature.47 However whimsical it may appear to us today, Coenen’s passionate interest in the wonders of nature was not a sudden whim. From his youth, when he was sent by his superior to inspect stranded mammals on the shore, he had been accustomed to take a notebook with him to record his experiences. He kept a record of unusual fish and extraordinary meteorological phenomena; he dissected and dried fish; and he collected shells and popular wisdom connected with fishing and the sea. Coenen continued to investigate fish, collect interesting and rare objects of natural history, and engage in conversation with fishermen, travellers and merchants into his seventies. His connection with the (emergent) world of the universities only began towards the end of his life, when he made contact with a few professors of medicine and natural science at the University of Leiden, which had only been founded in 1575. Among them was the renowned zoologist and botanist Rembertus Dodonaeus (Dodoens), who had been the emperor Rudolf ii’s physician in Prague from 1574 to 1577 and spent the last years of his life (1583–5) as a professor of medicine at Leiden. The pattern of Coenen’s career as a whole, as well as of his approach to the individual objects of his investigations, might be summed up as venit, vidit, lexit – he arrived on the spot, he used his eyes, and he subsequently corroborated (to some extent) his observations by citing textual authorities, aided in this by the fact that this was the period in which the first translations of academic works were beginning to appear in the vernacular, enabling him to make use of the popular German adaptations by 81

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

Cunrat Forer of Gesner’s works on four-footed beasts and fish, as well as German adaptations of Pliny by Johannes Heyden. At the same time, his close and painstaking observations and records – both on the spot and written up or drawn subsequently – of what he observed are evidence of a keen interest in immediate, everyday experience. It would be wrong to assume the preponderance of either the ‘philological’ or the ‘empirical’ approach in Coenen’s case. Besides questions of philology and natural history, the barnacle goose, however, had a wider significance, one which we might call cosmological.48 First, as can be seen from the status of those involved in the debate on the barnacle goose, the nature of the bird (or fish) was a matter of religious concern. If it was a fish, it could be eaten during Lent; if it was a bird, it could not.49 (Apparently nobody suggested that the bird be classified as vegetable, in spite of its growing on a tree.) Already in the twelfth century, Gerald of Wales claimed that bishops and other viri religiosi in some parts of Ireland ate barnacle geese at times of fasting, though he considered that they were wrong to do so. Jacques de Vitry, writing after the holding of the General Lateran Council by Pope Innocent iii in 1215, at which a bull was issued prohibiting the eating of barnacle geese during Lent,50 records that the practice is now forbidden, but the text from Coenen’s Fish Book cited earlier51 indicates that there were still religious orders in the sixteenth century who considered that the barnacle goose could be consumed during Lent.52 This belief was apparently shared by at least one member of the imperial Habsburg family itself, or why else would Maria (regent of the Netherlands from 1530 to 1555), who was suspected of harbouring sympathy for the Lutherans,53 have sent the salted barnacle geese as a present to these religious orders? Ironically, it was at the time of the religious troubles in Holland that Coenen lost his plucked, salted and smoked barnacle goose. The historical context is highly appropriate: his remarks on the religious controversy surrounding the barnacle goose are themselves sandwiched between a reference to ‘the time of the trouble here in our land of Holland’ and a prayer to God Almighty ‘to preserve us and other lands from all such trouble‘. Still, there is no smoked goose without fire. The religious controversy surrounding the barnacle goose is a reflection of a perplexity of a more cosmological kind because it raised the problem of apparent exceptions to ways in which the natural world could be classified. Like 82

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

49 Fish nest, from Adriaen Coenen, Visboock (1577-81), folio 390v.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

the dragon found inside the fruit of a tree, the tree-goose confounded the distinction between animal and vegetable. As we have seen, it was already associated with the Lamb of Tartary by Odoric of Pordenone and in the more influential work of Sir John Mandeville. A similar anomaly is that presented by oysters which appear to grow on trees in Brazil, recorded by the French cosmographer André Thevet, which he attributes to the effect of the tide.54 A case with a much longer tradition (perhaps best known from the account in Virgil’s Fourth Georgic) is the belief in the spontaneous generation of insects, particularly bees, from rotting matter. The most striking parallel to the case of the barnacle goose, however, is its inversion: the fish which makes its nest in a tree (illus. 49).55 To quote once again from the Fish Book:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

trebius . . . is white in winter and black in summer. Trebius is the only fish to nest on the tree Alga and to lay its eggs there.This fish lives in the great ocean, lake or sea and pierces ships with his hard jaw.56 In all of these cases, we are faced with an apparent exception to the ‘natural’ division between what were later to become the respective preserves of zoology and botany; instead, a continuity between the divisions of nature is postulated. Now, as pointed out in the introductory chapter, it is this very classificatory ambivalence which is also characteristic of many of the objects accumulated in collections of curiosities in the sixteenth century and later. Man-made Neolithic arrowheads could be confused with petrified serpent’s teeth. Fossils, bezoars and petrified objects called into question the division between animal, vegetable and mineral.The mandrake seemed to transgress the boundary between plant and human. Shells ‘naturally decorated’ with what seemed to be letters from some exotic alphabet threw the boundary between nature and culture into disarray.57 In particular, the conceit of the sea as a mirror of the land58 introduced an enormous range of ambiguous categories, to which the barnacle goose belongs. As we have seen, Adriaen Coenen was a collector too. An archive source contains Coenen’s request to display both his Fish Book and his collection of dried fish on the market in Leiden in September 1583 for a fee of ‘one oortgen’.59 He even managed to keep a huge turtle alive for a time in a tub of water, but the creature was taken out to be shown 84

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Birds that Grow on Trees

for money and came back dead. Coenen was not the only one to collect such items. After drying the deceased turtle, he gave it to the Lord of Renouteren, a nobleman in Flanders, who was ‘a great lover of rare and curious things to do with fish and birds’.60 The most popular bird in European collections of curiosities was the bird of paradise,61 but the barnacle goose found its way into them too, even though with lesser frequency. In his discussion of barnacle geese in French collections, Schnapper – who even includes a reproduction of a bernacle cravant now in the Museum of Natural History in Bordeaux62 – records that Cardinal Louis of Aragon was presented with two live barnacle geese in the early sixteenth century. He also refers to the presence of barnacle eggs in the collection of P. Trichet and of a piece of wood from which they were believed to be engendered in the collection of Borel. The myth of the barnacle goose was also reflected in the collections of Laurent Joubert, Paul Contant and Nicolas de Peiresc.63 The latter had a box of them from ‘the British or Norman ocean 1606’ and another box from the Mediterranean, while his drawings of various barnacle geese attest to his lively interest in the subject as well.64 In northern Italy, in the very city where learned debate had been conducted in Calzolari’s museum on the question of whether birds could hatch from barnacles, Lodovico Moscardo accepted the presence of goose-bearing barnacles in his confused and encyclopaedic Veronese collection without any qualms.65 Further south, in Rome, Cassiano dal Pozzo’s ‘paper museum’ included an extremely accurate rendering of the goose barnacle.66 In England, the catalogue of John Tradescant’s museum records ‘Barnacles - four sorts’ in the section ‘Whole Birds’,67 and a barnacle tree features in Johnson’s edition of Gerard’s Herball of 1633.68 As late as 1807, a ‘Barnacle Tree, or tree bearing geese, found at sea by Capt. Bytheway’ was on show to the British public in Spring Gardens.69 And in 1829 the Rev. Joseph Carter of St John’s College, Oxford, was recorded with gratitude in the catalogue of donations to the Ashmolean Museum for having provided ‘a fine specimen of the Barnacle Goose’.70 As for barnacle geese in collections by Coenen’s compatriots in the Netherlands, the German philosopher, theologian and jurist Christian Knorr von Rosenroth gives a detailed description (in Latin) of the contents of twelve collections that he visited in Amsterdam in 1663, where he found barnacle goose eggs attached to a plant 85

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

(conchae anatiferae herbae cuidam applicatae, minores) as well as a sucker fish (remora) in the collection of the drapery merchant Volckert Jansz., while the garden of Roetert Ernst contained not only American geese but also a barnacle goose (berniclas).71 The 1659 inventory of the botanical garden in Leiden mentions ‘a goose growing on trees in Scotland’.72 Heron-Allen mentions a Dutch lady who had lived in Java and was in possession of what she had been told was the shell of a shellfish which was transformed into a bird, but this Wonder of the East proved to be no more than a fresh-water mussel.73 In widening the discussion to include not only the textual and iconographical sources, but also reports of actual encounters with barnacle geese, we have moved from the (textual or visual) representation of barnacle geese to their actual presence and presentation in collections of curiosities.74 The general paucity of evidence on the latter aspect makes one painfully aware of the existence of a pressing scholarly desideratum: an up-to-date inventory of barnacle geese in the collections of Europe. How many other branches, eggs, shells and preserved barnacle geese were kept in the collections of curiosities? Only when we are able to answer that question will we have an idea, not only of what people read about this anomalous bird (or fish), but to what extent it left both woods and water to find a final resting place in the repositories of their own treasured possessions.

86

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

3 Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

It has a reddish and rather long coat . . . It is of about the height, bulk, and shape of a cow; however, it has no horns, and has a shorter neck, longer and more pendant ears, thinner and more agile legs, and an unsplit hoof shaped like that of a donkey. In fact, you could say that it partakes of both, and is half cow and half donkey. But it is entirely different from either, in its tail, which is very short . . . and in its teeth, which are more cutting and sharp; however, since it has no means of resistance other than flight, it is not at all dangerous.1 The answer to this riddle-like description is: the tapiroussou.What some of us know as the tapir makes its appearance as one of the fauna of Brazil described (but not illustrated) in the Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil by the Protestant voyager Jean de Léry, who travelled to what was then known as the French Antarctic in 1556 and first published his account of the affair in 1578. Léry’s arch-rival, André Thevet, who had also travelled to Brazil, described the creature in the same terms as half-cow and half-donkey.2 The accounts of the strange fauna of the New World published by Léry and Thevet rapidly influenced their contemporaries in other fields. Ambroise Paré, surgeon and author of a work on monsters and marvels that ran into many editions, included some of Thevet’s woodcuts and information about the strange-looking fauna of the New World in the 1579 and subsequent editions of his Des monstres et prodiges.3 They even appeared in the manuscripts of the humble Dutch beachcomber Adriaen Coenen.4 87

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

It was therefore not so far-fetched for Michel de Certeau to suggest, with special reference to Jean de Léry’s tapiroussou, the existence of a relation of homology between three different fields: the composite creature of Léry’s account; the freak bodies contained in Ambroise Paré’s Des Monstres et prodiges; and the linguistic figure or rhetorical device of the oxymoron.5 This chapter is intended to develop this passing insight of de Certeau in more detail, elaborating it in order to investigate some of the rhetorical devices which seem to be put into operation by three kinds of phenomenon which attracted widespread interest in the sixteenth century: hybrid human and animal forms; the monstrous births illustrated by Paré and others; and the so-called ‘Plinian’ monstrous human races. The monstrous human births described by Paré, Conrad Wolffhart (who Latinized his name as Lycosthenes) and others are individual cases of human babies who were seriously deformed at birth, such as a halfman and half-pig reputed to have been born in Liège in 1109 (illus. 50).6 Such prodigies are already recorded for Babylonian times, and it is known that there was a market of monstrosities in imperial Rome.7 Phlegon, a Greek freedman of the emperor Hadrian, devoted five chapters of his book of marvels to monstrous births, including a child with four heads and a child with the head of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal deity.8 Remarkable births of this kind attracted a good deal of attention in the sixteenth century, particularly in the political and religious turbulence of the mid-century, when some regarded them as portents or omens of

50 Pig with human head, from Conradus Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon . . . (Basel, 1557).

88

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

a change in the status quo that could augur alterations of kingdoms or portend the destruction of princes.9 Later, they were to play a similar role during the English Revolution; ten per cent of newspaper stories during the interregnum were about monsters.10 Compilations like Conrad Lycosthenes’ Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon (Basel, 1557) and Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges appeared, and the end of the sixteenth century saw the publication of one of the largest compilations of such prodigies, the four volumes of translation and compilation by Nicolas Belleforest and his associates, including a large number of woodcuts, known as Prodiges monstreuses (Antwerp, 1594).11 Images of monstrous individuals, however, could also be reinterpreted or recycled to represent monstrous peoples; a publisher like Petri, who issued both Lycosthenes’ work on prodigies and the cosmography by Sebastian Münster, might easily be tempted to recycle woodcuts from one work to the other. Besides these individual prodigies, therefore, there is an equally long-standing category of monstrous human beings, known as the Plinian races from a long catalogue of them in the work of Pliny the Elder.12 These monstrous peoples are an ethnological rather than a biological phenomenon. They go back to the Cyclops of Homer and the earliest Greek poets, but their occurrence in other cultures that are more remote in time and space, including the contemporary non-European peoples investigated by ethnographers,13 indicates that we are dealing with a phenomenon that is virtually universal, whatever effects may have been brought about by culture contact and other forms of diffusion. They feature in European accounts of non-European peoples from the earliest Greek ethnographers onwards, and persist right into the sixteenth century, when separate editions of the book of Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis in which they feature were published.14 Adriaen Coenen could not fail to reproduce them in his Fish Book. Below the heading ‘There are many wonderful monsters in India, as many travellers have described. It is therefore not surprising that there are strange monsters and fish in the sea and lakes’,15 we find a drawing of four different types of monstrous peoples to be found in India, each identified by a caption (illus. 51). They are familiar as the Plinian Sciapod, Cyclops, Acephalos and Cynocephalos, and the drawing – like many of Coenen’s illustrations – is based on woodcuts of these figures in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (illus. 52).16 89

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

51 Monstrous peoples of India (above), Wild Man andWoman (below), from Adriaen Coenen, Visboock (1577-81), folio 19v.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

52 Plinian races, from Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia (Basel, 1550), folio 1155.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

It is during this century, however, that two changes may be noted. First, the strain on credibility that most of these races made led to increasing doubts about their existence, although there was no clear-cut chronological break between belief and disbelief,17 any more than there was one for contemporary astrology between magic and logic: as Aby Warburg wrote, ‘that age when logic and magic blossomed . . . “grafted to a single stem”, is in fact timeless’.18 Second, the large-scale application of the Plinian races as models by which to account for the newly discovered inhabitants of the Americas – a process which began directly with the first printed reports of the New World – meant that they came to occupy a privileged place as representations of the native peoples of the Americas, thereby dislodging them from what had been a firmly European tradition.19 Despite an analytical distinction of this kind between the three categories of hybrids, prodigies and monstrous races, there is a large degree of overlap. This can best be illustrated by an example. In the second part of the History of Ireland by the courtier and cleric Gerald of Wales, in which he mentions the wonders and miracles of Ireland, we find the following account, dating from the second half of the twelfth century, of a man who was half an ox and an ox that was half a man: In the neighbourhood of Wicklow at the time when Maurice fitzGerald got possession of that country and the castle, an extraordinary man was seen – if indeed it be right to call him a man. He had all the parts of the human body except the extremities which were those of an ox. From the joinings of the hands with the arms and the feet with the legs, he had hooves the same as an ox. He had no hair on his head, but was disfigured with baldness in front and behind. Here and there he had a little down instead of hair. His eyes were huge and were like those of an ox both in colour, and in being round. His face was flat as far as his mouth. Instead of a nose he had two holes to act as nostrils, but no protuberance. He could not speak at all, he could only low. He attended the court of Maurice for a long time. He came to dinner every day and, using his cleft hooves as hands, placed in his mouth whatever was given to him to eat. The Irish natives of the place, because the youths of the castle often taunted them with begetting such beings 92

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

53 & 54 Man with hooves (Hippopod), left, and Noseless being, right, from Conradus Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicum . . . (Basel, 1557).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

on cows, secretly killed him in the end in envy and malice – a fate which he did not deserve.20 This half-man, half-ox clearly belongs to the category of hybrids. At the same time, he belongs to the group of creatures who are deformed at birth, the prodigies, containing an allusion to the genesis of these beings in acts of bestiality. And third, the man/ox resembles certain of the Plinian races: the Hippopodes, people with horses’ hooves (illus. 53); and particularly the Amyktyres, a people without noses but with two orifices for breathing that were set above the mouth (illus. 54).21 He thus combines the three analytical categories under review in the present chapter.

the quest for origins There are many different kinds of people in these isles [the Andaman Islands]. In one, there is a race of great stature, like giants, foul and horrible to look at; they have one eye only, in the middle of their foreheads. They eat raw flesh and raw fish. In another part, there are ugly folk without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder; their mouths are round, like a horseshoe, 93

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

in the middle of their chest. In yet another part there are headless men whose eyes and mouths are on their backs. And there are in another place folk with flat faces, without noses or eyes; but they have two small holes instead of eyes, and a flat lipless mouth. In another isle there are ugly fellows whose upper lip is so big that when they sleep in the sun they cover all their faces with it. In another there are people of small stature, like dwarfs, a little bigger than pygmies. They have no mouth, but instead a little hole, and so when they must eat they suck their food through a reed or pipe. They have no tongues, and hiss and make signs as monks do, to each other, and each of them understands what the other means. In another isle there are people whose ears are so big that they hang down to their knees. In another, people have feet like horses, and run so swiftly on them that they overtake wild beasts and kill them for their food. In another isle there are people who walk on their hands and their feet like four-footed beasts; they are hairy and climb up trees as readily as apes. There is another isle where the people are hermaphrodite, having the parts of each sex, and each has a breast on one side. When they use the male member, they beget children; and when they use the female, they bear children. There is another isle where the folk move on their knees marvellously, and it seems as if at each step they would fall; on each foot they have eight toes. There is still another isle where the people have only one foot, which is so broad that it will cover all the body and shade it from the sun. They will run so fast on this one foot that it is a marvel to see them. There is also another isle where the people live just on the smell of a kind of apple; and if they lost that smell, they would die forthwith. Many other kinds of folk there are in other isles about there, which are too numerous to relate.22 This extract from the fourteenth-century Travels attributed to Sir John Mandeville, and illustrations of twenty-one of them from the pages of Hartmann Schedel’s Das Buch der Croniken unnd geschichten (illus. 55, 56) should be sufficient to give an indication of the scope of the monstrous human races.23 Two attempts of very different kinds have been made to tone down their strangeness. 94

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

55 Plinian races, from Hartmann Schedel, Das Buch der Croniken unnd geschichten . . . (1550).

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

56 Plinian races, from Hartmann Schedel, Das Buch der Croniken unnd geschichten . . . (1550).

The first can be characterized as a moralizing tendency, based on the reluctance on the part of Christians to take over pagan deities and other mythological figures as they were. In the early fifth century, Macrobius was already using this method to interpret a serpent’s body with the heads of a lion, a dog and a wolf as a symbol of time past, present and future.24 We might also take the twelfth-century versions of the voyage of the sixth-century Irish monk St Brendan, who encountered the Walscheranden during his travels at sea. Their swinish snouts and dog’s hair were interpreted as signs of their swinish character and disloyalty.25 While the earliest Latin versions of the Physiologus simply 96

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

present the fabulous creatures as they are supposed to be, symbolizing and moralizing interpretations came to gain the upper hand.26 There is little consistency in these accounts. In a thirteenth-century bestiary, the pygmies stand for humility, the giant for pride, the dog-headed Cynocephali for quarrelsome persons, and the people who cover themselves with their lower lip (Sciritae) are regarded as mischievous. In chapter 175 of the Gesta Romanorum, on the other hand, the people with the large lower lip are seen as symbols of justice, the Cynocephali are the preachers who ought to be coarsely clad, and the headless monsters (Blemmyes) are the symbol of humility. In a fourteenth-century Old French version of Thomas of Cantimpré’s Liber de monstruosis hominibus, the Cynocephali are the symbol of calumny, while the people without heads are lawyers who charge high fees to fill their bellies.27 Such interpretative commentary could go to great lengths. A sea monster supposed to have been found on the banks of the Tiber in 1496 is explained by Martin Luther as an allegory of the Pope, in which each limb of this composite creature, like the tapiroussou with which we began, is derived from a different animal – the head of an ass, the right hand of an elephant, the right foot of an ox, the left foot of a griffin’s claw, the scales of a fish, and so on – and stands for a particular aspect of the papal tyranny. The griffin’s claw, for instance, signifies the servants of the secular power of the pope, the canonists who repress the whole world.28 We should note how these moralizing interpretations avoid the issue of belief in the monstrous creatures themselves. The fantastic animals become real, but their fabulous qualities are detonated, as it were, and they come to be seen as bizarre, imaginary representations of less bizarre, real human qualities. The monsters themselves are subordinated to the qualities they symbolize, and to which they are ultimately reduced. Such metaphorical interpretations met with favour in later eras too. Edward Tylor, the author of the influential two volumes of Primitive Culture (1871), suggested that the headless Blemmyes might be seen as a metaphor for what anthropologists still refer to as acephalous units: a people whose head and founder were not known. However, Tylor also put forward a different kind of interpretation when he suggested that the Panotii, a monstrous human race known under a variety of names, whose ears are extremely elongated, might be derived from the actual practices of people who extended their ear lobes by hanging 97

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

weights from them. This second, literal type of interpretation has been put forward in more detail by J. B. Friedman:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Many of the fabulous races did in fact exist. They continue to exist today, though we may find them difficult to recognize from the medieval accounts. A casual glance at our catalog will suggest several examples: the Pygmies can be identified as aboriginal people who are far from imaginary, reports of giants by European travelers in Africa may well describe the Watusi, Amazons reflect the customs of matriarchal societies, the Amyctyrae could have been based upon lip-stretching customs of the Ubangi, the Anthropophagi were cannibals, the Sciritae Tartars, and so on.29 Friedman goes on to suggest that the hereditary lobster-claw syndrome of a tribe in the Zambesi valley, resulting in feet which are divided into two giant toes, may lie behind the Hippopodes and other Plinian races with strange feet or an odd number of fingers. Other fabulous peoples are assumed by him to be the result of a misperception. Baboons or anthropoid apes, he claims, may be behind the tales of barking, dogheaded peoples (an explanation which goes back at least to Albertus Magnus).30 The people with their faces on their chests (Blemmyes and Epiphagi) (illus. 57) are explained by Friedman as the result of a misperception of ornamented shields or breastplates. The noseless and mouthless races who live by drinking through straws may refer to the actual practices of beer-drinking peoples, while the Apple Smellers (illus. 58) were a Himalayan tribe who sniffed onions to ward off mountain sickness.31 As for the Sciopod, who reclines on his back and uses his enormous single foot as a parasol (illus. 59), Friedman seeks to derive it from the perception of yoga practices in India. Rudolf Wittkower, whose 1942 essay ‘Marvels of the East’32 is still one of the basic texts for the study of the Plinian races, also suggested that real observation might sometimes lie at the bottom of a story, adducing the Indian rhinoceros as the basis for the accounts of the fabulous unicorn by Ktesias and Megasthenes. However, he drew the line at Hosten’s onion-sniffing Himalayans, and confined his own account to a study of the transmission of the Plinian races within already existing literary and pictorial traditions. 98

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

57 & 58 Blemmyae (left) and Apple Smeller (right), from Conradus Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon . . . (Basel, 1557).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

In a similar vein to Friedman, but referring more specifically to the animal world, Robert Delort has suggested that misunderstood observations may lie behind some of the fantastic fauna to be found in the bestiaries. The cobra and other snakes may lie behind the myth of the dragon; the female hyena, with its protruding clitoris and two

59 Sciopod, from Conradus Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon . . . (Basel, 1557).

99

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

large labia maiora, might have generated the notion of the hermaphrodite; sea serpents might derive from enormous squids; and giant birds might have engendered belief in the roc. Iguanas and similar creatures may also have helped to populate the bestiaries.33 These modern interpretations have their antecedents. John de Marignolli, a thirteenth-century Franciscan traveller, had already concluded that the legendary races of the East were distortions of actual customs, and explained the Sciapods as the product of poetic liberties taken with Indians who went about naked except for a parasol.34 The Pliny of the sixteenth century, Ulisse Aldrovandi, let loose a variety of explanations to account for different Plinian races, some of which are in a similar vein. For instance, he claimed that the Astomi were simply men with small mouths, a feature which was then exaggerated in travellers’ tales, and that the Cynocephales were a population of monkeys who resembled humans. In other words, some of the monstrous races were to be accounted for as imaginary exaggerations of real phenomena.35 If we move on into the following century, we find a pragmatic approach in the observations of Dr John Bulwer (pioneer of the deaf and dumb alphabet), who suggested a new explanation for the headless Ewaipanoma reported by Sir Walter Ralegh in the Amazon area, who ‘are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts’.36 Bulwer knew of the practices of certain peoples to alter the shape or appearance of the body in some way (tattooing, enlarging ear lobes and lips and so on) and suggested ‘that it is an affectation of some race to drown the head in the breast’ (illus. 60).37 And in the eighteenth century descriptions of such procedures were still to be adduced by Jean-François Lafitau, Ch. M. de la Condamine and others.38 The encylopaedist Jean-Nicolas Démeunier devoted a whole chapter to ‘ways of disfiguring oneself, relative to beauty and terror’, ranging from deformation of the head and forehead to that of the nose, cheeks, tongue, teeth, lips, chin, neck, breasts, testicles and feet.39 Like the moralizing interpretations, this argument in terms of misperception denies the fabulous an existence in its own right. Both types of explanation reduce the bizarre qualities to a more prosaic ‘reality’ that is supposed to lie behind them. The obvious weakness of arguments of the literal type is their limited nature: even if certain isolated Plinian races were explicable 100

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

60 Headless Ewaipanoma and Amazon, from J. Hondius, Nieuwe Caerte van Guiana (Amsterdam, 1599).

in this way, it is unthinkable that all of them could possibly derive from a misinterpretation of what is actually observed. The universality of the Plinian races excludes such an explanation.40 Second, the arbitrariness of such an explanation is further emphasized by the geographical obscurity and remoteness of the examples cited: it is hard to believe that a group of people who were only discovered in the Zambesi valley in the late twentieth century could function in any way as the basis for representations which go back to Pliny and even earlier. Third, the attempt to ‘read off ’ the unfamiliar from the familiar fails to call into question the unwarranted presuppositions which may lie behind the latter: how are the Amazons to be explained as a misinterpretation of matriarchy when the very existence of matriarchy 101

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

itself is questionable? Or to claim that the Anthropophagi are simply cannibals when the issue of whether cannibalism as such exists at all is a controversial one? We may therefore draw the provisional conclusion that the origins of the Plinian races and the beasts of the bestiaries are not to be explained in terms of a faulty perception of some less fantastic reality. Instead, their origins should be sought in the work (and play) of the imagination itself. The Bolognese cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, who was a friend of the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, advised painters who represented monsters to locate them in distant places, since to represent them at all was to conjure them into existence, and once created, such images could go on to live a life of their own.41 The same message was given a more popular form in a rhyme by the Dutch beachcomber Adriaen Coenen:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

For as the scholars opine The work of Leviathan is of the mind, Not just a dragon or fish of the sea. Hence his image may not be made by me.42 It is here, in the capacities of the human imagination, that the site of the generation of the monstrous races is situated. Sometimes their genesis has a purely linguistic character. For instance, a number of the monsters described in ancient Egyptian sources are simply derived from the additive nature of hieroglyphic script. The cumulative way in which a hieroglyph could be composed meant the possibility of accumulating different features within a single unit, producing as its result the monstrous form known as the hybrid. The naturalness of this linguistic process goes some way to explaining the fact that these creations were not in fact seen to be monstrous by the Egyptians themselves.43 Another case in this connection is the horse called Bucephalus, which belonged to Alexander the Great. In the works of the historians of Alexander, as well as in Pliny, the name Bucephalus (which means ‘ox-head’) is derived from an ox-head branded on the horse’s flank. In the early third-century compilation by Solinus – a work that was widely read in the Middle Ages – this derivation of the name is suggested, but the author also puts forward two other explanations for the 102

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

name: either it was derived from the grim look which the horse cast, or from the fact that the horse had the (miniature) horns of an ox.44 As a result, certain manuscripts of the Alexander legend and some of the illustrations to them present us with a hybrid horse with an ox’s horns, whose origins are thus purely linguistic.45 To turn from ‘imaginary’ beasts to the Plinian human races, orthographic confusion and faulty etymologies were sufficient to bring a host of new races into being. For instance, the Senophales, Grammates and Belues mentioned by Bartholomaeus Anglicus bear a striking orthographic resemblance to the Cynocephales, Garamantes and Blemmyes of the ‘regular’ Plinian tradition, but Bartholomaeus refuses to make the identifications, thereby creating three new races at one fell swoop. An Indian tribe described by Pliny is said to be clad in a ‘down of leaves’. In the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, however, they are described as being like feathered birds. The confusion is a linguistic one: the common Greek source from which both Pliny and Gellius are drawing must have wavered between ptílon (feather) and pétalon (leaf).46 There is a similar oscillation in the manuscripts between monocolus (‘one-eyed’, from the Latin oculus) and monocolos (‘one-legged’, from the Greek kolos), which gives us the choice of the one-legged Sciapod or the oneeyed Cyclops. The long-living Macrobii of Pliny become figures of tall stature in Isidorus and Honorius. And while some pictorial manuscripts, as well as the famous twelfth-century tympanum at Vézélay, show a Plinian race with fan-like ears, a different manuscript has snake-like ears wound around the arms: the two different pictorial types have their origin in different translations by Greek authors from the Sanskrit.47 The list could be extended.48 It should not be supposed that we are simply replacing the argument against a misinterpretation of perceived reality with an argument in terms of linguistic misinterpretation. But what should be made clear is that these monstrous figures are not the product of an act of observation; it is a prior conceptualization of the world which proceeds to define the objects contained within it. But at this stage we have not yet defined what it is that makes them monstrous. It is therefore necessary to consider the question of typology in more detail.

103

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

typologies The various traits of the Greek and Roman accounts of the monstrous human races have been grouped by Friedman under the headings of food and dietary practices; the possession of articulate language; the forming of villages and cities; the practice of the arts of urban life (law, social intercourse, worship, art, philosophy); and the existence of industry.49 These traits are cultural traits. The scheme by which Herodotos classified the ‘savage’ peoples at the extremities of the known world lays down most of these features already. He distinguishes between vegetarians, those who live on raw fish and raw meat, those who practise a restricted anthropophagy, and those who are downright cannibals. In congruity with this spectrum is a geographical scheme according to which the furthermost regions are the most ‘savage’.With regard to sexual behaviour, Herodotos effects similar gradual transitions from the droits de seigneur of the king, the droits de seigneur of all the guests at a wedding, and the promiscuity of women, to an unbridled sexuality and generalized promiscuity. These scales also accommodate gradations in the degree of agricultural development, religious development, the use of tools and precious metals and political organization.50 Though Herodotos does not do so, we might easily accommodate language within this scheme: a lack of articulation at the dietary, sexual or other levels might be supposed to indicate a lack of linguistic articulation. If we try to accommodate the Plinian races to these categories, we can note the stress on dietary practices for the Anthropophagi, Pamphagi, Agriophagi, Cynamolgi, Oeonae, locust eaters, turtle eaters, fish eaters, Astomi or apple-smellers and straw-drinkers. The lack of articulate language arises in the case of monstrous races like the speechless men, the Kynokephaloi, who can only bark in some accounts; the bat-like cave-dwellers of the African interior, who live on snake meat; and the Atlantes, who have no names; as well as those like the Astomi and straw-drinkers who obviously lack speech altogether. The Donestre, on the other hand, pretend to speak the language of any traveller they meet. Some of the races have weapons (Kynokephaloi, maritime Ethiopian archers) or hunt with dogs (bearded women). As for religion, the Augilae of Africa have an infernal religion, while the Bragmanni have a developed religion or philosophy. As for sexual customs, the wife-givers give their wives to any traveller who stops among them. 104

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

The ‘inverted’ Kynokephaloi of Thomas of Cantimpré are sexually importunate, and the monstrous races depicted on the frescoes from around 1500 in Råby Church, Denmark, exhibit an unmistakable sexual vitality, no doubt symbolizing un-Christian vices. Definition of the monstrous human races in terms of cultural practices is always bound to run up against problems in the definition of borderline cases and ethnocentrism, since any attempt to go beyond mere description necessarily involves questions of interpretation that created severe semantic difficulties for the first would-be ethnologists.51 A case in point is that of the Anthropophagi: within the classical sources, this is a relatively well-defined ethnic group, situated in a variety of geographical locations but always clearly definable in terms of the diet of human flesh. Problems arose when the Mediterranean image of the Anthropophagi was mapped onto the Amerindian peoples of the extended Caribbean who first appear as caníbales in Columbus’s entry for 23 November 1492. The term is sometimes a purely geographical term, indicating those people who inhabited the island called Caniba. Or it may be an ethnic term, los caníbales. Soon, however, its dominant meaning became ‘those who are hostile and eat human flesh’, as the classical Mediterranean paradigm asserted its superiority within European discourse on native America.52 The salient characteristic of many of the Plinian races which is less open to such vagaries, as was pointed out more than a century ago,53 is their physical appearance. After all, there are certain limits to the ways in which the physical appearance of the human body may be modified without doing extreme violence to its humanity. It may thus be possible to present a harder classification of these physical variations, thereby clarifying the ways in which the image of the other is constructed in terms of the structure of the human body.54 While taking heed of Kappler’s warnings about the risks of trying to impose any classificatory scheme on such elusive beings,55 it may nevertheless prove valuable to attempt some kind of provisional typology to serve analytic purposes. The simplest typology is that suggested by Cl. Lecouteux: Separated from the natural order of things and creatures, monstrosity assumes several forms: enlargement or diminution of existing beings, absence or excess of certain organs, hybridation 105

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

by the attribution to a single subject of members belonging to different species than its own.56

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

As he goes on to point out, however, even a physical typology of this kind is relative.What is the dividing line between normal and gigantic stature, for instance?57 Thus ‘each society establishes the standards of human monstrosity’.58 Denis Diderot suggests a typology which goes some way to explaining the mechanisms involved. In his Dream of D’Alembert (1769, first published in 1830), Diderot explains fabulous creatures such as the Cyclops as a result of mutations in the bundle of threads which comprises the human organism. This bundle constitutes the original and first difference of all animal species.59 There are three mechanisms which Diderot names: suppression, duplication and combination. That is, there are monsters through lack of some essential feature, or through the hypertrophy of some organ; through an excessively large or excessively small stature or life-span; and there are hybrids. If we apply these three categories to the monstrous human races, we derive from them both a principle of classification and a model of internal logic. In the first case, suppression, we deal with lack or loss: the lack of a mouth (Astomi), the lack of a nose (Sciritae, straw-drinkers), the lack

61 & 62 Arimaspi (left), and Four-eyed Ethiopian (right), from Conradus Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon . . . (Basel, 1557).

106

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

of an eye (Cyclops) (illus. 61), the lack of a head or neck (Blemmyae), the lack of a breast (Amazons), the lack of a leg or foot (Monocoli and Sciopodes). Diderot’s second category, duplication, leads to the monstrous races with four eyes (maritime Ethiopians) (illus. 62), or the eight fingers and toes of the Pandae. It can also be seen in the six-armed people of the Alexander romance (illus. 63), referred to by John Bulwer as ‘Bracchiall Redundancy’. More generally, in the form of excess it includes the protruding lower or upper lip of the Amyctyrae (illus. 64) and the enormous foot of the Sciopodes, the Androgini of Africa who have genitals of both sexes, the bearded ladies and hairy men and women, the excessively large giants and excessively small pygmies, and the enormous ears of the Fanesii or Panotii. Third, we have the combinations of displaced elements, such as the feet of the Antipodes (illus. 65) and of the Abarimon ‘whose feet are turned back to front’,60 the displaced eyes of the Epiphagi and Blemmyae. More extreme cases of displacement involve the displacement of organs across species, as in the dog-headed races (illus. 66), the owl-eyed Albanians, the horse-footed Hippopodes (illus. 67), the goat-footed Pans. In combination, we have composite figures like the dog-headed Abominable or the pig-headed Walscheranden, who combine features of different animals in one being.

63 & 64 Six-armed man (left), and Nigritae (right) from Conradus Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon . . . (Basel, 1557).

107

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

65 & 66 Antipodes (left) and Cynocephalos (right), from Conradus Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon . . . (Basel, 1557).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

As we see, the three mechanisms elaborated by Diderot take us a long way towards grouping the physical peculiarities of the monstrous races in a systematic way. The fibres of Diderot also have the advantage of providing a structural passage from the monstrous races to the individual anomalies, a transfer which Isidorus of Seville had already

67 Centaur, from Conradus Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon . . . (Basel, 1557).

108

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

made more inductively in his Etymologiae. Clearly, the monstrous births recorded already in Babylonia, of babies with no mouth, no nostrils, or six toes on each foot, conform to Diderot’s scheme in the same way as the monstrous races do. So far we have left hybridation out of account. Here Kappler establishes the following distinctions: hybrid monsters composed of several animals; human/animal hybrids; and the extreme case of creatures consisting of human, animal and inanimate traits.61 The most elaborate typology of hybrids, however, is that presented by L. Freeman Sandler in a study of English Gothic marginal illustration.62 First is the sequential hybrid, composed of two or more sections, each of which is of a distinctly different kind.We might take as an example the Walscheranden of the voyage of St Brendan, who had the heads of swine, the teeth of wolves, the hands of men, the feet of dogs and the necks of cranes. Second is the bifurcated hybrid, with one head attached to two bodies, with its corollary in the third type, consisting of two heads attached to a single body (illus. 68).

68 Siamese twins, from Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicorum (Nuremberg, 1493).

109

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

69 Profile heads facing in different directions, from Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicorum (Nuremberg, 1493).

The fourth mode of hybrid construction involves a shift in orientation. Profile heads face in different directions (illus. 69),63 sometimes with a third head in the middle facing frontally (illus. 70), or the sequential segments of the body are in a reverse relation to one another. The fifth mode is that of displacement of body organs from their usual position to a novel one. And sixthly, there is the kind of hybrid characterized by absence or excess. For instance, the trunk of the body might be eliminated, leaving a head resting directly on a pair of legs. Alternatively, there may be a proliferation of organs, as in the case of the seven-headed Antichrist. As can be seen, these six modes are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, they bear a number of points of resemblance to the typologies already discussed. For example, bifurcation and its corollary (modes 2 and 3) might be seen as forms of lack or of excess: the lack of a second 110

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

70 Filippo Ferroverde, Triple-headed human-animal hybrid, from Lorenzo Pignoria’s appendix to Vicenzo Cartari, Imagini delli Dei de gl’Antichi (Venice, 1647).

head to match the twin bodies, or the lack of a second body to match the twin heads. The fourth mode – the shift in orientation – is really little more than an ‘optional extra’ to the first mode of sequential combination. And the fifth mode (displacement), a shifting of things from their normal position, is closely related to the first mode as well, which might equally well be characterized in terms of a shifting of parts of different species from their normal, discontinuous positions. In short, the elaborate typology of hybridation proposed by L. Freeman Sandler seems equally compatible with Diderot’s system of suppression/duplication and combination/displacement, which would then yield a means of approaching the monstrous human races, the individual monstrous births and the monstrous hybrids from within the same typological frame. By stressing the range and coherence of this typology, we are far removed from the preoccupations of whether a monstrous race is 111

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

imaginary or not. By making the detour via the typology of the body, we see how the Plinian imagination uses reflection on the limits of the body to construct its images of the other.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

tropologies The typologies discussed above may help us to understand the composition, the mechanics and the generation of the figures in question. But what effects do such figures produce? What rhetoric, what tropologies do they deploy? For a physical portrait of such a being we can quote the composite figure of the giant herdsman in the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes: he is a peasant who looks like a Moor, he is extremely ugly and hideous, and is seventeen feet tall. His backbone is long, but twisted and hunched. His forehead is wider than two espanz (that is, two hand-spans), a detail which serves to stress his reality, since he can be measured in a recognizable way. The portrait is further composed of metonymic animal comparisons: his head is bigger than that of a horse or any other animal, he has the ears of an elephant, the eyes of an owl, the nose of a cat, the mouth of a wolf and the teeth of a wild boar. Contrary to appearance, however, he is human and is able to speak.64 In ancient Greek literature this technique of metonymic composition is at least as old as Herodotos, who describes the Egyptian hippopotamus and crocodile in a similar way.65 For an example from early Greek art we could take the type of the sea monster known as the ketos, with the head of a lion, snake or dog, the legs (if any) of a lion, the ears of a griffin (itself a hybrid), the fins and tail of a fish, the mane of a seahorse, the nose of a pig or bear, and the corrugated snout of a crocodile.66 It is a recurrent feature in medieval bestiaries too. For example, in his Historia Orientalis, the first of three books intended to provide a history of Jerusalem, Jacques de Vitry catalogues a number of marvellous animals that are to be found in the East,67 although his work provided models for the first observers of American flora and fauna. De Vitry’s rhinoceros has the head of a stag, the body of a horse, the tail of a pig and the feet of an elephant, and differs from them all in that it also has a horn. The manticora has the face of a man, the body of a lion and the neck of a serpent, but its three rows of teeth, vermilion colour, piercing whistle and remarkable velocity distinguish 112

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

68

it from all three. The fastest of these creatures is the ceucroquota, with the body of an ass, the back of a stag, the feet and loins of a lion and a human voice. As for the onocentaurus, it is ‘a beast resembling a monster, with two forms and one nature: it has the head of an ass and the body of a man’.69 In a theory already contested by the Roman poet Lucretius,70 such hybrids are supposed to be the result of the promiscuous mating of humans with animals. In a work attributed to Albertus Magnus, the Secreta Mulierum, monstrous births are taken to be due to the adoption of ‘unnatural’ sexual positions during intercourse, intercourse during menstruation or bestiality (whether in thought or in deed).71 Similarly, in his description of the onocentaurus, a beast with the head of an ass and the body of a human (or vice versa),Thomas of Cantimpré wondered whether such a creature was a part of the creation of the world; was it a divine or a diabolical creation? Or was it a secondary product, the fruit of intercourse between humans and beasts?72 In a remarkable chapter of Jean de Léry’s account of his sojourn in Brazil, in which he records a bilingual dialogue in French and in the language of the Tupinamba, he refers to the tapiroussou simply as ‘an animal so named, half donkey and half cow’.73 But this part-donkey, part-cow is neither: Léry’s tapiroussou is an example of a composite creature consisting of features that are drawn from different animals and brought together in what we might call a metonymic creation. Such composite creatures partake of the nature of a number of beasts by metonymy, in that a part of the beast (a horn, for example) stands for the whole beast. The resulting figure defies classification: it is not a cow, nor a donkey, nor anything except a tapiroussou. Paradoxically, thus, the combination of clearly attributable features of different animals leads to a composite being which is itself incapable of attribution. It cannot be placed within any existing scheme. It refers only to itself. In some of the examples from de Vitry, we can note the combination of human and animal attributes. This features in de Léry’s list of Brazilian fauna too: the Hay (sloth) is the size of a spaniel, has the face of a monkey, resembling that of a human, the belly of a sow, the coat of a black sheep, and the hairy legs of a bear. It was further believed to live on air, as it was never observed in the act of eating.74 One of the earliest published texts on American fauna, the Lettere sul Nuovo Mondo written by the Venetian ambassador Angelo Trevisan in Granada, 113

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

Spain, in 1501, describes the opossum in a similar way: ‘It has the body and muzzle of a fox, the tail and back feet of a monkey, the front feet of a man, the ears of a bat.’Trevisan saw the dead animal, which Yáñez Pinzón brought to Europe from Brazil, in Granada. The king and queen of Spain were persuaded to put their fingers inside the pouch and wonder.75 The mode of construction of such composite creatures has been described as follows: ‘To describe an unfamiliar creature, it is necessary to dismantle it piece by piece and to relate each of these pieces to a being which is already familiar; such a method inevitably results in a composite monster’.76 The accretion of different elements taken from different species is thus a form of condensation, as they are clustered together in one figure. A related but distinct form is that of the metamorphosis, in which a creature goes through various transformations over a period of time. If we were to compress the time span, the result would be such a composite creature. In other words, a metamorphosis might be seen as displacement of the elements of a composite creature over time. Condensation and displacement not only lead us back to the fibres of Diderot. They take us further in the direction of rhetorical figures because of their linguistic equivalents: metaphor and metonymy. We might describe the hybrids as metonymic beings, participating as they do in a variety of different realms, and standing for them. Condensation and displacement, as we have seen, also feature in the typology of the Plinian races. This is hardly surprising, as there is no hard and fast distinction between the separate Plinian races themselves, and they too can result in combinations. For instance, the single foot of a reclining Sciapod might be reversed, thereby making him an Antipode-Sciapod. The savage wild man of the woods in the Welsh narrative of Owein (included in the Mabinogion) is one-eyed (like the Cyclops), one-legged (uniped) and single-handed.77 Another example is indicative of the kinds of problems of interpretation that arise in this connection: when the archaic Spartan poet Alkman mentioned the webbed-feet Steganopodes,78 was this a separate race from the Sciapodes, with their gigantic parasol-like feet? And if so, are these the web-footed Sciapods whom we find in the illustrations to the Old French version of Thomas of Cantimpré, in Conrad Megenberg’s Book of Nature, and in the texts of Bartholomaeus Anglicus and the Herzog 114

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

79

Ernst? In the New World, Edmundo Magaña has shown how the master of the woods, commonly known as curupari or curupira, may attract a wide variety of features deriving from separate Plinian races and combine them in a single being who is a dwarf lacking an anus, lacking joints, as an Antipode, as a Cyclops, and so on.80 From these examples we can see that some Plinian races tended to confusion more than others, and that some had a wider circulation. The hermaphrodite and the Artabatites, for example, are very rare in medieval German literature,81 whereas the uniped and the Cyclops are much more popular. In the application of the Plinian races to the New World, there is also a marked preference for certain types: Amazons, giants, the Blemmyes and the cannibals figure more prominently than others.82 Can we detect other patterns with particular reference to hybrids? In other words, can we trace various patterns by which greater or lesser degrees of alterity are produced? This might be a way of indicating the rhetorical force of certain monstrous tropes. First, we can detect preferences for certain patterns, deviations from which lead to a heightened degree of monstrosity. For instance, with the exception of the Minotaur and of Medusa, Greek human/animal hybrids tended to have a human head and an animal body,83 while the best-known of such hybrids in the Middle Ages are the Cynocephales.84 The reverse is very rare, which is why Freeman Sandler sees a heightened degree of monstrosity in a hybrid from the Luttrell Psalter where ‘a bovine-humanoid head and a lizard-like body end in the exposed posterior of a crawling human being’.85 Second, the elements which are combined in a hybrid composite may be individually more or less monstrous. For instance, we find (rarely) two-legged Sciapodes: those with webbed feet in the Herzog Ernst have two feet.86 The overwhelming majority of Sciapodes, however, are one-legged, thereby rendering them more monstrous than their biped counterparts. There is a third way in which alterity can be heightened, which we might call ‘laying it on thick’. For instance, the unilateral figure discussed by the anthropologist Rodney Needham is a personage consisting of only one side; consequently the figure has only one eye, one arm and one leg, all on the same side.87 In Plinian terms, this is a combination of one-armedness with features drawn from the Cyclops and the Uniped. To take another example, the Wild Man and Wild Woman of 115

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

71 Sylvestres, from Conradus Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon . . . (Basel, 1557).

popular European tradition are, strictly speaking, distinguishable from the Plinian races in that they represent a domestic as opposed to an exotic other.88 However, various features of the Wild Man and the Wild Woman, such as their hairiness (illus. 71), are sometimes used as optional extras to enhance the monstrosity of certain hybrids. In a similar fashion, the Plinian race of the Anthropophagi is soon diluted. It is particularly in the context of European representations of the New World inhabitants that we see the trait of cannibalism arbitrarily and massively applied to Amerindian peoples who are already distanced from Europe in terms of such Plinian races as the giants, Cynocephales, Amazons and Blemmyes. Fourth, alterity can be heightened by the use of the rhetorical device of oxymoron, to which Michel de Certeau has drawn attention in this connection.89 This exception to the world of similitudes famously described by Foucault90 juxtaposes two elements drawn from different orders that contradict one another. Linguistically, oxymoron is of the type festina lente (‘make haste slowly’). Renaissance iconography devised a huge variety of visual illustrations of this maxim: a dolphin and anchor, a dolphin and tortoise, a sail and column, a butterfly and crab, a falcon and clock-weights, a remora and arrow, an eagle and lamb, a blindfolded lynx and innumerable other emblematic combinations.91 116

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

These Renaissance emblems show how the structure of the oxymoron can affect both linguistic figures and visual illustrations. To take another example, the bodies depicted in compilations of monstrous births, such as Ambroise Paré’s Monstres et prodiges (1573), share the structure of the oxymoron in their combinations of discordant elements. The tapiroussou described by Jean de Léry or the creatures painted by Hieronymus Bosch, seem to follow the same rules of construction. Some of the hybrids marked by ‘dual orientation’92 belong here, as well as those with a head at either end of the body. This combination of mutually opposed elements produces a special effect: unthinkable in itself, it points outside itself to a third term whose absence is created by the impossible juxtaposition. The result is opacity – the inscrutable message cannot be decoded, hence the oxymoron juxtaposition has a deictic value. In pointing away from itself, it produces the other as an opaque, unknowable – and thereby radically other – other. Fifth, we can add the sheer weight of numbers. While the oxymoron involved the parataxis of two mutually opposed features, the paratactic order itself can be extended indefinitely. The Yale Psalter offers ‘several cases of creatures with as many as five different heads, including squawking, predatory birds and grotesque human caricatures, some with knobby noses, some with hooked noses, some with projecting tongues, some open-mouthed and vomiting’.93 The sixteenth-century sources provide a wealth of this kind of composite creature, whose body is composed of elements taken from different animals (illus. 72). One of the most persistent of these types is the papal monster to which Luther devoted so much attention (illus. 73). This image goes back at least to a representation of the idol Dagon in the 72 Composite creature ‘from Tartary’, from Conradus Lycosthenes, fourteeth-century Concordantiae Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon . . . (Basel, 1557). 117

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

73 Composite creature ‘discovered in Rome in 1496’, from Conradus Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon . . . (Basel, 1557).

Caritatis of Ulrich of Lilienfeld.94 It recurs in a marine version in other sixteenth-century representations. Finally, the maximal stretching of the limits of alterity is to be found in the compositions of artists like Giuseppe Arcimboldo or Hieronymus Bosch, in which inanimate objects are added to the range of elements from which a selection is made, such as the combined knife blade and pair of human ears in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.95 Of course, there were precedents. The Gothic marginal illustrations frequently feature the sequence of human to animal to leafy plant,96 but Bosch goes even further in extending the range to include man-made artefacts like knives.97 We might compare a shift which took place in fourteenthcentury France in the conception of the tortures of Hell, in which torture by natural objects or demons tended to be replaced by torture by man-made artefacts such as knives and cauldrons, while hanging from a tree was replaced by hanging from the man-made gallows.98 The maximal extension of the system of hybridation by Bosch enables us to enunciate the formula for the production of maximal alterity: the maximum number of elements drawn from maximally disparate origins, combined in a system of maximal disorientation with a maximum of disruption with regard to existing conventions. 118

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

By now we have come a long way from the attempts at a tidy classification of the distinct realms of the human, the zoological or botanical, and the inorganic.While the tree-goose or the dragon tree create confusion on the borderline between two categories – the animal and the vegetable – the production of maximal alterity seems to coincide with maximal confusion. This chapter concludes with a brief look at two cases, one from the early modern period and one from the nineteenth century, to illustrate two different responses to the hybrid.

the madness of the prince of palagonia In the Sacred Grove at Bomarzo, in the province of Viterbo some seventy kilometres from Rome, an inscription (illus. 74) invited the visitor:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

You who mistakenly travel through the world To see great and astonishing marvels, Come here, where there are terrifying faces, Elephants, lions, bears, ogres and dragons.99

74 Inscription, Sacred Grove, Bomarzo, Italy.

119

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

75 Ogre, Sacred Grove, Bomarzo.

At first sight, the intention seems to be to horrify or to astonish, and indeed many of the sculptures in the wood do exactly that. But behind this invitation to marvel at the sensational, the inscriptions and sculptures were the vehicles of more sophisticated ideas. For instance, above the gaping mouth of a monster (illus. 75), an inscription – now only in a fragmentary state, but which it has been possible to reconstruct – contains the invitation ‘Abandon all thought you who enter’. The reference to Dante is obvious – the famous words ‘Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate’ inscribed above the gate of hell – but the substitution of ‘thought’ for ‘hope’ gives the phrase a completely different twist, turning it into an invitation to be carefree in this garden of delights.100 Similarly, while the gaping mouth modelled on the jaws of hell seems to have sinister connotations, and the stone table and bench inside have a funerary aspect in that they recall the Etruscan tombs located nearby,101 the injunction to abandon all thought becomes an invitation to sit down and enjoy a picnic.Yet without the ability to read and decipher these inscriptions and their allusions, the invitation to 120

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

enjoy a state of bliss would go unheeded. In short, the play of literary allusion and visual seduction makes subtle and contradictory demands on the visitor, calling for both the use of the intellect and the suspension of the intellect. This was just the kind of game that would have appealed to Goethe after he had moved on from the Sturm und Drang of Werther and was finding a new, classical voice for himself in Rome in 1786. But when he went to Sicily and visited the villa of the Prince of Palagonia in Baghiera, outside Palermo, he faced the following difficulty: When a person is expected to describe some absurdity, he is always at a loss, because however great his love for the truth, merely by describing it, he makes it something, whereas, in fact, it is nothing that wants to be taken for something.102 He went on to present a list of what the Prince had ‘perpetrated in his madness’:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Human beings. Beggars of both sexes, men and women of Spain, Moors, Turks, hunchbacks, deformed persons of every kind, dwarfs, musicians, Pulcinellas, soldiers in antique uniforms, gods and goddesses, persons dressed in French fashions of long ago, soldiers with ammunition pouches and leggings, mythological figures with grotesque accessories; for instance: Achilles and Chiron with Pulcinella. Animals. Only parts of them; a horse with human hands, the head of a horse on a human body, deformed monkeys, many dragons and snakes, every kind of paw attached to every kind of body, double heads and exchanged heads.103 Goethe concluded by asking the reader to: imagine similar figures multiplied ad infinitum, designed without rhyme or reason, combined without discrimination or point, pedestals and monstrosities in one unending row, and the painful feelings they must inspire, and you will sympathize with anyone who has to run the gauntlet of this lunacy.104 121

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

76‒78 Grotesque sculptures, 1749,Villa Palagonia, Baghiera, Sicily.

Goethe’s newly won classical sensibility clearly baulked at figures that in his eyes did not represent anything, or – what was worse – brought something monstrous into being by representing it (illus. 76, 77, 78). But sensibilities were to swing in the opposite direction again within a century or so. The renewed interest shown in the Sacred Grove of Bomarzo by Surrealists like Salvador Dalí was symptomatic of a growing acceptance and appreciation of monstrosity and Mannerism. The Italian art historian Eugenio Battisti, who included a discussion of Bomarzo105 in his magisterial L’Antirinascimento (first published in 1962), has written: We are bound more than ever to Romanticism, or in a more general sense, to the Counter-Renaissance . . . And our enthusiasm extends towards all that was constantly defined by the classicizing critics as capriccio, monstrosity, fantasy, barbarism: such as medieval decoration, late-Gothic and Mannerist deformations, Rococo.106 122

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

When it came to specifying the elements of that counter-Renaissance, he described them as follows: I believe that the love of contrast, opposition, exaggeration, multiplication, distinction, metaphor and, in other words, the unrealistic combination of fragments of nature, is an intentional characteristic of a large part of Mannerist painting.107 Seen from this perspective, Goethe’s classicizing raging against the excesses of the Prince of Palagonia seems to represent no more than a brief interlude in an otherwise fairly continuous positive appreciation of ‘capriccio, monstrosity, fantasy’. Several of the elements listed above in Battisti’s characterization of Mannerist painting hold true of the monstrous races, the monstrous births and the hybrids considered in this chapter. Like the Sacred Grove of Bomarzo, they take us back, way back, to the days before disenchantment.

123

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

4 Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem of Charles de l’Écluse The name of Charles de l’Écluse (Carolus Clusius) has already cropped up several times in the preceding chapters with regard to both the dragon tree and the barnacle goose, and he also plays an important part in the various articles that William Ashworth Jr has devoted to the representation of exotic animals in early modern works of natural history. Two of those that Ashworth singles out as worthy of further study – the armadillo and the penguin1 – are both illustrated in the Exoticorum libri decem (hereafter Exoticorum) of Charles de l’Écluse, who was the first to name and describe for the scientific community the Magellanic penguin. What the armadillo and the Magellanic penguin also have in common is that they both derive from the American continent.2 Indeed, the armadillo is so closely associated with that continent that it features regularly in visual allegories or personifications of America as one of the four continents.3 And what they also have in common is that Clusius was receiving the latest information about them in the period immediately prior to the completion of the Exoticorum. Since oral, written and visual information about Americana as well as the American items themselves were arriving in the Netherlands in the years immediately after the return of the first Dutch expeditions to the South Atlantic,4 Clusius’s treatment of them offers us a fascinating glimpse of the ‘kitchen’ in which he was putting the finishing touches to his magnum opus.

124

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

sources for clusius,s Americana Among the Americana that we find described in the Exoticorum are fruits, different kinds of wood, birds, geese, armadillos, serpents, lizards, cacti, beans, potatoes, sloths, monkeys and the manati.5 Not all of these representatives of the animal and vegetable worlds were or are equally well known. But when it comes to examining the sources of the information presented by Clusius in his Exoticorum, the least known can turn out to be the most interesting, and vice versa. This list is not exhaustive, nor could it ever be. In a number of cases, Clusius himself is uncertain whether the item in question came from the Americas or not, so that it is impossible to compile a full list of Americana on the basis of his descriptions alone. One could, it might be argued, bring the insights of modern science to bear on the question to facilitate more reliable identifications. There are, however, two objections to such a practice. First, the descriptions provided by Clusius are often, though not always, sufficient to provide a modern zoologist or botanist with enough material for a firm identification. Second, and more important, if we aim to get closer to an understanding of Clusius’s own methods and practice, we have to bracket such later insights as irrelevant, if not confusing. For it is with the categories of his own day that we must start if we are to avoid the twin perils of anachronism and scientific triumphalism. Charles de l’Écluse, or in the Latinized version of his name, Carolus Clusius, was born in Arras in 1526. After studying Latin and Greek in Ghent and Louvain, he went to Marburg, where he studied law and theology. It was apparently after a meeting with Phillip Melanchthon in Wittenberg that he decided to change course and to study medicine and natural history as part of what at the time constituted the very broad category of ‘natural philosophy’, although Harold Cook has warned against leaping to conclusions in ascribing Clusius’s early botanizing to a theological position:‘He may have been prompted to pay attention to nature by natural piety, but that could be found in many places and among many creeds. If circumstances were otherwise, he might equally well have been captivated by the subject in Catholic Italy, France, or Spain.’6 Attracted by the fame of medical studies in Montpellier, Clusius enrolled as a student in the university towards the end of 1551, where he stayed until the beginning of 1554, assisting 125

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Rondelet with the completion of his book on fish. In the following decade he travelled around the Northern and Southern Netherlands.7 Clusius’s interest in and contact with Americana go back at least to the year 1564, when he visited Sebald Linz in Lisbon during his travels through the Iberian peninsula, which were to result in the first botanical monograph on a specific region, the Rariorum aliquot stirpium per Hispanias observatarum historia (Antwerp, 1576) which, as we have seen, opens with an illustration and discussion of the dragon tree.8 Sebald’s son Roderic had sailed to the Portuguese port from Pernambuco (in Brazil) with some parrots, monkeys and a marmoset, whom he fed on maize, another American novelty.9 Only one marmoset survived the voyage. It was still alive when Clusius left Lisbon for Spain in January 1565. At the time of writing the Appendix to the Exoticorum, Clusius could remember its shape, and subsequently obtained a coloured image of it, on which his wooodcut is based (illus. 79).10 It is also probably to his Iberian travels that we can attribute the connection with Simón de Tovar, who had two botanical gardens in Seville and at some point in time sent Clusius a Peruvian bean.11 Besides descriptions of the flora of Spain and Portugal based on this journey, however, the Rariorum aliquot stirpium . . . also included accounts of items from the other side of the Atlantic, such as the American

79 Cercopithecus sagouin, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

126

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem

avocado tree that Clusius saw in a monastery in Valencia, the sweet potato, the thuya, the agave12 and a type of American cane.13 The publishing history of this work is revealing of Clusius’s eagerness to incorporate new data in his publications, a characteristic that, as we shall see, applies to the publication history of the Exoticorum as well.Though he probably contacted the printer Christoffel Plantijn in Antwerp with a proposal for the publication soon after returning from the Iberian peninsula, political troubles in the Netherlands, followed by Clusius’s departure for Austria, both delayed the appearance of the work. Characteristically, Clusius turned this delay to his advantage: besides descriptions of the flora of Spain and Portugal, the published work incorporated not only the results of Clusius’s earlier observations of the flora of Southern France carried out during his stay in Montpellier in 1551–4, but also an appendix on the plants of European Turkey, including the famous tulip, which had been sent to him by the imperial representative in Constantinople, Ogier van Busbeck.14 Clusius was in Vienna from 1573 to 1578, and again from 1581 to 1588. It was during this period that he received several American objects connected with British voyages to the New World, such as the Brazilian bean purchased by the British apothecary Richard Garth and sent to Clusius in Vienna in 1585,15 and two other types of Brazilian bean that Clusius received from another British apothecary, James Garet Jr.16 It is also to this period that we can date Clusius’s translations into Latin, in 1582 and 1583, of two works on the natural history of South America written by Nicolás Monardes. Monardes, however, had never left the Iberian peninsula, and while he had first-hand knowledge of the use of American plants which had been taken to Spain, he had no first-hand knowledge of New Spain itself. By this time Clusius and many other scholars in Europe were aware that the Spanish scientific expedition sent to New Spain by Philip ii had returned to Europe, bringing with it twenty folio volumes of illustrations and information about the plants, animals and minerals of New Spain.17 The work itself, compiled by the royal physician Francisco Hernández, was bound and kept unpublished in the Escorial, and was therefore inaccessible to Clusius.18 However, he knew that a selection had been made from it by Nardo Antonio Recchi, and there is evidence that before the end of the century he was making efforts to obtain Recchi’s compilation for his own use, ‘probably motivated’, as Irene

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

.

127

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

Baldriga has written, ‘by his concern to protect the originality of his project for the Exoticorum libri decem (1605) and, most of all, to acquire some brand-new material to include in his text’.19 Clusius moved from Vienna to Frankfurt in 1588. Three years later Garth sent him a branch of a Brazilian ‘Junipappeeywa’,20 and in the same year James Garet sent him aVirginian Macoqwer, a kind of gourd. Clusius’s account of it in the Exoticorum includes a surprising amount of ethnographic detail: the Virginian Indians first emptied it, then filled it with small stones and attached it to a stick as a rattle, but without feather ornaments21 – unlike the Brazilian rattles, which were well known to the educated European public through the description of them in Michel de Montaigne’s essay Des Cannibales of 1580.22 Two years after the publication of Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana in 1596, Garet sent Clusius a ‘scaly fruit’ (squamosus fructus) which had been brought to London by Ralegh’s expedition.23 It was also during his years in Frankfurt that Clusius received the famous image of the potato.24 In 1593 Clusius moved to Leiden in the Netherlands to take up his post as praefectus of the botanical garden. He was joined there after a few years by a manatee calf; brought back from the Atlantic by Dutch sailors in 1600, it was hung from the gateway of the Leiden hortus botanicus after Clusius had had the opportunity to observe it in Amsterdam and to have an illustration of it made (illus. 80). The other manatees brought back by the sailors did not achieve such an illustrious posthumous fame: a male manatee had been stuffed with straw and hung from the beam of the ship with the calf on its back, but all that was left of the female manatee was her ribs with a bit of flesh still clinging to them.25 Clusius’s interest in both the East and West Indies probably grew after his move to Leiden. He was in contact with Jan Huygen van Linschoten, who had spent a little over five years in Goa, and with Linschoten’s fellow townsman the collector Bernardus Paludanus in Enkhuizen, as well as with the merchants Johannes de Weely, David Sinapius and Emanuel Sweert in Amsterdam, and Simon Parduyn in Middelburg.26 Stephen Jan Scharm, an apothecary in Amsterdam, sent him a bean from Haiti in 1600.27 An indication of the speed at which access to information about the exotic world was taking place can be seen from the fact that the 128

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

80 Manatee, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

sailing instructions contained in Linschoten’s Itinerario were rushed through the press in 1595 in order to be given to the first Dutch fleet to sail to the East Indies in April of that year. Cornelis de Houtman, who was in command of that voyage, Jacob van Neck, who commanded the second Dutch voyage to the East Indies (1598–99/1600), and his vice-admiral Wijbrand van Warwijk, are all mentioned in the pages of the Exoticorum as suppliers of exotica. As Nicolás Monardes had enjoyed his privileged position in the port of Seville,28 so Clusius took advantage of his proximity to the main Dutch port of Amsterdam. Clusius himself mentions that he went to Amsterdam in August 1601 – the year before the establishment of the United Dutch East Indian Company (voc) – ‘to see whether the ships returning from Java and the Moluccas had brought back any exotica’.29 If Clusius could not be on the spot himself, a proxy would do: two years later, when Peter Garet met a certain Jacob Ceulener in Amsterdam, who had just returned from the East Indies and had a tale to tell about the hallucinatory effects of a particular fruit, Garet encouraged him to establish direct contact with Clusius, who turned Ceulener’s narrative into Latin for the Exoticorum.30 Nevertheless, despite the opportunities that these voyages offered Clusius for collecting information and specimens, the French scholar Nicolas de Peiresc, after he had had the opportunity to peruse the pages of the Exoticorum, wrote to Clusius in 1606: 129

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

I have been very surprised to see that your Dutch mariners who travel so freely throughout the Indies have acquitted themselves so badly of their duty towards you, and that they have not supplied a larger number of curiosities, and in particular that they have not been more careful to bring you not only the seeds or fruits, but the branches themselves of the majority of the plants that they collect.31 Dutch voyages to the South Pacific followed the same pattern. An account of the catastrophic expedition of Jacques Mahu and Simon de Cordes that left Rotterdam in 1598 and passed through the Strait of Magellan to harry the Spanish on the Chilean coast, during which more than a hundred men, including both commanders, lost their lives, was published (with illustrations) in 1600.32 Likewise, Olivier van Noort’s expedition of 1598–1601, which operated in the waters of the Strait simultaneously with the fleet of Mahu and De Cordes, was described in an account published in both Amsterdam (by Cornelis Claesz.) and Rotterdam (by Jan van Waesberghe) in 1602.33 Jan de Maes, a relative of Clusius, mentions having read Van Noort’s account with great interest (in a letter to Clusius dated 15 April 1602).34 Incidentally, the chronology of these voyages itself could furnish Clusius with a clue to the provenance of an item. In discussing a ‘Serpens peregrinus’, Clusius deduced that it must be from America because there was no voyage to the East Indies in the year in which it was brought back.35 By the time of writing the Exoticorum, then, Clusius had been intermittently exposed to Americana for almost forty years, and the pace at which such objects became available to him was accelerating soon after his move to Leiden. He had connections with local traders in exotica, access to scholars like Paludanus who were involved in collecting and describing them, was on friendly terms with several of the persons who led the overseas expeditions, and could draw on a network of individuals abroad, such as the British apothecaries, to supply him either with objects themselves, or with verbal and/or visual representations of exotic objects. The weak link in this knowledge network was an epistemological one. It was the gap between first-hand knowledge of the object in question, and having to rely on second-hand verbal or visual information 130

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

in the absence of the object, that was to create the greatest difficulty for Clusius in the task of compiling the Exoticorum, for Clusius repeatedly stressed that, if an opinion was to be authoritative, it had to be based – and to be shown to be based – on accurate, first-hand observation. This emerges clearly from the case of what is probably the most famous of Clusius’s American exotica: the drawing of a potato.36 The watercolour now in the Plantin Museum in Antwerp is inscribed with a note by Clusius: ‘Taratoufli à Philippo de Sivry acceptum Viennae 26 Januarii 1588’ (taratoufli received from Philippe de Sivry in Vienna 26 January 1588). In fact, Philippe de Sivry, the Lord of Walhain and governor of Mons, sent Clusius two potatoes in that year, followed by a coloured drawing of a branch of the plant with its flowers a year later. Philippe informed Clusius that he had received it, with the name Taratouffli, from a friend of the papal legate in the Southern Netherlands.37 James Garet and Caspar Bahuin also supplied him with drawings of potatoes. For the visual representation of the potato in the Rariorum plantarum historia, however, Clusius did not use any of these drawings, but commissioned new ones; after all, he had not seen those potatoes with his own eyes.38 The potato was not exactly a novelty in Europe at this time. After its introduction to Spain, it had spread rapidly through Europe, so the difficulties in obtaining first-hand observation were less. But when it came to less common exotica, Clusius ran up against considerable obstacles, as we shall now see.

object, report, image If I never have, can, must or shall see a white bear alive, have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted? – described? Have I never dreamed of one? Thus the father of Tristram Shandy in his chapter on the auxiliary verbs.39 After 1557, at any rate, there was no need to dream of the Brazilian sloth. The first European illustration of a Brazilian sloth appeared as one of the woodcuts in Singularitez de la France antarctique by André Thevet, published in that year, who claimed to have kept a wounded sloth for twenty-six days (illus. 81).40 And by the time of the publication of Clusius’s Exoticorum in 1605, two more images of the sloth had been 131

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

81 Sloth, from André Thevet, Les singularitez de la France Antarctique, autrement nommée Amerique (Paris, 1557).

added to the repertoire. Clusius obtained the first of these (illus. 82) via one of his correspondents, Dietrich Clemensz. Coornhert, who arranged for a drawing to be made of the preserved sloth that was in the collection of Rutger Jansz. in Amsterdam.41 He soon realized, however, that the illustration based on a stuffed specimen was not very accurate. Peiresc was later to make a similar complaint: since he had kept live chameleons in his home, he knew that the illustration of a chameleon in a work by the Nuremberg chemist, apothecary and botanist Basil Besler must have been based on a badly stuffed exemplar, resulting in a very distorted rendering of the appearance of the creature, while his own chameleons had died before an artist had been able to immortalize them.42 The second image of a sloth came into Clusius’s hands after the first six books of the Exoticorum libri decem, containing the woodcut of the stuffed sloth, had already been printed. This time it was the famous floriculturist and merchant in rare and curious specimens Emanuel Sweerts who told Clusius that he had just acquired a sloth in Amsterdam that had died on the voyage from America only a few days before. Sweerts obligingly 132

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem

82 Sloth, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

dispatched the sloth to Clusius, who included a woodcut of this rather fierce-looking creature and a description of it in the 21-page appendix to the work (illus. 83). Clusius did not know that the sloth is unable to support the weight of its body in an upright position.43

83 Fierce-looking sloth, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

133

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

84 Rex bird of paradise, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The Appendix to the Exoticorum opens with a discussion of the bird of paradise. Sweerts had sent a bird of paradise to Clusius along with the sloth, and he also sent Clusius a Rex bird of paradise, which Clusius described and had illustrated (illus. 84).44 But the bird of paradise and the sloth were not just related in the mind of Emanuel Sweerts: The accordeon of the map of the world, in an epoch when longitude could not be fixed with precision . . . made it possible to consider the fabulous bird of paradise of the eastern islands, and the sloth of Brazil with its nocturnal habits, as two creatures placed in a relation of inverse symmetry, diametrically opposed on the parallel.45 Antonio Pigafetta, in his account of the first circumnavigation of the world by Magellan, had mentioned a gift to the King of Spain by one of the kings of the Moluccas: As a gift to the King he sent a slave and two bahar of cloves. He sent him also two very beautiful dead birds, which are as thick as stock-doves, with small head and long beak, and legs a palm in length and as thin as a feather. They have no wings, but have instead long feathers of divers colors like large plumes. The tail is as long as that of a stock-dove, and all the other feathers except the wings are of a tawny color, and they 134

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem

never fly except when there is wind. We were told that those birds came from the earthly paradise, and were called Bolon diuata, that is to say, birds of God.46 A few years earlier than Pigafetta’s account is a letter by Maximilian Transylvanus, a secretary to the Emperor Charles v, to the Archbishop of Salzburg on 5 October 1522. Transylvanus reports that the expedition was presented with no less than five manucodiatas, one of which he managed to obtain from the captain of the vessel for the Archbishop (along with some cinnamon, nutmeg, mace and cloves). His letter may be the earliest mention of the bird of paradise in European literature. He notes:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

They hold these manucodiatas to be celestial, and even when they are dead they never corrupt or smell.Their plumage is of diverse and very beautiful colours, they are the size of turtledoves, and have a very long tail, and if one of their feathers is plucked, another grows, even when they are dead. The kings take them into battle, and believe that if they have them with them they are safe and invincible in battle.47 One of the earliest birds of paradise to appear in a European collection is the one recorded in the 1523–4 inventory of the collection of Margaret of Austria in Malines, who kept a stuffed bird of paradise wrapped in taffeta in a small wooden casket in her library.48 Among the early collectors of birds of paradise we can also mention Conrad Peutinger in Augsburg and Johann Kramer in Nuremberg.49 From the Appendix to the Exoticorum, we know that Clusius had heard reports that the birds of paradise had feet, but he was unable to confirm them because the ones with feet taken to Amsterdam from the East were sold and transferred to Rudolf ii in Prague before he had had a chance to see them and to have them illustrated.50 So the woodcut of the bird of paradise in the Appendix to the Exoticorum is footless (illus. 85).51 The image is of a bird of paradise in the collection of Peter Pauw in Leiden. In the Appendix, Clusius quotes Jehan de Weely, who sold the bird with feet to Rudolf, for confirmation of the fact that it did have feet. De Weely’s letter to Clusius has been preserved: 135

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

85 Bird of paradise, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The bird of paradise was in every respect like the vulgar sort, somewhat flat, not of the round kind that they call papauwe, but the other sort with its [snawen?] that they call the feet. It had two feet like a sparrow hawk or harrier, that looked unseemly and ugly, being pressed flat against the belly so that little more than the claws could be seen. The leg was dried and looked ugly too, so that the Indians very sensibly cut off the feet together with the leg, for it is the ugliest part of the bird, and in my opinion they all have similar feet.52 In fact, the 1607 inventory of the collection of Rudolf ii mentions a large number of birds of paradise, variously without feet or wings, without feet but with wings, with feet but without wings, and one with both feet and wings.53 The problem here is that many of the items that reached Clusius did so in a more or less fragmentary state.54 This was a problem which plagued many collectors of curiosities.55 In Bologna, for instance, Ulisse Aldrovandi stressed the importance of publishing pictures in order to obtain a complete knowledge of nature: ‘It was for example through pictures that Aldrovandi could see and study the elk, seeing that the only sample relating to this animal that he had in his museum, that is “the hoof ”, could not have been much help’.56 The ideal state in which Clusius hoped to receive objects is exemplified by the Echinomelocactus 136

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

86 Echinomelocactus, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

that he bought in Holland in 1601. Having purchased it in perfect condition, he was able to dissect it and thus to arrive at authoritative knowledge based on first-hand observation, even though he regretted that the sailors who had brought it to Holland had not bothered to enquire what its local name was nor how it was used (illus. 86).57 The other extreme is exemplified by the scaly horn that Johan Hoghelande bought from Dutch sailors in the same year and lent to Clusius so that the latter could have an illustration made (illus. 87). Clusius was given no indication of its provenance; he did not even know whether the creature it came from had one or two horns.58 137

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

87 Scaly horn, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

It was not just the objects themselves, but also visual representations of them that could be fragmentary. Jacques Plateau sent Clusius a picture of the head and beak of a bird, but not of the whole bird (illus. 88).59 Clusius wondered whether it might be the bird alcatraz described by the chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés,

88 Bird (alcatraz?), from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

138

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem

who had spent about thirty years in America and whose Historia General y Natural de las Indias had earned him the reputation of the Pliny of the New World.60 But without the full picture it was impossible for him to decide. In a letter to Clusius written in 1599 by the apothecary Willem Janszoon Parduijn in Middelburg we read:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

I send you the creatures both large and small, six large and eight small, which I have had removed from the bottom of the ships that have come from Guinea, and the big beak of a bird, they say that the bird died on the voyage, and the beak is larger than the entire body of the bird.61 Parduijn is presumably talking about the toucan, but we cannot be entirely certain of the fact.62 Clusius endeavoured to fill in the gaps in his information through an appeal to Oviedo in connection with several other items. For instance, the description and woodcut of the ‘Yvana’, a type of lizard, are based on the animal in the collection of Pieter Pauw, but Clusius also refers to Oviedo in this connection.63 Although the ‘Ficus Indica’ was not American, Clusius suggested a connection with an American tree, the mangrove (mangle), as described by Oviedo.64 And after Paludanus had lent Clusius the branch of a tree in 1595 for him to describe and illustrate, Clusius wondered whether it might by the ‘Gaguey’ described by Oviedo.65 The quantity of information about America expanded considerably after 1600, in the years immediately prior to the completion of the Exoticorum. One can mention the annatto (Bixa orellana) seed sent to Clusius by Juan de Castañeda in September 1602,66 followed by a branch of the same tree sent by Peter Garet a month later. The woodcut in the Exoticorum (illus. 89) is based on the branch, and Clusius recorded the use of annatto for body painting in America – evidence of his continued ethnographic interest.67 In 1601 Peter Garet sent him a ‘Lignum exoticum’ from America.68 Another piece of wood that Clusius received from Peter Garet arrived without a provenance; Clusius learnt that it had come from the Strait of Magellan from someone who had received a similar piece from Sebald de Weert, captain on the Mahu and De Cordes voyage, whose ship had been unable to pass through the Strait of Magellan and who had returned to Europe in 1600.69 139

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

89 Bixa orellana, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

Clusius cites the diaries of the Dutch expedition to the Strait of Magellan as the source for information about an illustration of a bird that he was the first to describe for the scientific community: the Magellanic penguin, or Anser Magellanicus.70 The illustration in the Exoticorum (illus. 90) is indeed taken from an engraving of Dutch sailors killing penguins for food in the Wijdtloopigh verhael . . ., an account of the voyage of Jacques Mahu and Simon de Cordes published in Amsterdam by Zacharias Heyns in 1600 (illus. 91).71 Clusius thus had ample time to include its findings in his work. In the following year the same publisher issued a book with almost 150 woodcuts of individuals in national costumes, each accompanied by a descriptive quatrain, the Dracht-Thoneel (costume stage), which included versions of the native peoples of Tierra del Fuego, based 140

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

90 Anser Magellanicus, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

91 Anser Magellanicus, from Barent Jansz. Potgieter, Wijdtloopigh verhael van tgene de vijf schepen (die int jaer 1598 tot Rotterdam toegherust werden, om door de Straet Magellana haren handel te drijven) wedervaren is [. . .] (Amsterdam, 1600).

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

92 Anser Magellanicus, from Zacharias Heyns, Dracht-Thoneel (Amsterdam, 1601).

on, though not identical to, the woodcuts contained in the Wijdtloopigh verhael . . . Though hardly relevant to a collection of national dress (intended as a guide for stage productions), the volume also contained a woodcut of shells (klipklevers) from the Strait of Magellan, and one of the Magellanic penguin (illus. 92), based on the one in the Wijdtloopigh verhael . . ., though with webbed feet like those of a duck. Another version of the image, but with more claw-like feet, appeared in the account of the same voyage included in Part 2 of the ninth volume of the encyclopaedic work America, published in a German-language version by the De Bry brothers in Frankfurt in the same year of 1601 (illus. 93, 94).72 Incidentally, the presence of a male and a female Magellanic penguin like the one illustrated in Exoticorum, though lacking its rear toe, among the South American birds illustrated by various artists for Marcus zum Lamm, a Protestant cleric and jurist at the court of the Prince-Electors of the Palatinate in Heidelberg and compiler of 142

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

a 33-volume Thesaurus Picturarum, leads one to wonder whether there was any personal contact between zum Lamm and Clusius prior to the former’s death in 1606.73 One of those who supplied Clusius and others with both Americana and images of them during these years was Jacques Plateau, who had a private museum in Tournai.74 In 1603, for instance, he sent Clusius the coloured image of a Brazilian bird with bright colours,75 but the most celebrated of the fauna with which the names of both Plateau and Clusius are connected is probably the armadillo, which had been first described by Oviedo. In a letter to Clusius dated November 1602, Plateau mentioned three types of armadillo.The first was the type that had already been described by Clusius in his annotations to Monardes, which were published as volume x of the Exoticorum. It is the only animal to be illustrated in those annotations (illus. 95); the other illustrations are of (parts of ) plants and of two animal products (the lapis

93 Dutch penguin-hunting, from Theodor de Bry, America (Frankfurt, 1601), vol. ix, Part ii.

143

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

94 Detail of illus. 93.

tiburonum and the bezoar).76 While Monardes had included a very rudimentary woodcut (illus. 96) and noted the medicinal use of the armadillo’s tail, Clusius’s annotations provided a fuller description of the animal, drawing on André Thevet, Hans Staden and Jean de Léry, who had all been in Brazil, as well as Pierre Belon, who had not.77 Plateau’s second type of armadillo was a smaller version of the first type. The third type, however, was very different, and Clusius claimed to be the first to describe and illustrate it. Jacques Plateau sent Clusius a coloured image of this type of armadillo, which is the model for the woodcut (illus. 97), but failed to include any dimensions. When Clusius insisted on the need for the creature’s vital statistics, Plateau obligingly sent them on later.78 Incidentally, although most of today’s tourists to Rome are probably ignorant of the fact, Clusius’s first type of armadillo was immortalized in the group of American attributes (including an opuntia cactus) of the Río della Plata in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in the Piazza Navona, completed in 1651 (illus. 98).79 This was not the only occasion on which Clusius criticized Plateau for failing to provide full details. For instance, Plateau sent Clusius a ‘mus aquaticus’ in 1604, but failed to indicate its provenance.80 The 144

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

95 Armadillo, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

96 Armadillo, Nicolás Monardes, Primera y segunda y tercera partes de la Historia medicinal, de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales . . . (Seville, 1574).

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

97 Armadillo, from Carolus Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605).

same problem arose in connection with the scaly lizard that the Leiden apothecary Christian Porret showed to Clusius in 1604: its provenance was unknown.81 The woodcut of the ‘Cercopithecus’ in the Appendix to the Exoticorum is based on an image sent by Plateau, but Clusius complains that he had received no indication of the size of the creature. Clusius’s artist had to improve on the crude original image.82 In the case of a ‘Mergus Americanus’, an image of which was sent to Clusius by Plateau, Clusius thought that it was probably the first description of this bird, but regretted that all he could offer was a description based on the image he had received and expressed the hope that the artist had got it right.83 If Clusius sometimes appears ungrateful, we should bear in mind that many of the images Clusius received from Jacques Plateau reached him when time was running out. He could not wait for further, more detailed information. Literally stop press news was the picture of a ‘Psittacus elegans’ that Clusius received from Plateau in 1605, the very year of publication of the Exoticorum.84 The accelerating pace at which a growing number of Americana reached Clusius between 1600 and 1605 coincides with the increasing pressure he was under to complete the Exoticorum. In fact, many of those who supplied him with information felt the same pressure; in a letter of 21 August 1601, Juan de Castañeda stated: ‘I would like to send you the drawings of so many 146

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

98 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, 1651, Piazza Navona, Rome.

new plants before the completion of the printing of your book.’85 The fear of being overtaken by rival publications was very strong in the first decades of the seventeenth century: Federico Cesi of the Accademia dei Lincei was horrified by the appearance of the Hortus Eystettensis in Nuremberg in 1613 because of the direct threat that it posed to his own project of publishing natural historical illustrations of the Americas.86 Two years after the publication date of the Exoticorum, Clusius was shown a book of plants and animals from various regions by a certain Johannes van Uffele, who had just returned from Brazil. Clusius begged him for copies of the drawings, which were incorporated in the posthumous Curae posteriores, seu plurimarum non ante cognitarum, aut descriptarum stirpium, peregrinorumque aliquot animalium novae descriptiones published in Antwerp in 1611.87 The Capuchin friar Gregorio da Reggio, five of whose letters to Clusius have been preserved, sent him not only dried plants from near Innsbruck, but also a brief treatise – 147

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

the only work of the friar’s to be published – on the American pepper, which was likewise incorporated in the Curae posteriores.88 The fact that Clusius included a 21-page appendix to the Exoticorum already bears witness to his concern to be abreast of the latest news in the world of natural history. An edition of Clusius’s Historia Plantarum & Exoticorum bound in one volume, now in the Leiden University Library,89 takes us one stage further in documenting the scholar’s relentless desire to update his work in the light of the new discoveries that were being made almost every day in the New World. On the verso side of the title page, the Latin text explains that ‘everything has been expanded and revised, partly with the help of an exemplar with corrections by the hand of Clusius, and partly on the basis of loose sheets with comments that he had entrusted to Justus Raphelengius [the publisher of the Exoticorum libri decem] a few weeks before his death’.90 Although it includes many handwritten additions on plants that had been published in the Historia Plantarum, the main changes to the Exoticorum libri decem are connected with the incorporation of the Appendix of that work into the body of the text of this projected second edition. Weeks before his death, Clusius was still working, Sisyphus-style, to ensure that the finished work would be seamless.

148

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

5 Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

the making of the Mexican Treasury Images may travel large distances, enjoy long lives, and pass through many illustrious and less illustrious hands, irrespective of the size of the object that they illustrate. A pen and ink drawing of ‘the plant of the Lincei’, a delicate Lyncaea, an American orchid (Stanhopea tigrina), by Giovanni Rocchi, dated 1611,1 apparently draws on an illustration of this rare plant that Rocchi had seen in his native Florence, presumably brought there from Rome by Galileo Galilei.2 Galileo, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, had seen the illustration in the collection of Federico Cesi, the young prince from Acquasparta who was one of the founders of that learned society in Rome in August 1603;3 Cesi obligingly sent the astronomer some illustrations of ‘Indian plants’, including the American orchid, in 1612.4 Cesi had obtained his illustration from the physician Nardo Antonio Recchi of Salerno. Recchi, in turn, had acquired it via Philip ii in Spain from among the material on New World natural history compiled between 1571 and 1577 by Francisco Hernández, Recchi’s predecessor as personal physician to Philip ii.5 The Latin annotation to the drawing states that this image of a New World plant was taken from a volume that was on the eve of publication,6 and the image was in fact published exactly as it appears in Rocchi’s drawing in the Mexicanarum Plantarum Imagines given to the Bishop of Bamberg Johann Gottfried von Aschhausen by the Accademia dei Lincei in 1613.7 A woodcut of the same plant can be found among the 207 proof woodcuts for the plants in the section of the Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (hereafter referred to for brevity’s sake as the Mexican Treasury) edited by Johannes Schreck, with 149

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

99 Adam Elsheimer (attr.), Lynx as emblem of the Accademia dei Lincei, from F. Hernández et al., Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651).

notes on colour that have been attributed to Federico Cesi.8 According to Schreck, one of the reasons why it earned the name Lyncaea was that its variegated colour and dappled petals recalled the dappled fur of the emblem of the Lincei, the lynx (illus. 99).9 By the time of its reappearance in that ‘opera nobilissima’,10 the Lincei publication Mexican Treasury of 1651,11 the image of the orchid was around eighty years old, had passed through many hands and had travelled thousands of miles (illus. 100). Within six months of the foundation of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in August 1603, one of the founding members, Johannes van Heeck, addressed two letters to Charles de l’Écluse.12 Van Heeck, a doctor from Deventer in the Netherlands who had just entered the service of Federico Cesi, was eager to secure the adherence of the renowned botanist to the initiatives of the Accademia, which combined – at least in its early years – the type of scientific experiment for which its best-known member, Galileo Galilei, was to become famous, with researches of a more arcane kind. The main thrust of these activities was to oppose what Cesi diagnosed – with prophetic foresight – as the intellectual petrifaction or sclerosis of the universities. As we saw in the previous chapter, Charles de l’Écluse never visited Italy, but he did correspond with the Capuchin friar Gregorio da Reggio in Bologna from 1602, and, in the last three years of his life, with the young Florentine botanist Matteo Caccini, to whom Gregorio had introduced him.13 Like Bauhin and Lobel, and later Kepler and Bacon, 150

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

100 Lyncea orchid, from Hernández et al., Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651).

however, the Flemish botanist refused to include the Lyncei in his wide-ranging network of correspondents. Perhaps Van Heeck’s reference to the investigation of the secret and arcane aspects of the universe put him on his guard; perhaps, more simply, the fact that the Accademia dei Lincei was already disbanded at the end of 1604 under pressure from Cesi’s family rendered it less interesting to Clusius, especially if he had heard any of the rumours connecting the circle with heresy and Van Heeck with the murder of the herbalist Raniero Consolini.14 By the time that Federico Cesi had come of age, overcome parental hostility to his plans, and reconstituted the Accademia dei Lincei in 1610, Clusius was dead. 151

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

Despite this failure to arrive at a satisfactory modus vivendi between Clusius and the Lyncei, however, the unabated interest in Americana on the part of the botanist from the Southern Netherlands that was documented in the previous chapter was also shared by the new Accademia dei Lincei. Probably inspired by the organizational model of the Jesuits, though imposing a strict ban on membership of any religious order and on any involvement in religious controversies on the part of the Linceans, its founder intended the activities of the Accademia to be guided by the principle that Galileo formulated in the following words: ‘Instead of wanting nature to accommodate itself to what seems the best arrangement and disposition to us, we must accommodate our intellect to what nature has done, in the certainty that that, and no other, is the best arrangement’.15 The study of the New World of the Americas offered an excellent opportunity to put that principle into practice. The annotations that Cesi made to his copies of the works of Clusius show how closely he studied the writings of the famous botanist.16 It was probably as a development of Clusius’s work on the natural world of the Americas, and in particular his interest in the exotic, that the Lincei initially conceived the vast undertaking of what was to become the Mexican Treasury. The history of the genesis and composition of this work, which was begun by the Accademia in 1610, extends down to 1648. In a letter to Faber, the ex-Lincean Johannes Schreck compared the slow pace of publication to the movement of a sloth as described by Clusius.17 The publishing history will only be summarized here.18 It goes back to the 1570s, when Francisco Hernández, the personal physician of Philip ii of Spain, was sent to Mexico to collect material on New World natural history.19 His rich material on South American plants and animals, which was not confined to those of Mexico alone,20 was put into a semblance of order by his successor, Nardo Antonio Recchi of Salerno, who abbreviated and edited Hernández’ text, regrouping Hernández’ traditional Mexican arrangement of the material to bring it into line with European systems of classification. This task was completed by 1582.21 Recchi himself returned to Naples in 1589, taking a copy of this abbreviated and edited work with him. While the arrival of Recchi’s text in Naples was to have major repercussions for the activities of the Accademia dei Lincei, it also 152

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

triggered publishing activity in New Spain. A copy of the Recchi compilation was left in Madrid which was subsequently sent to New Spain.This was the copy on which Francisco Ximénez based his translation into Spanish entitled Quatro libros de la naturaleza y virtudes de las plantas y animales de uso medicinal en la Nueva España (Mexico, 1615). Hernández had left a copy of his work in Mexico in Nahuatl for the benefit of the natives; Ximénez’ publication in Spanish was designed to make Hernández’ work accessible to the Europeans and Creoles in New Spain who were not familiar with Nahuatl.22 Ximénez translated, edited and corrected the Recchi text, adding four species of plants and six species of animals.23 The acquisition of Recchi’s text (though not the illustrations, which Recchi’s heir Marco Antonio Petilio jealously kept for himself ) by Federico Cesi in 1610 was of capital importance for the future of the Accademia. As Irene Baldriga has written: ‘What has been underestimated so far is the huge success obtained in 1610 by Cesi in purchasing the manuscript brought by Recchi to Naples. In acquiring that rich document for the Lincean library, he had succeeded where other famous botanists and scientists had failed.’24 The division of labour to prepare the work for publication was as follows. The first and second parts of what was to become the Mexican Treasury, consisting of Recchi’s digest of the work of Hernández and another section comprising illustrations, the Nahuatl nomenclature and brief descriptions of more than three hundred other plants, was the responsibility of the German Johannes Schreck (Latinized as Johannes Terrentius). This cannot have been an easy task. For example, as the author noted, the woodcut of the Yccotli (illus. 101), depicting the tree, fruit and leaf, bore at first sight an uncanny resemblance to the Clusian image of the dragon tree of the Canaries (compare illus. 29); the black veins in its leaves and other distinguishing marks nevertheless made it clear that it was something else.25 The third part of the work, consisting of the names and illustrations of thirty-five ‘Mexican’ animals (although not all of them came from Mexico), received the prolix commentary of his compatriot, Johannes Schmidt (Latinized as Johannes Faber). Fabio Colonna provided the scientific commentary on the plants in the fourth part.26 Francesco Stelluti, nicknamed ‘tardigradus’ (slow-paced), compiled the indices. As for Federico Cesi, he supervized the work of the engravers, concerned himself with 153

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

101 Ycottli, from Hernández et al., Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651).

obtaining the requisite permissions to publish, and contributed a set of tables intended to present his own special system of plant classification. Naturally, other members of the Accademia were consulted on specific points. For present purposes we can single out the person of Johannes Schmidt/Faber, to whom Irene Baldriga devoted a large part of her valuable monograph on the Accademia. As she has remarked: ‘There is no doubt . . . that the most relevant person in the context of the Lyncei with respect to artistic interests and collecting is that of Johannes Faber of Bamberg’.27 Born of Protestant parents, he was orphaned as a baby and brought up in the Catholic faith by his cousin Philip Schmidt. After studying at Würzburg, he arrived in Rome in 1598 at the age of 24 to continue his studies, and practised surgery at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia, near the Vatican. From 1600 he was Simplicista Apostolica, in other words, director of the Vatican botanical garden. In 154

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

the same year he was also given (relatively minor) appointments in medicine and botany at the university of La Sapienza in Rome.28 He had an anatomical museum near the Pantheon,29 and his library, like Cesi’s, included the major publications of Charles de l’Écluse.30 Admitted to the Accademia dei Lincei in 1611, he became its treasurer in the following year. His interest in art and artists is shown, for example, by the fact that he was later involved in the granting of the commission for the decoration of the Cappella di San Benno in the German church of Santa Maria dell’ Anima in Rome to the Venetian painter Carlo Saraceni.31 It is to the year 1613 that we can date the printing of a remarkable book that had received little attention in the literature until the publication of Baldriga’s monograph.32 This is a book of woodcuts, all of plants,33 which was among the dozen books presented on behalf of all the Linceans (the dedication refers to ‘lyncei Unanimes’) by Johannes Faber to Prince-Bishop Johann Gottfried von Aschhausen (1575–1622), a major persecutor of witches in Faber’s native Bamberg, who was in Rome from December 1612 to March 1613 and was invited to attend meetings of the Lyncei.34 Some of these woodcuts found their way into the later publication of the Mexican Treasury.35 What is important to stress here is that, only three years after its reconstitution, and only two years after the posthumous publication of the Clusian Curae posteriores, the Accademia Lincea was interested in and capable of publishing this small book (libellus) containing no less than 62 woodcuts of American plants.36 This success may explain the allusions to the imminent publication of the definitive work that we find soon after the publication of the libellus for the Prince-Bishop. For instance, in a postscript to a letter of November 1614, Federico Cesi wrote to Faber: ‘Once the book is finished, a process which I want to use every effort to speed up as soon as Ryckius has arrived, I will send it’.37 In August of the following year, Cesi wrote to Faber: ‘If Ryckius comes, who must be urged in every way . . . the printing of the book will be completed without any doubt within a year and a half; it is going slowly at the moment because none of us can be assiduously working on it, and I am doing what I can; but believe me, I have found some figures, and modified others, and modified passages which, if we had proceeded more hastily, would have resulted in a pile of errors; what is needed is continuous, insistent diligence’.38 At this stage the sloth had not yet taken over control of the speed of production. 155

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

enter cassiano dal pozzo

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The next appearance of Americana in a publication of the Lincean circle is in 1622. This is the Uccelliera, an ornithological treatise by Giovanni Pietro Olina that contains descriptions and woodcuts of 47 species of Italian birds and a further two of exotic birds, as well as 23 short chapters on how to raise, feed and catch birds, how to teach them to sing and reproduce, and on the use of their feathers for artistic purposes.39 The latter were accompanied by lively engravings by the famous Florentine painter and engraver Antonio Tempesta, while the very precise portraits of birds done from live or dead specimens have been attributed by Solinas to an assistant of Tempesta who had recently set up in Rome as an independent artist,Vincenzo Leonardi.

102 Vincenzo Leonardi, Parrot, from Giovanni Pietro Olina, Uccelliera, ovvero discorso della natura e proprietà di diversi uccelli (Rome, 1622).

156

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

In fact, although the work is presented as having been written by Olina and as being dedicated to Cassiano dal Pozzo, it was actually written by Cassiano himself. This nobleman from Turin moved to Rome in 1612, where his artistic and scientific interests soon enabled him to move in influential circles and where he and later his younger brother Carlo Antonio both built up an impressive collection of originals and copies of paintings, statues, scientific instruments and natural curiosities.40 He was obviously on very friendly terms with Johannes Faber, since Cassiano signs one of his letters to Faber as the godfather of one of Faber’s children.41 Various special copies of the Uccelliera with additional plates were donated to such important figures as the brothers Jacques and Pierre Dupuy, librarians to Louis xiii of France, to Cardinal Barberini and to the French scholar Nicolas de Peiresc.42 The copy given to Federico Cesi met with the prince’s approval – in particular, the emphasis on images done ad vivum was completely in accord with the Accademia’s guidelines – and Cassiano was admitted to the Accademia dei Lincei in October 1622.43 There are two birds of the parrot family in the Uccelliera. The first, labelled ‘Pappagallo’, is shown in a magnificent and detailed woodcut (illus. 102), while the text mentions that Cassiano had one of them in his home which was very good at imitating the sounds of other animals.44 It was their ability to imitate the human voice which made them very popular in the Roman palaces of princes and prelates.45 The second, labelled ‘Perrochetto’, is a smaller bird which, Cassiano states, comes from the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Cassiano continued his ornithological researches after 1622. He wrote a number of discorsi on ornithological subjects, including one on the pelican, for which one of the accompanying drawings has survived.46 In a letter of 1629, Nicolas de Peiresc wrote to Cassiano that he hoped to send him a live flamingo to enable him ‘to write their history more conveniently’,47 but if Cassiano wrote a discorso on the flamingo, it does not appear to have survived.48 It is likely that he intended to publish the discorsi in a more comprehensive work at some stage as a contribution, like the Mexican Treasury, to the projected vast Lincean illustrated encyclopaedia of the natural world, but that ambition was never realized. Nevertheless, as we shall see, he was soon to prove instrumental in the progress of the Mexican Treasury in several ways. 157

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

The progress of that work underwent a radical change as the result of a circumstance that was in itself extraneous to the activities of the Lincei: the Barberini cardinal who was a patron of Cassiano, Maffeo Barberini, became Pope Urban viii in 1623 and declared the year 1625 a Holy Year to be celebrated in the new Basilica of St Peter.49 This meant that thousands of pilgrims would flock to the Holy City from all over the world, including the Americas. Some of them were important as carriers of information about the New World.50 Federico Cesi already realized the potential of the religious orders as carriers of information when he wrote to Francesco Barberini towards the end of 1623 with a list of Mexican plants that he hoped the cardinal would be able to obtain for him via contacts in Mexico and the neighbouring countries, or, failing that, from Seville, in order to corroborate the material in the Mexican Treasury that was being printed at the time.51 Faber too was aware of the benefits of such direct contacts. He explicitly states that his knowledge about the Americas was derived not only from the histories of the continent, but also from converted Americans and from missionaries who had gone there to bring the light of Christ to those ‘wretched and demon-crazed men’.52 One such figure was the Franciscan Gregorio de Bolívar. In the Mexican Treasury, Johannes Faber describes him as having lived in the Americas for 25 years, being able to speak three native languages, an industrious and devoted missionary in the Andes and Mexico, but also a person interested in observing and writing about the natural world. He had almost completed a Historia americani orbis, including a map, and from the evidence of his discussions of various South American animals with the Linceans, such as the American tiger, the American panther, Peruvian sheep and the Mexican boar, he must have been of great benefit to Faber at the time when the latter was editing the zoological part of the Mexican Treasury,53 even though the Franciscan led him astray in identifying the zibethicum animal americanum as an American civet cat, since no such animal exists on that continent.54 Matters took a dramatic turn, however. In a letter written by Faber to Cesi in October 1625,55 he lamented the loss of the friar’s complete manuscript. Apparently Bolívar had presented the Pope with a report on the inadequacies of the church in the Americas and in the East, singling out for special mention such abuses as the avidity and love 158

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

of wine and gambling of many of the clergy.56 This cannot have made him very popular among his fellow religionaries. In a fit of rage at their threats and at being thrown out of his lodgings, he had hurled his precious manuscript into the fire and borrowed bed linen from Faber to sleep elsewhere before finally leaving the city. A few days later, Faber was delighted to inform Cesi that the destruction of Bolívar’s manuscript had not been total; most of it, including the best parts, had survived his frenzy, and the friar had gone to Spoleto to arrange the Italian translation of a colophon to the work.57 We find Bolívar in June of the following year in Madrid. The source for this, which appears to have been overlooked by earlier scholars, is the diary kept by Cassiano dal Pozzo of the visit of the papal nuntius to Madrid in 1626 (see below). Long known to art histor ians for its description of almost 40 patrician collections in the Spanish capital, it is justly considered a testimony that is ‘unique because there is no other similar work, and unique in terms of its compiler: a man who was among the best connoisseurs of art of his century’.58 Perhaps this explains why Cassiano’s visit to the home of Gregorio de Bolívar on 23 June – the same day on which he went to see the collection of bezoar stones and amber in the house of two Flemish diamond dealers who had worked in Goa for more than thirty years – has passed unnoticed. Cassiano relates that the friar had presented an extremely comprehensive and detailed map of the Indies to the influential Count of Olivares, and also had a fairly large work ‘dealing with many particularities and rarities of the Indies’, of which he promised to give a copy to Cardinal Francesco Barberini once it had been tidied up.59 We do not know whether he kept his promise. By 1627 he was back in the Bolivian Andes, where he died in 1631. Another such figure who appears in the same sources is the Spanish Dominican Bartolomeo de la Ygarza, who had lived close to the silver mines of Potosí in Peru for forty years. He showed a great interest in the animals and plants of the region, as well as being highly knowledgeable about metallurgy. In the context of his discussion of the small Peruvian lion, Faber notes that he had several learned conversations with the Dominican friar in 1626. Faber also mentions a Spanish Franciscan who had lived in Peru for thirty years and who provided the doctor with the name given to what Faber called a Mexican bull, but he fails to tell the reader the name of this friar. 159

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Finally, we must mention another of these informants, the Dominican Pietro de Aloaysa, a native of Lima, who had written a book about the activities of his order in the Americas and with whom Faber relates that he had several delightful conversations in the year 1626.60 One of these concerned the bird known as the Acitli. But the most striking for present purposes is Faber’s account of the reaction of the friar when the German physician showed him a picture of an amphisbaena:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

That serpent which I saw among us in 1623 was not very different from this, it is a snake with two heads, while the rest of its body is marked with blackened and red scales. It is so terrible that there is no cure for its bite.61 It would be hard to overestimate the importance of the first-hand testimony that such persons brought with them from the Americas to Rome. Their presence in Rome must have seemed as much a godsend to the Linceans as the travellers returning from the Atlantic and the Indian oceans were to Charles de l’Écluse. Not only could they corroborate or refute reports that circulated in Europe on the basis of their own experience, but we may suppose that they were an important channel through which local, native knowledge about the New World was transmitted to the Old World. If the Mexican Treasury might at first sight seem to have been an armchair compilation, nothing could be further from the truth. It incorporated the vernacular knowledge derived from local informants in the Americas that Hernández had put into his manuscript, known to the Lincei through the abridged compilation that had come into the hands of Federico Cesi; and Faber and other Linceans were evidently taking advantage of the presence of so much expert knowledge in Rome in and immediately after the Holy Year of 1625 to fill in the gaps in their own knowledge. The year 1626 was a very important one for another member of the Accademia, whom we have already come across: Cassiano dal Pozzo. In the previous year he and his younger brother Carlo Antonio had accompanied one of the Pope’s nephews, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, on a (failed) mission to Paris in response to the French occupation of the strategic Valtellina corridor in Northern Italy on the border with Switzerland, which de facto restored power there to the Protestants.62 To maintain a position of neutrality between the rival French and 160

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

Spanish claims to the valley, Pope Urban viii had decided to resort to diplomacy rather than force, and he could not send a mission to the French court without sending one to the Spanish court as well. He therefore dispatched Francesco Barberini with a company of more than 100 persons, including Cassiano, to Madrid at the beginning of 1626. Cesi was immediately aware that Cassiano’s presence in France and Spain could be put to good use for the Lyncean project. For instance, Cesi asked him to make use of clerical or lay contacts in Seville to obtain Mexican plants and seeds, particularly of the Lyncaea orchid.63 While in Madrid, Cassiano performed two actions that were of great importance for the future of the Lyncean Mexican Treasury. During a visit in June to the library in the Escorial, where a Scottish friend of his called David Colville worked, Cassiano visited the room used for private audiences and as a dining room by the king, in which there were eight or ten paintings, ‘most of which were of the most curious birds, quadrupeds, reptiles, insects and plants that are seen in the Indies, of which the history in 16 volumes by Francesco Hernández is composed’.64 Cassiano also managed to examine the sixteen volumes of Francisco Hernández’ account of the plants and animals of the New World themselves in the Escorial library, and was particularly interested in the illustration of a toucan.65 As they included coloured illustrations done by native American artists, Cesi was keen for Cassiano to find out on his behalf what those colours were like. Cassiano comments in his diary on ‘the exactness and beauty of the colours’,66 and, given his own interest in ornithology – a passion that he shared with Philip ii of Spain – it is not surprising that he singles out the illustrations of birds for special mention. What he does not mention, however, is that on this occasion he had parts of the text of Hernández – dealing with animals and minerals – transcribed and took this transcript back with him when he returned to Rome later in the year. It should be recalled that what the Accademia had to work with was the abridged compilation of Hernández’ work by Recchi, not the original work itself. In fact, after 1671 no one would be able to consult the originals any longer because they were destroyed by the fire of that year in the Escorial. Cassiano was particularly keen to have transcriptions of the parts which Recchi had omitted or drastically cut down. Cassiano’s transcription, however, did not include any illustrations. 161

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

The other transcription connected with Cassiano’s Spanish trip is the ‘little book of medicinal plants of the Indians’ now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Its history goes back to 1552, when an Indian convert priest and herbalist from the convent of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco in the Mexican capital wrote a manuscript with drawings of more than 180 medicinal plants and texts in Nahuatl.67 The texts were translated into Latin (except for the plant names, which of course had no equivalent in Latin) by another Indian convert priest, Juan Badiano, and the resulting syncretistic work, combining Renaissance representation with pre-Hispanic canons, was dedicated and presented to the Viceroy Mendoza and was subsequently given to the Spanish king, Philip ii. In fact, its arrival may have been the stimulus for Philip to organize the Hernández expedition. Shortly before his visit to the Escorial, on the same day on which he visited Gregorio de Bolívar, Cassiano went to see the garden of simples of the herbalist Diego Cortavila y Sanabria in Madrid ‘with various curious Indian plants, of which he gave seeds and fruits to the Cardinal, as well as giving him a small book of various Indian simples with their figures and qualities in dealing with most of the indispositions of the human body’, which is now known as the Codex Badianus.68 The extent to which the Hernández transcription and the Codex Badianus actually influenced the Lincei at the time has been disputed.The transcription was not included in editions of the Mexican Treasury before 1651 – by which time Stelluti and the Dal Pozzo brothers were the only Linceans left. The Codex Badianus entered the Barberini library69 – where it remained until it was donated to the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia de México by Pope John Paul ii in 1990 – and is unlikely to have been available for consultation on a regular basis to any of the Lincei who were in Rome. Moreover, the scientific commentary on the plants in the Recchi compilation was in the hands of Fabio Colonna, and he was in Naples, not Rome. On the other hand, Cassiano himself considered the Codex Badianus so important that in the winter of 1626– 7 he borrowed it from the Barberini library to have a copy of it made in which the images have been condensed but not reduced; the copyist has faithfully reproduced the style of the original drawings to produce what has been called a ‘quasi facsimile’.70 It may therefore be the case that the transcription and the ‘quasi facsimile’ were closer to Cassiano’s tastes – 162

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

with his penchant for combining scientific with aesthetic interests – than to those of at least some of his fellow Linceans. This suggestion of the transformation of the Lincean project in the course of time coincides with the hypothesis of Irene Baldriga, according to which an initial focus on American curiosities gradually turned into a more solid and encyclopaedic project along more Galilean lines.71 Symptomatic of this move towards a more exhaustive and systematic treatment is Cesi’s proposal, accepted by his fellow Linceans, to change the title of the work from De Materia Medica Novae Hispaniae to include the word thesaurus, since what he envisaged was more of a thesaurus than a book.72 In the previous year Cassiano had taken advantage of his stay in Paris to have illustrations made of a parakeet, some Brazilian falcons and a Canarian goose.73 An opportunity arose to indulge in a similar combination of the aesthetic with the ornithological while Cassiano was still in Spain. Among the various paintings of parrots in Cassiano’s collection is one ‘con Papagalli del Vander’.74 The curious name of ‘Vander’ betrays a lack of familiarity with the Dutch and Flemish system of nomenclature; the artist concerned is Juan van der Hamen y León, one of a family of Flemish archers who had left Brussels to serve in Spain.75 He was better known for his still lifes, at least one of which Cassiano took to Italy with him.76 The naturalism and scientific precision of Van der Hamen’s paintings, combined with their high aesthetic appeal, were bound to appeal to Cassiano’s taste.We also know that Cassiano’s collection included several bird paintings, attributed to Nicolas Poussin in the list of paintings in the dal Pozzo collection established by Giuseppe Ghezzi; apparently they are now lost.77 The years immediately after Cassiano’s return to Rome were ones of feverish activity for the Lincei. The privilege to print the Mexican Treasury was granted in 1624, and the printing of parts of the work had already begun in 1625.78 But a major delay in publication was caused by the appearance in that year of an illustrated description of sixteen exotic plants in the Farnese gardens, which covered half of the Palatine hill in Rome, written by Pietro Castelli.79 Combining an erudite compilation of previous writers on the species in question with extremely detailed observation and description of the specimen itself, it deliberately and explicitly made a virtue of prolixity: no less than 31 pages were devoted to one exotic plant, the seeds of which had been introduced from San Domingo in 1611, the Acacia Farnesiana. By 163

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

comparison, the botanical note on the same plant that Schreck had written for the Mexican Treasury before leaving the Lincei was only two lines long. Both Faber and Cesi realized that the entire botanical apparatus of the Mexican Treasury was in need of revision and expansion if it was to come up to current expectations.80

an amphisbaena and an about-turn Like Charles de l’Écluse, Federico Cesi never stopped adding marginal annotations and corrections down to his death in 1630,81 and Faber kept expanding his zoological texts with a prolixity, if not inspired by, at least matching that of Castelli, as new material came in. It was a bewildering task. Faber’s perplexity is evident from one of his letters:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

I wonder whether the first figure is a wolf, because it does not have a hairy tail, which is normal with wolves, unless the Mexican one is different. I don’t know for certain which animal the third figure is supposed to be; and the fourth is almost the same as the third.82 Faber’s description of 35 animals, printed and presented to the Barberini Pope and his nephew Francesco in the middle of 1628 in anticipation of the entire Mexican Treasury, eventually ran to almost 400 pages. The eagerness of the Lincei to incorporate stop press items is reminiscent of the final years of the activity of Charles de l’Écluse’s work on the Exoticorum libri decem. Faber went out of his way to acquire the most recent editions of publications for his library and drew on an international network of informants for the latest news.83 The German physician tells in detail how his ideas on one particular creature were shaken by just such a stop press arrival. That creature, introduced to Faber through the mediation of Cassiano dal Pozzo, was an Amphisbaena. Faber was writing his explanatory comments on the woodcut of a Maquiztetzauhuatl or Amphisbaena Mexicana (illus. 103). Although the creature in the illustration has only one head, he plunges into a lengthy discussion of both the fear and the veneration of serpents in antiquity and on their venom, before moving on to the question of whether it is possible for creatures with two heads to exist: ‘For what exceeds the bounds of nature and the order of created things more 164

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

103 Amphisbæna Mexicana, from Hernández et al., Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651).

than to paint, or even to draw, let alone to observe a living animal with two heads, not in one place, as is often seen in monsters, but one where the head is naturally placed, and the other where the tail is accustomed to be . . . ?’.84 After citing a host of ancient and medieval authorities, some credulous and some critical, he raises doubts of a more logicomedical kind about the impossibility of the organ by which food is digested coinciding with the organ by which it is expelled from the body, and about the possibility of the creature’s being driven in two opposite directions at the same time.85 This in turn leads him into the intricacies of vertebrate and invertebrate motion.86 At this point he receives a revelation: Completely unexpected and contrary to my opinion, the illustrious Cavaliere Cassiano dal Pozzo, one of our Lyncei, showed me a most accurate image of an Amphisbaena rendered in its proper colours. He declared that, in this very week in which I had entrusted the above pages to the typesetter for printing, it had been brought to Paris, and that a representation had been made from the animal itself by a certain friend of his with a great curiosity in exotic things, and sent to him.87 165

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

104 Amphisbæna Europæa, from Hernández et al., Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651).

Both exhilarated and embarrassed, Faber recants. Brendan-like, he launches into a disquisition on the need for the humility to change one’s mind when faced with the limitless possibilities of the divine creation. If the Creator likes to create an Amphisbaena, or to give a peccary a navel in the middle of its back, so be it. Even though the German physician has never seen a head like it on any live or dead serpent, nor in any drawing or painting of one, he instructs the engraver to make a woodcut of Cassiano’s image for publication in the Mexican Treasury (illus. 104).88 Both Faber and Cesi were well aware of the shortcomings of the technique of woodcut illustration, and they regretted the obstacles, particularly of an economic kind, which barred them access to the higher quality of printmakers on the other side of the Alps.89 It is therefore difficult to deduce from the rather rudimentary woodcut of the Amphisbaena Europaea what the drawing made for Cassiano will have looked like. At all events, given the combined scientific and aesthetic interests of the Cavaliere and the high quality of the images preserved in his Paper Museum, it may be assumed that the original drawing was of a sufficiently high and convincing quality for Cassiano to have been prepared to pass it on to a trained physician.90 Internal evidence enables us to date Faber’s palinode to 1627. Although the original hope had been to have the text of the Mexican Treasury printed for the Holy Year of 1626, that deadline proved to be 166

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

105 Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, The Head of Medusa, c. 1617, oil on canvas.

unrealistic. Nevertheless, correspondence between the various members of the Lincei indicates that printing had certainly begun by 1625, when more than a hundred pages had already been printed.91 In 1626, as we have seen, Pietro de Aloaysa had confirmed the existence of an American Amphisbaena like the one that Faber had shown him in a picture. Cassiano’s drawing must have seemed to confirm the Dominican’s eyewitness testimony. It is in the light of this controversy that we can consider a detail of a painting of the Head of Medusa (illus. 105) by Peter Paul Rubens, which includes a mass of serpentine locks (variously attributed to Jan Brueghel the Elder or to Frans Snyders).92 The artists’ concern for zoological accuracy has made it possible to identify certain species, such as the grass snake and the fire salamander. The poet Lucan mentions that a trade in Egyptian reptiles developed between Egypt and Italy in his own time – the first century ad93 – and no doubt a growing interest in and familiarity with such exotic imports lies behind the catalogue of deadly snakes that attacked Pompey’s army as it marched through Libya to be found in the ninth book of Lucan’s Pharsalia. This is the context in which Lucan refers to the Amphisbaena and to Medusa; according to his account, it was one of the snakes born from 167

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

106 Detail of illus. 105.

Medusa’s blood that dripped onto the Libyan desert as Perseus flew through the air with the Gorgon’s head.94 This must be the setting of the imaginary landscape in the Head of Medusa, and the serpent in the lower centre (illus. 106), with a head at each end of its body, corresponds to the Amphisbaena as described by Pliny and others (some of whom add that its eyes shine like lanterns).95 Always eager to display his classical erudition, Rubens will have hoped that at least some viewers of the painting would recognize the allusion to a recondite source, since the detail of the Amphisbaena is not to be found in the more familiar Ovidian account of the myth.96 The presence of the Amphisbaena in this – evidently mythological – painting has been taken to mark a retreat to the mythical past. Peter Sutton, for instance, has written about this painting: ‘Thus hand in glove with the rigorous empirical observation that imbued naturalistic animal painting with its outward realism was a continuing recognition of the uncritical scientific theories of classical antiquity’.97 It is evident from comparison of the woodcut in the Mexican Treasury with the amphisbaena in the painting that both artists are representing one and the same creature. Moreover, the very same amphisbaena is represented yet again in a painting-in-a-painting by another Antwerp artist, Frans Francken the Younger, The Cabinet of a Collector, now in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen.98 This work, one of a type that Francken appears to have produced above all in his early period,99 168

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

which includes an oriental kris, dried fish including a sea-horse, shells and coins as well as paintings, an album and a drawing, gives us a clue to the kind of setting in which both Rubens and Faber may have viewed the amphisbaena: as an example of the curious phenomena that could be observed in the natural world, like Brueghel’s horned hare or horned ass mentioned in the Introduction, and that could be found within the walls of a typical Kunst- und Wunderkammer. Indeed, Jeremy Muller has pointed out that such a representation of a collector’s cabinet by Francken ‘suggests the contents typical of an Antwerp study and, in certain respects, is evocative of Rubens’.100 Francken’s The Cabinet of a Collector also coincides with Rubens’s The Head of Medusa in terms of chronology, since the former is signed and dated 1617, and the latter may be dated on stylistic grounds to around the same date. We are in the dark as to the identification of the common source of all these representations, but it seems evident that it was circulating in Europe north of the Alps some ten years before it reached Faber as stop-press news. It seems most probable that the basis for these representations was to be found in one of the collections of curiosities in the Southern Netherlands. At any rate, it is to that cultural world, and not to the mythical world of the past, that the amphisbaena in The Head of Medusa belongs.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

rubens and the roman circle of lincei That Rubens and Faber should both have shown an interest in the amphisbaena is not surprising. After all, both the German physician and the Antwerp painter had their own collections of curiosities. However, there was a link of a more personal kind between the two men. Peter Paul Rubens and Johannes Faber both arrived in Italy from the North in 1600. While Faber went straight to the capital, Rubens found employment at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua, but he was allowed a measure of freedom to travel and study. From 1605 on he spent most of his time in Rome, where he stayed with his brother Philip until October 1608, when he hurried back to Antwerp – taking with him a marble bust that was believed at the time to be the philosopher Seneca101 – to find his mother dead. He never returned to Italy. It was in a letter addressed to Faber himself and dated 10 April 1609 that the artist expressed a reluctance to ‘become 169

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

a courtier again’; he had decided to stay in Antwerp, even though he concluded the same letter with greetings to friends in Italy ‘whose good conversation makes me often long for Rome’.102 As Faber tells us in the Mexican Treasury, he had cured Rubens of a serious pleurisy during the latter’s stay in Rome. As a token of gratitude, the Flemish painter had given him a portrait and a painting of a cock inscribed with the words ‘For my [recovered] health, to the illustrious doctor Johannes Faber, my Aesculapius, I – once condemned – willingly pay my debt of gratitude’.103 The learned allusion contained in these words to the dying words of Socrates (‘Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius; please pay it and don’t let it pass’) as recorded by Plato in the Phaido,104 is evidence not only of the close ties of friendship between the two men, but also of the interest in Neo-Stoicism – and thus reverence for Seneca – that they shared with Philip Rubens and other members of the Lincei.105 Faber and Rubens had a number of friends in common. One of these was the Frankfurt-born artist Adam Elsheimer, who arrived in Rome viaVenice in 1600. Faber was one of the witnesses at Elsheimer’s marriage in 1606, and was godfather to the artist’s son, Giovanni Francesco.106 Both the German artist and the German physician effected the transition from Protestantism to Catholicism. In his characteristically associative style, Faber felt that the point in the Mexican Treasury where the Techichicotl or Stellio Novae Hispaniae, a kind of lizard, was presented was also the place for a description of a delicate and highly original painting on copper by Elsheimer, The Mocking of Ceres, depicting the transformation of a boy into a lizard as punishment for his mockery of the goddess. Rubens himself owned a copy of this painting that later passed into the collection of Philip iv of Spain.107 The letter that Rubens wrote to Faber on 14 January 1611 after hearing of the death of Elsheimer is a moving tribute to the affectionate bond that the three men clearly felt for one another.108 Besides direct contact between Faber and Rubens, it should not be forgotten that both men belonged to large international networks which overlapped at many points. One such point of intersection is the figure of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, who had corresponded with Charles de l’Écluse.109 Through the intermediary of Girolamo Aleandro, who was primo maestro di camera to Francesco Barberini and in that capacity accompanied the legate to France in 1625, Cassiano dal 170

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome

Pozzo was introduced to Peiresc in that year.110 Peiresc also supplied the members of the Accademia dei Lincei with information about the Americas, for a few years later, he responded to Cassiano’s request for recent publications dealing specifically with both North and South America and the Canary Islands.111 The correspondence between Peiresc and Rubens went further back in time. They first met in 1622 when Rubens was in Paris to discuss the commission for a series of paintings commemorating the life of Maria de’ Medici with the French queen.112 This was when the two men embarked on a project to publish the most outstanding extant gems, with text by Peiresc and preparatory drawings for the engravings by Rubens, though the project was never brought to completion. Rubens’s prolonged absence from Italy might be supposed to have led to a weakening of his friendship with Faber over the years. That this was not the case can be demonstrated from the remarks with which Faber prefaces his reference to the cure of Rubens in the Mexican Treasury. In concluding a lengthy discussion of the legendary dragon, he regrets that his work as a doctor does not give him the time to go into even more aspects connected with dragons, which those of his scholarly friends with more leisure at their disposal are invited to pursue further. After mentioning the humanist polemist Gaspare Scioppio, the antiquarian Girolamo Aleandro and the philologist Lucas Holstein, Faber singles out – ‘singular reference!’, as one commentator has called it113 – the Rubens brothers as former disciples of Justus Lipsius and both worthy successors to his chair in the light of their work on antiquities.114 He also mentions that through the success of his art in Germany, Belgium, Italy, France, England and Spain, Peter Paul Rubens has in the course of twenty years been able to amass a vast fortune in Antwerp.115 Further evidence that Rubens was still connected with the Barberini circle in the following decade comes from a letter of 22 September 1633 from Peiresc to dal Pozzo referring to Rubens’s eagerness to come to Italy to do a portrait of Cardinal Barberini as well as of dal Pozzo himself.116 Cassiano dal Pozzo, Peiresc and Rubens were all concerned with the question of precision and accuracy. As his correspondence repeatedly shows, Peiresc was a stickler for getting the facts right – as he might be expected to be, since he was, among other things, writing a treatise on the measures of antiquity. Cassiano’s Paper Museum project 171

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

demanded nothing if not scientific and artistic precision on the part of the artists involved.The other Lincei too, including Faber, were attempting to apply the new principles of scientific inquiry that Federico Cesi was advocating. As for Peter Paul Rubens, he had purchased many of the lavishly illustrated natural historical works of Ulisse Aldrovandi that were being published posthumously, particularly with a view to rendering accurately the animals in his paintings of hunts. In the case of a hippopotamus, he drew on Aldrovandi, on a rare stuffed hippopotamus that he had seen in Rome, combined with information from the hippopotamus relief in the Belvedere gardens of the Vatican.117 On another occasion he reworked a reduced copy of Mantegna’s The Triumphs of Caesar: The Elephants, reducing the size of the foremost elephant’s ears even more, because Peiresc had told him that elephants appeared to have had smaller ears in antiquity.118 He famously criticized a mural of an antique landscape that had been found in the grounds of the Palazzo Barberini (the so-called Barberini Landscape) for its architectural and hydrological inaccuracy, implicitly correcting these practical drawbacks in his own Feast of the Gods in Vienna.119 And he included an Amphisbaena in his Head of Medusa, it may be concluded, because the ‘reality’ of the mythical amphisbaena – a creature specifically mentioned in Lucan’s account of Medusa in the Libyan desert and supposedly documented in (representations of) the types of collections of natural curiosities that were to be found in Antwerp and elsewhere – was now beyond doubt. Ten years later, its hotly contested existence was to be reasserted by his scientific friends in Rome, who felt confirmed in their position by additional eye-witness evidence that was coming in from the Americas. All this took place more than two hundred years before Gustave Moreau was to display an equal concern to base the seven heads of the Hydra on accurate scientific observation of serpents for his Hercules and the Lernean Hydra which triumphed at the Paris Salon of 1876.120

172

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

6 The Camel-sheep

The by now familiar figure of Gregorio de Bolívar figures prominently in Johannes Faber’s discussion of the Peruvian sheep. Although this Andean species was not strictly relevant to a publishing venture on the flora and fauna of Mexico, Faber no doubt felt justified in including it in the Mexican Treasury because the Peruvian sheep could be seen in New Spain too, albeit ‘for the sake of curiosity rather than utility’.1 No less than one-third of Faber’s ten pages on the subject are a rendering in Latin of a text in Spanish that the missionary had left Faber as he was on the eve of returning to the Americas.2 And given that much else of the discussion is completely irrelevant to the subject – Faber digresses on the location of a triple sacrifice, the suovetaurilia, in ancient Rome, with a personal interest in that he believed it to have taken place near his home close to the Pantheon, as well as on the decline of Tivoli, which has degenerated into a sprawl of taverns for shepherds and stalls for their flocks – it would be no exaggeration to say that Gregorio de Bolívar’s account occupies the lion’s share of the material that is presented on the Peruvian sheep. It ranges over the usefulness of the Ovis peruana as a beast of burden, a physical description of the animal itself and of its mating habits, the qualities of its wool, and the virtues of its bezoar stones.3 Besides presenting the Gregorian text, Faber sees fit to quote Girolamo Cardano, whose De rerum varietate (Basel, 1557) incorporated information about Peruvian animals taken from Pedro Cieza de León. Cardano asserted that the ‘Peruvian sheep’ were the size of donkeys because of the hot climate. Gregorio, however, knew that they lived in the cold climate of the Andes and were unable to stand a hot climate.4 173

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

The first-hand observations of the Franciscan friar prevailed over the humanistic natural history of the Italian. Faber further quotes from a certain Levinus Apollonius Gandobruganus Middelburgensis with regard to the capacity of the Peruvian sheep to be ridden like horses, to their extreme stubbornness, to the superior quality of their wool, to the pleasant taste of their meat, and to their ability to go without food for several days. The source of this material is in fact Agustín de Zárate, whose Historia del descubrimiento del Perú (Antwerp, 1555) was plagiarized by the young Flemish Latinist Lieven van Ghentbrugghe, who was later to run foul of the Inquisition in the Canary Islands.5 Faber is uncertain whether the animal should be classified as a sheep or a camel. In fact, with great perspicacity he recognizes that the Aristotelian categories cannot be simply extended to the New World, and raises the possibility that the Peruvian sheep form a species sui generis.6 As for the rather rudimentary woodcut that accompanies Faber’s text (illus. 107), he states that it is a more or less accurate imitation of Her nández’ original drawing, except that the neck should have been more elongated like that of a camel. Given the shortness of the hair of the beast in the woodcut, it is probably intended to represent a llama. There are in fact four types of camelid in South America; of the two undomesticated types, the slender vicuña lives in the high altitudes of the altiplano and is generally of a yellowish-brown colour with a white patch on its chest, while the slightly larger guanaco, which prefers a similar habitat, is generally of a brownish colour except for white patches on the chest and the insides of the legs and a grey or black head. The domesticated llama, a descendant of the guanaco, comes in a variety of sizes and colours as a result of long-term breeding, while the domesticated alpaca, a descendant of the vicuña, has a smaller head and a thicker fleece than the llama. Because of the difficulties of distinguishing between these types, and of matching them to the various representations considered in this chapter, they will be referred to generically as South American camelids unless a secure identification is possible.

174

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Camel–sheep

107 Ovis peruana, from Hernández et al., Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

the hump-backed camelid The earliest European description of an American camelid conforms to the type of composite hybrids discussed in chapter Three. Antonio Pigafetta describes it as follows: ‘This animal has the head and ears as large as a mule’s, and a neck and body like those of a camel, a stag’s legs, and a tail like that of a horse, and it neighs like a horse.’7 An anonymous German engraving from 1525 showing a camelid being used as a beast of burden by dog-headed cannibals (the Kynocephales discussed in chapter Three) has been identified as the earliest European representation of a llama.8 That llama corresponds in all essentials to Pigafetta’s description. It may have been Pigafetta’s comparison of the creature’s body with that of a camel that led to the creation of images of hump-backed camelids in South America. By the 1540s they begin to appear on maps, though the generic nature of these images usually rules out the possibility of identifying particular species.9 The first author to describe the four different types of American camelids was Pedro Cieza de León in a chapter of his Primera parte de 175

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

la Crónica del Perú entitled ‘On the sheep, guanacos and vicuñas that are to be found throughout the larger part of the mountainous region of Peru’.10 He describes the llamas as being ‘the size of small donkeys, with long legs, broad bellies, and a neck of the length and shape of that of a camel’. He distinguishes the guanacos from the more slender vicuñas, and concludes with the alpacas (pacos), which he considers to be ugly and very woolly. The woodcut, the first illustration of recognizable South American camelids to appear in print, represents four animals of the same species. Apart from their long necks and long ears, they are to all intents and purposes sheep, the European term to which Cieza assimilates the domesticated llamas. Evidently the engraver had to rely on a written or oral source for his information.11 Nevertheless, live South American camelids were to be found in Europe by the 1550s. Philip ii introduced both wild and domesticated ones on his country estates, and evidence of the presence of a South American camelid in Madrid in 1562 is provided by a medal designed by Giampaolo Poggini. Showing Philip ii on one side, on the other it shows a female figure holding a globe, a group of Indians, and an animal that is presumably meant to be a llama, in spite of its excessively long neck and stumpy legs, since it is rendered as a beast of burden carrying bars of silver (illus. 108). As the medal itself is made of (gilt) silver,

108 Giampaolo Poggini, Allegory of Peru: llama transporting bars of silver, 1562, gilt silver medal.

176

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Camel–sheep

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

109 Allocamelus, Conrad Gesner, Icones Animalium Quadrupedum… (Zürich, 1560).

this is an appropriate detail. In a letter sent from Madrid to Cosimo I de’ Medici, Poggini wrote that he had given the human figures Peruvian dress, and that the animal, ‘which resembles both a camel and a sheep, is reproduced from a living exemplar that is here’.12 Conrad Gesner and Pietro Mattioli both refer to the arrival of a camelid from Peru in the Dutch port of Middelburg in 1558. As the secondary literature tends to be rather confusing at this point, it is worth going back to Gesner’s text to see exactly what it was that he saw. After a discussion of the giraffe, whose Latin name camelopardus associates it with the camel, Gesner proceeds to discuss the animal described by Scaliger as an allocamelus (illus. 109). He then continues: This [sc. allocamelus] appears to be the same animal, whose figure we propose, taken from a printed sheet, with this description: Anno Domini 1558, June 19, this remarkable animal was brought to Middelburg in Zeeland. It had never been seen previously by the German princes nor mentioned by Pliny or any of the other ancient writers. They said that it was an Indian sheep (ovem Indicam) from Peru, a region some six 177

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

110 Camelid, from the Libri Picturati (a.16, folio 55).

thousand miles from Antwerp. Its height was six feet, its length five; the neck was as white as that of a swan; the rest of the body was reddish or yellowish, with feet like an ostrich (struthocamelus), like which it also urinates backwards. This animal (it was a four-year old male) was brought by Theodore of Neuss, a citizen of Cologne on the Rhine, and presented to His Majesty Caesar. Thus the pamphlet, which I take to have been printed in Nuremberg, in which city a certain friend who had seen this beast sent it on to me. Although it does not have horns, I have wanted to place it here after the camelopardus because it has the most features in common with 178

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Camel–sheep

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

111 Anselmus de Boodt (1550-1632), Allocamelus. Lama, from Historia Naturalis, ii, 33.

it: and the name sheep similarly, not from any bodily likeness, as can be seen, but because of the same gentle disposition in such a large body.13 There is a similar illustration of the creature, also wearing a collar, in one of the two zoological volumes of the Libri Picturati now in the Jagiellonska Library in Kraków (illus. 110), several of whose illustrations can be shown to go back to German pamphlets.14 The same creature also appears in a compilation of drawings by Anselmus de Boodt, court physician to Rudolf ii (illus. 111).15 While the collar can be taken to indicate that the animal was displayed as a curiosity (the woodcut in Gesner’s Icones includes an attendant holding the animal with a leash), a painting in oils of what appears to be the same animal, though without 179

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

112 Anonymous Italian artist, South American Camelid beneath a European Oak, oil on canvas.

a collar, standing amid lush vegetation and beneath an oak tree – a tree that does not occur in South America – represents the South American camelid in a European natural setting (illus. 112).16 Completely independent of this cluster of images which all seem to go back to the (lost) pamphlet, on the other hand, are the two pen 180

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The Camel–sheep

drawings of three camelids ‘of Peru, Callao and Chile and of all the highland’ based on first-hand observation by Fray Diego de Ocaña, who travelled through Chile two years after the great Indian revolt of 1598 (illus. 113).17 Given the fact that Diego de Ocaña’s drawings led an obscure existence within the pages of his unpublished manuscript, they failed to produce a major impact on the world of images that were circulating in Europe. However, the sending of six expeditions to Chile by a European state that was very influential in the production and distribution of the printed book, the Netherlands, was a decisive moment in the production and distribution of European images of South American camelids, particularly hump-backed ones. The first Dutch expedition to Chile, which left the port of Rotterdam in 1598 under the command of Jacques Mahu and Simon de Cordes, included the occupation of Castro on the island of Chiloé, but the engravings (based on drawings by Barent Jansz. Potgieter) which accompany the printed account of the expedition show a greater interest in the penguins of the Strait of Magellan than in any camelids.18 The account of the second Dutch expedition, however, which was operating in the Strait of Magellan under the command of Olivier van Noort during the same months as the fleet under Mahu and De Cordes, includes an impression of the island of La Mocha, some 30 km off the Chilean coast and home of the Lafkenche Mapuche, at the moment of the arrival of the Dutch. In the foreground can be seen two shaggy camelids which are larger than the European men in the scene. Their most striking characteristic, however, is their humped back (illus. 114). Llamas made their reappearance in Book ix of the De Bry publication America, which was issued in 1601. The frontispiece and a plate in the first part presented llamas carrying bars of silver from the mines of Potosí to Arica. A plate in the third part depicts the welcome given to the Dutch on the island of La Mocha. Once again the camelid has a hump, though the animal has now been reduced to the dimensions of a sheep (illus. 115). The humped back appears again in the engraving of the island of La Mocha that accompanies the account of the voyage of Joris van Spilbergen published in Dutch and Latin in 1619 (illus. 116).19 This time the Mapuche couple that is familiar from the earlier prints have a humpbacked camelid the size of a sheep attached to a leash. The text refers to 181

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

113 Fray Diego de Ocaña, Camelids of Peru and Chile, from A través de la América del Sur, 1600.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

114 La Moche, Chile, from Barent Jansz. Potgieter, Wijdtloopigh verhael van tgene de vijf schepen (die int jaer 1598 tot Rotterdam toegherust werden / om door de Straet Magellana haren handel te drijven) wedervaren is . . . (Amsterdam, 1600).

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Camel–sheep

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

115 Theodor de Bry, Americae IX, part 111 (Frankfurt, 1601).

‘a strange type of sheep, with a hump on the back like a camel’.20 An innocent observer of this plate could be forgiven for failing to recognize that the animal in question was a camelid and not a sheep. It is likely that the use of South American camelids as beasts of burden encouraged their assimilation to the hump-backed camels of North Africa (whose inability to survive in the cold Andean climate was one of the arguments adduced by Cornelis de Pauw to support his thesis that the climate of South America had a detrimental effect on animals imported from the Old World).21 A map of Chile included in Alonso de Ovalle’s history of Chile presents not only a camelid carrying a load, but even two of them working the land with a plough.22 The Jesuit author himself explained: Among the animals endemic to that country, the first are those called sheep of the land, and they have the shape of a camel, but are smaller in size, and lack the hump that they have. Some are white, others black and brown, and others are ash-coloured. The authors cited say that in the past they were 183

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

116 La Mocha, Chile, from Joris van Spilbergen, Speculum Orientalis Occidentalis que Indiae Navigationum / Oost ende West-Indische Spiegel der nieuwe Navigatien (Leiden, 1619).

used in some parts to plough the land before they had oxen, and even afterwards the accounts of the Dutch armada of Joris van Spilbergen cited above state that when they passed through the island of La Mocha, the Indians were using these sheep for that purpose.23 So by 1646 the hump-backed camelid had lost its hump, and the ship of the desert had become the sheep of the land.

the four-clawed camelid An even stranger-looking beast is to be found in one of the three illustrations in the Journal and Historical Story about the Voyage made East of Strait le Maire, to the Coast of Chile, published in Amsterdam in 1646, entitled ‘A sheep-camel, a Chilean and his wife’ (illus. 117).24 The immediate context of the engraving is a passage in the Journal in which 184

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Camel–sheep

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

the author describes an event that took place on 30 May 1643. A group of Dutch military disembarked to take prisoners on an island southwest of Calbuco in the Gulf of Ancud which separates the island of Chiloé from the Chilean mainland. They came back on board without having sighted any Indians or Spaniards, but they did manage to find ‘five big camel-sheep, having fine wool and necks 3 to 4 feet long, not good for eating because the meat was as tough as horsemeat’.25 Before analysing the content of the plate in more detail, it is necessary to briefly set the historical context.26 After the resumption of hostilities between Spain and the Netherlands in 1621, one of the strategic bases for attacks on the Spanish fleet was the South American coast. In 1628 the Dutch West Indian Company (wic) dispatched a naval expedition to establish a base on the Chilean coast, attack the Spanish vessels that were taking silver from Arauco to Lima, make an agreement with the Mapuche, and investigate the unknown territory

117 Exchange between Mapuche and Dutchmen, Gulf of Ancud, Chile, Journael ende historis verhael van de reyse gedaen by oosten de straet le Maire, naer de custen van Chili, onder het beleyt van den Heer Generael Hendrick Brouwer, inden jare 1643 voor gevallen, vervatende der Chilesen manieren, handel ende ghewoonten . . . (Amsterdam, 1646).

185

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

further south during the return voyage. However, the difficulties encountered by the Dutch in maintaining possession of Recife in northeast Brazil obliged them to call off the Chilean expedition. The interest of the Dutch in Chile at this time, and particularly the possibility of an alliance with the Mapuche, was reflected in literature in a chapter of the satirical work La hora de todos, written by Francisco de Quevedo between 1633 and 1635. Ten years after the recall of the first expedition, the Dutch West Indian Company and the States-General sent three ships from Holland to Pernambuco in Brazil under the command of Hendrick Brouwer. Reinforced with three extra vessels supplied by the governor of the Dutch colony in Brazil, the Dutch reached the island of Chiloé at the beginning of May 1643. They spent several months there, destroying the Spanish bases at Carelmapu and Castro. After the death of Brouwer in August of that year, the command passed to Elias Herckmans. The Brouwer-Herckmans expedition had chosen the city of Valdivia, which was controlled by the Mapuche, to form an alliance with the Indians and for the construction of a fortress. Herckmans embarked more than 470 Mapuche in August, supplying them with large quantities of grain, peas, beans, potatoes, sheep and pigs.27 But Herckmans’s repeated questions regarding the whereabouts of the gold mines of Valdivia soon raised the suspicions of the Mapuche,28 and supplies started to run out. Herckmans had no alternative but to return to Recife at the end of the year. The plate shows the Chilean man and woman indicated in the title on the left. They are both barefoot. On the right are two men in European dress accompanied by a third figure half their size. In the centre is a figure in a buttoned tunic, gesticulating with his hands. He is standing behind the ‘sheep-camel’, a quadruped with woolly hair on its body and neck. Its rear feet have a cloven hoof like that of a sheep, but the ones at the front have four claws each. That the encounter takes place on the coast is indicated by the presence of a European vessel on the right. The action appears to be one of exchange between Indians and Europeans. The gesticulating man in the centre may be acting as an inter preter or go-between; the Journal records that ‘the Spanish of these people is so peculiar that none of us could understand anything of what they said’.29 The diminutive figure on the right is perhaps intended to represent a Moor in the role of a servant of the Dutch. The appearance and dress of the man and woman on the left conform 186

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Camel–sheep

closely to the image of the Mapuche that emerges from the Journal.30 But what are we to make of the four-clawed camelid? Besides the Journal, there are two other sources that go back directly to the Brouwer-Herckmans expedition. One of the dossiers of the Dutch West Indian Company now in the Dutch National Archive contains several diaries of the expedition, a few maps and other documents connected with the venture, but unfortunately there is nothing in this material that resembles the engraving in question.31 The second visual and textual source on the ill-fated Dutch adventure in Chile is the illustrated journal of a German soldier who took part in the expedition. This journal contains 128 drawings and maps, most of them in colour.32 And one of those drawings is of a camelid with four claws on its front feet. It will therefore be necessary for us to look at this source in more detail, because cursory discussions of it in the past have overlooked some important points. Its author, Caspar Schmalkalden, was one of seven children born in Friedrichsroda, Thuringia. His account begins:

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

In the year of our Lord 1642, Thursday, 16th October by my calendar, I embarked in Texel together with other soldiers, a total of 36 men and 4 women, without the ship’s crew. The ship did not belong to any company, but was just a merchant ship, called Elephant.33 Two months later he landed safely in Recife, Brazil. On 12 January 1643 he left Pernambuco for Chile on board the Vlissingen, which was commanded by Elias Herckmans, as a member of the Brouwer expedition.34 Schmalkalden returned to Amsterdam at the end of 1645, but it was not long before he set off again, this time for the Dutch East Indies. After returning to Europe in 1652, he married three years later and spent the rest of his life in Germany.35 Besides a map of Valdivia and a second of the Gulf of Ancud, the Schmalkalden drawings offer four different Chilean subjects. The first is of a penguin that he saw in March 1643 in the Bahía del San Valentín (or the Puerto de Buen Suceso) (illus. 118).36 The second and third represent a Chilean man and woman respectively.The quatrain that accompanies the drawing of the man alludes to the European greed for precious metals that had aroused the suspicions of the Mapuche: ‘I have 187

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

118 Penguin, from Caspar Schmalkalden, Reise von Amsterdam nach Pharnambuco in Brasil, watercolour.

to be continuously worried and alert, here foreign ships come to extract the gold, therefore the gold and the avarice do not attract us at all.’37 The fourth Chilean subject represented in Schmalkalden’s journal appears in the drawing that he labels ‘Ein Cameelschaap, Chilesisch Paco’.38 Zoologists have identified it variously as a guanaco, llama or alpaca.39 But whatever identification is accepted, none of the four types of camelid has four claws on each of its front feet as this animal does, both in the drawing (illus. 119) and in the accompanying text (‘on the front feet it has four claws and on the back, just two’).40 But although the animal does not correspond to any known species, it does correspond 188

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Camel–sheep

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

119 Camel-sheep, from Caspar Schmalkalden, Reise von Amsterdam nach Pharnambuco in Brasil, watercolour.

to the ‘sheep-camel’ depicted in the engraving in the Journal of the Brouwer-Herckmans expedition. This correspondence, as we shall now see, forms part of a wider system of what Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblances’: ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’.41 This polyphony increases if we extend the sphere of investigation and consider some other members of the Dutch corpus of images of Chile and Brazil.42 Among the loose sheets with drawings of the natural history of Brazil done by Dutch artists associated with the court of Prince Johan Maurits, governor of the Dutch colony in North-East Brazil from 1637 to 1644, we find two representations in oils on paper of a camelid. One of them, labelled ‘Ovis Chilensis’, is of a white to coffee colour and has the regular hooves of a camelid (illus. 120). The other, labelled ‘Ovis Chilensis alia’, clearly belongs to the family of images under consideration because it has four claws on each of its front feet (illus. 121). 189

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

120 Chilean sheep, Libri Picturati a.34, folio 133.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

121 Other Chilean sheep, Libri Picturati a.34, folio 135.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

These loose leaves, which were later bound in the four volumes of the Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae for Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg, have no accompanying text apart from the titles, which were added at a later date. However, the camelid with four claws reappears a few years later as a woodcut in an appendix (‘On Peruvian and Chilean sheep’) to the Historia naturalis Brasiliae, published in 1648, which includes both De medicina Brasiliensi by Willem Pies, and the Historiae rerum naturalium Brasiliae by Georg Marcgraf, who died in the same year as Hendrik Brouwer. This appendix is the work of Johan de Laet, who edited Marcgraf ’s notes as well as adding notes of his own. The two-page appendix opens with an account based on Pietro Mattioli of the camelid shown in Middelburg in 1558, which we have already come across, including a woodcut of that animal. De Laet then continues with the words: ‘The Chilean sheep are very different. Our people brought this image of them, done from life (ad vivum)’. He adds that it has cloven rear hooves, but that the front feet end in four claws, and this is exactly what we see in the woodcut (illus. 122), which is clearly a copy (in reverse) of the drawing done by one of the Dutch artists in Brazil at the court of Johan Maurits.43 Among the later representations connected with the brief Dutch presence in Chile is the tapestry known as L’Indien à cheval or Le cheval pommelé, one of a series of tapestries produced in the 1680s at the Gobelins workshops in Paris that were presented to Louis xiv of France by the Dutch prince Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen.44 The Mapuche Indian on horseback, with his poncho, breeches and spurs, is a more elaborate version of the Chilean male represented by Schmalkalden and in the Historia naturalis Brasiliae, while the two camelids, one coffee-coloured, the other white with four claws on its front feet, correspond to the two paintings in oils on paper on loose sheets that were later bound in the Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae. And to complete the dossier, it is worth mentioning the existence of an eighteenth-century tapestry, Le Chameau, which features not only a hump-backed camel but also a white camelid with four claws on each of its front feet.45 The dossier of images centred on the presence of a four-clawed South American camelid that we have compiled on the basis of ‘family resemblances’ brings those images together on the basis of morphological 192

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The Camel–sheep

122 Johan de Laet, Chilean sheep, in Willem Piso and Georg Marcgraf, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden and Amsterdam, 1648).

criteria. Can we pass from morphology to history to establish a sequence or chronological filiation?46 With regard to chronology, the published works offer us a terminus ante quem: the engraving in the Journal of the Brouwer-Herckmans expedition cannot be later than the date of publication of this work, namely 1646. The woodcuts in the Historia naturalis Brasiliae cannot be later than its date of publication in early 1648, and are probably not much earlier than that date either. The text of the Historia naturalis Brasiliae seems to have been completed by October 1646,47 but the editor De Laet had to wait for the completion of all the illustrations, and given the presence of the Chilean ones in an appendix to the 193

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

work, they were probably among the last to be completed. When we turn to the unpublished images, we lack the security of a publication date, but it can be safely stated that the two representations of a camelid on the loose sheets of the Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae must have been done before Johan Maurits took them to the Netherlands in 1644. The situation regarding the manuscript of Caspar Schmalkalden is even more difficult to interpret. The drawing of a penguin and the two drawings of Chileans form part of the account of his journey from Pernambuco to Chile in 1643. According to the author, he set out from Pernambuco in January, saw the penguins in the Bahía del San Valentín in March, two Indian caciques brought the admiral, who was stationed on Chiloé, the head of a Spaniard on 27 July, and Schmalkalden left Valdivia on 28 October of the same year to return to Brazil after the failure of the expedition. It would therefore be natural to suppose that Schmalkalden did these drawings in the course of 1643. In the two modern editions of Schmalkalden’s manuscript,48 the text on the ‘camel-sheep’ or ‘Chilean Paco’ has been placed after the description of a Chilean man and a Chilean woman, thereby implying that the text (and the drawing of the ‘Chilean Paco’) were done during the same period, namely 1643. However, the desire of the modern editors to facilitate the task of the reader has created confusion. Just as Charles Darwin brought together material from different periods of his Beagle voyage if it belonged thematically together to produce more readable chapters – as a simple comparison of the diary of his voyage with the narrative that was later published shows49 – so the editors of Schmalkalden’s manuscript have transposed the text on the ‘Chilean Paco’ from folio 100 of the manuscript to a place some 30 folios earlier. In fact, in their original position, both the text on and illustration of the ‘Chilean Paco’ are wedged between a section on East Indian fruits and one on the animals of Brazil. This part of the manuscript contains various references to fish or animals that were captured in the years 1644 and 1645, by which time Schmalkalden had left Chile, while the descriptions of East Indian fruits, if based on first-hand observation, cannot be earlier than Schmalkalden’s departure for the Dutch East Indies in 1646. Indeed, the entry on folio 101, immediately following the ‘Chilean Paco’ on folio 100, is a Brazilian porcupine, but Schmalkalden adds that ‘in September of the year 1646, I saw the same in Africa, in the Cape of Good Hope’. 194

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The Camel–sheep

Schmalkalden’s manuscript is thus not a day-by-day diary, and there is no justification for automatically assuming that proximate entries are also proximate in time. There is an added complication, to which nobody has so far drawn attention: folios 122 to 137 show the presence of two different styles of handwriting. Whatever the explanation for the latter phenomenon may be, it does point away from the supposition that the extant manuscript was recorded day by day, or at least chronologically, by its author. The most likely hypothesis is therefore the one advanced by Whitehead and Boeseman: that the journal is probably ‘a fair copy made from loose notes and drawings’.50 It could have been compiled at any time after Schmalkalden’s return to Europe in 1652. This opens up the possibility that he could have based some of his sketches on published works, such as the woodcuts in the Historia naturalis Brasiliae. In this connection, it is worth noting that one of the appendices that De Laet added to the Historia naturalis Brasiliae, entitled ‘On the Chileans’, and dealing with the physique, homes, clothes, agriculture, food, marriage customs, religion, political structure, weapons, plants, trees and climate of Chile,51 opens with a woodcut of a Chilean couple, which with minor variations closely resembles the Chilean couple in the manuscript of Caspar Schmalkalden. In other words, after the appearance of the Historia naturalis Brasiliae in early 1648, Schmalkalden could have drawn on it for his Chilean couple and for his Chilean ‘Paco’. Although every published work is generally preceded by a manuscript, it would be erroneous to suppose that Schmalkalden’s manuscript is, by virtue of its being a manuscript, closer to Chilean reality than the published works. So who introduced the four-clawed camelid into the iconographic corpus? Of the extant sources, we are left with the sketch in oils from the Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae. Those sketches, however, were made by artists based in (the Dutch colony in) Brazil, and there is no evidence that any of them ever went as far south as Chile.52 Albert Eeckhout, it is true, is credited with having done a painting of Tenerife, but this was en route to or from the Americas.53 Of course, there is the possibility that a Chilean camelid found its way into Brazil without the need for the Dutch artists to travel beyond the confines of the colony – after all, the Dutch artist in Brazil who painted three portraits of Africans from Congo did not have to travel to that kingdom, since they were members of a diplomatic mission to the court of Johan 195

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

Maurits in 1642–354 – but that would be pure speculation. Moreover, given the generally lifelike quality of the work of the Dutch artists in Brazil, especially Albert Eeckhout, it seems unlikely that they would have invented the spurious detail of the four claws if they had actually seen a Chilean camelid. If the sketch in oils from the Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae is not the artist’s invention, we have to assume that it was copied from some lost original. That lost original may also be the source behind the engraving of the ‘sheep-camel’ in the Journal of the Brouwer-Herckmans expedition. Indirectly, it would then be the source behind all the later representations of the South American camelid with four claws on each of its front feet. It has often been stressed that, in attempting to represent the fauna and flora of the New World, European artists had to fall back on familiar models to flesh out the written or oral descriptions of species that they had never seen with their own eyes. On the other hand, Albert Eeckhout and the other Dutch artists in Brazil spent almost a decade there, and Caspar Schmalkalden spent three years in Brazil and Chile. In each case there are difficulties in supposing that the images that have come down to us should be taken as more or less ‘photographic’ representations of what they saw before their very eyes and produced during their stay in the Americas. There is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between what these eyewitnesses saw with their own eyes and the images that they crafted and composed with their own hands. Each image in the pictorial record requires the patient work of unravelling before we can even begin to determine what it represents. After all, in spite of that first-hand experience, they all proved capable of perpetuating the memory of a four-clawed South American camelid that never existed.

196

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

7 The Sloth Proceeds

As we have seen in the introductory chapter to this volume, William B. Ashworth Jr singled out the Historia naturalis Brasiliae of 1648 by Willem Piso and Georg Marcgraf as marking a turning-point that changed the face of natural history forever. He attributed the same pioneering role to the publication by Marcgraf and Piso in a discussion of the printed images of a creature that had been classified in the sixteenth century as half-bear and half-ape: the sloth. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the woodcut of the fierce-looking sloth that Clusius had included in the appendix to the Exoticorum libri decem (illus. 83) was the most persistent of these images,1 reappearing in publications by Juan Nieremberg, John Johnston and others and leaving its mark on non-print representations as well.2 In fact, it was so persistent that, although Rudolf ii had a stuffed sloth in his collection in Prague, his court physician, Anselmus de Boodt, based his drawing of a sloth, signed ‘A.D.B.’, on the image in Clusius’s appendix.3 The image of the fierce-looking Clusian sloth is also the source of the one that appears in the 1648 edition of the Historia naturalis Brasiliae,4 but the engraved title page of that edition (illus. 123) includes the image of a sloth climbing a tree that does not go back to any previous prototype. Moreover, the enlarged edition of the work by Marcgraf and Piso, published in 1658 as De Indiae utriusque, contained no less than three images of the sloth: the Clusian one that had featured in the 1648 edition of Historia naturalis Brasiliae; a picture of the skeleton of a sloth that had been given to the anatomy theatre in Leiden; and a new representation of the sloth, identified as ‘ai repens minor’, described as crawling, although the result of the rotation of the woodcut through 197

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

123 Title page, Willem Piso and Georg Marcgraf, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden and Amsterdam, 1648).

ninety degrees before printing, as Ashworth points out, is that the little sloth appears not to be crawling at all, but clinging.5 In a footnote, Ashworth refers to two collections of natural historical drawings, known as the Libri Picturati, that are now in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Kraków. At the time when he wrote his article very little was known about these collections, which were only rediscovered in 1977, but in the meantime a number of hypotheses, some of them mutually contradictory, have been launched in connection with them and it has become possible to refine some of his remarks. For instance, his suggestion that ‘perhaps the prototype of the ignavus’ is to be found among the ‘sixteen volumes of drawings of L’Ecluse’ can now be ruled 198

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The Sloth Proceeds

out. The sixteen volumes in question, commonly known as Libri Picturati a. 16-30, have been brought into connection with the name of Charles de l’Écluse by the majority of scholars,6 but none of the 261 representations of fauna – mainly fish and birds – contained in the first two volumes is of a sloth, and the remaining volumes (Libri Picturati a. 18-30) are entirely devoted to plants.7 The second collection of natural historical drawings in Kraków to which Ashworth refers comprises a large number of paintings of Brazilian natural history on paper in oils, crayon and watercolours associated with the artists who accompanied the humanist prince Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen, who was governor of the Dutch colony in Recife, Brazil, from 1637 to 1644. They were given by Johan Maurits to Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg, in 1652.The Elector’s physician Christian Menzel was engaged in the process of arranging and binding them in seven volumes between 1660 and 1664. The result was the four volumes of (mainly) oils on paper, Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae (Libri Picturati a. 32‒5); the two volumes of watercolours, Libri Principis (also known as Handbooks or Brasilianische Natur-Gegenstände) (Libri Picturati a. 36‒7); and a miscellaneous volume containing a mixed collection of drawings sent to Menzel by Andreas Cleyer, the Miscellanea Cleyeri (Libri Picturati a. 38). In the early nineteenth century these volumes were incorporated into the series of Libri Picturati in the former Preussischer Staatsbibliothek, and are now in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Kraków.8 Ashworth noted:‘So far as I can tell, there is no drawing of a sloth among these drawings’.9 However, with the publication of the Brazilian iconographic corpus,10 it is now possible to follow the development of the image of the sloth within the Brazilian iconographic material that is prior to the publication of the Historia naturalis Brasiliae by Piso and Marcgraf. Libri Picturati a. 34 is the one of the four large volumes of the Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae devoted to people, mammals, reptiles, insects and arachnids. Folio 99, labelled ‘Ai’, shows a sloth in a crawling pose, though devoid of any background to indicate where it is crawling (illus. 124).11 The head-on pose is clearly identical to that of the more crudely executed woodcut of the ‘ai repens minor’ in the Historia naturalis Brasiliae, without the rotation through ninety degrees of the latter. A pair of sloths are depicted within a setting of vegetation on folio 112 of Libri Picturati a. 36, the first of the two volumes of watercolours 199

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

124 Crawling sloth, Libri Picturati a. 34, folio 99.

known as the Libri Principis or Handbooks (illus. 125).12 The sloth crawling on the grass has a pose similar to, but not the same as, that of the ‘ai repens minor’, and is not represented head-on as the latter is. The one climbing a tree is roughly similar to the sloth climbing a tree in the title page to the Historia naturalis Brasiliae (illus. 123), though the sloth in the Libri Principis clings closer to the trunk and its front legs point upwards rather than downwards. The artist in question has not been securely identified, and variations in style within the two volumes suggest that more than one artist was involved.13 The annotation is in the hand of Johan Maurits himself and states:‘The Germans call this animal a sloth since it walks no more than fifty steps a day. It feeds on old leaves. Its hair is thick, and it reaches about two feet long’.14 The Libri Picturati a. 32‒8 are not the only visual documents from the Dutch expedition in Brazil. Lacking any background, but in a pose resembling the crawling sloth of the Libri Principis, is the sloth labelled ‘Priguiça’ on folio 78 of the Thierbuch, a volume of drawings by Zacharias Wagener (illus. 126).15 Wagener had sailed for Brazil as a soldier, but he rose to the rank of quartermaster to the court of Johan Maurits.16 200

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

125 Two sloths, Libri Picturati a. 36, folio 112.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

126 Watercolour from Zacharias Wagener, Thierbuch, folio 78.

On this page of the illustrated journal of his stay in Brazil, he records: ‘This animal is called slothful by our people and by the Portuguese, and is thus given the fitting name for its action. It needs a good day to climb a tree, it hangs there by its three-toed front paw, hanging there for a long time until the next paw, after a good half hour, comes to help; then, finally, it brings its hind legs up, very slowly. It only eats some sweet leaves and grasses and does no harm to anybody’.17 Another soldier in Brazil who produced illustrations of his tropical surroundings was Caspar Schmalkalden, whom we encountered in the previous chapter. Among the drawings contained in Schmalkalden’s journal Reise von Amsterdam nach Pharnambuco in Brasil are two versions of a sloth. The first, on folio 109, labelled ‘Ai Brasilianisch, Pigriza Portugiesisch’ (illus. 127), repeats the version that Clusius had included in the appendix to Exoticorum libri decem.The second, illustrated on the following folio, is depicted between two clumps of vegetation and above a musical ascending and descending scale of its song: ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha’ (illus. 128).18 It has the skinny limbs of Wagener’s sloth (illus. 126), but it is portrayed in a head-on pose that is closer to the version in Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae.The strip of fur extending over its back from its head, on the other hand, has no parallel in any of the other versions considered so far, nor does its 202

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The Sloth Proceeds

127 Watercolour from Caspar Schmalkalden, Reise von Amsterdam nach Pharnambuco in Brasil, folio 109, Chart b 533.

stump of a tail. The numerous differences from the woodcut in the Historia naturalis Brasiliae by Piso and Marcgraf render it unlikely that Schmalkalden’s second sloth is based on that printed source. In 1647, that is, before the publication of the first edition of the Historia naturalis Brasiliae by Piso and Marcgraf, Joan Blaeu printed a wall-map of Dutch Brazil that had been completed four years earlier by Georg Marcgraf.19 In a vignette below the main title ‘Brasilia qua parte paret Belgis’ is a representation of a sloth ‘shown above and head-on’ (illus. 129).20 Its posture, the strip of hair running halfway down its back, and the two 203

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

128 Watercolour from Caspar Schmalkalden, Reise von Amsterdam nach Pharnambuco in Brasil, folio 110, Chart b 533.

clumps of vegetation on either side of it, all correspond to the version of the sloth with ascending and descending musical scale by Caspar Schmalkalden (illus. 128), except that the position of the front paws is reversed.21 Presumably both Schmalkalden and the anonymous artist of the vignette were drawing on a (now lost) common source. The most strikingly novel feature of Schmalkalden’s second representation of a sloth is the ascending and descending musical scale to represent the song of the sloth. Already Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés had discussed the sloth’s song in detail in the description of 204

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Sloth Proceeds

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

129 Detail from Georg Marcgraf, geographical wall-map of Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam, 1647).

‘the ugliest and most useless animal that he had ever seen’ in his Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias of 1526, but he had illustrated neither the creature itself nor its song.22 Incidentally, Oviedo is the source of the account of the sloth in an anonymous Turkish Ottoman manuscript compiled around 1580, the Tarih-i Hindi-i garbi, where the translator stated: ‘Its voice is quite delightful and unusual. At night it goes up in trees and makes different noises such that those who do not know think that it is the sound of a dulcimer’.23 The credit for ‘the first pictorial record of the ignavus in full voice’ is conferred by Ashworth on Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680), whose Musurgia combined the ascending and descending scale of the sloth with a representation of the creature.24 Musurgia was published in Rome in 1650.25 As discussed in the previous chapter, we do not know exactly when Schmalkalden completed this section of his manuscript (in the description of a porcupine on folio 101, that is, only nine folios before the first image of the sloth, he records that he saw the porcupine in September 1646). It is therefore uncertain whether the credit for ‘the first pictorial record 205

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

of the ignavus in full voice’ is due to the Jesuit polymath Kircher or to the obscure figure of a soldier from Thuringia, whatever his source for that illustration may have been.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

enter frans post At this point we pass from the relatively obscure figures of Zacharias Wagener and Caspar Schmalkalden to consider the representations of the Brazilian sloth in the work of a much better-known figure, the Haarlem-born Frans Post (1612–1680), one of the artists attached to the court of Johan Maurits, who presumably travelled to Brazil with his employer in 1637 (the date of his first dated and extant painting, a view of Itamaracá, now in the Mauritshuis designed by his brother Pieter Post in The Hague26) and returned to Holland in 1644. His name has been associated with the vignettes of the Blaeu map; Whitehead and Boeseman noted: ‘The iconography has never been studied in detail, but it has been concluded, probably rightly, that the pictures were derived from drawings by Frans Post.’27 Nevertheless, although they state that the style is ‘typically Postian’, they have the reservation that ‘the animals have a certain clumsiness about them . . . which seems to belie Post’s accurate lines’.28 Indeed, if we want to know how Post rendered the Brazilian sloth, we have only to turn to the oil painting of the cathedral of Olinda, signed and dated to 1662 (illus. 130).29 Not only is the wooden frame of this painting decorated with Brazilian animals, flowers and fruits, but the foreground of the painting shows a number of Brazilian fauna, including the sloth. This sloth corresponds exactly to the ‘Ai’ depicted in the Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae with which this series of comparisons began. The same sloth, rendered in exactly the same way, can also be found in the company of other Brazilian animals in the foreground of two other oil paintings of sugar mills.30 It has generally been assumed on the basis of the immense amount of detail in the paintings made by Post after his return to Europe that he must have had notebooks crammed with sketches.31 In the case of the sloth, however, there is no need to postulate the existence of even more unknown images as likely sources, since Post clearly derived his images of the sloth from the version in the Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae. From 1652 on, as far as we know, the collection of watercolours and oils on paper that constitute the Libri picturati a. 32–8 was in Berlin, for in 206

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

130 Frans Post, View of Olinda Cathedral, 1662, oil on canvas (detail).

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

131 Frans Post, Brazilian Landscape, signed and dated 1652, oil on canvas.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The Sloth Proceeds

that year Johan Maurits presented them to Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg, as part of a diplomatic gift.32 Derivations from them in post-1652 paintings by Frans Post must therefore be supposed to be based on copies now that the originals were no longer available to him. It is not just Post’s sloth that goes back to the Brazilian Libri picturati. Consideration of a few other zoological details of his paintings confirms his dependence on them. For instance, one of his most famous and widely reproduced paintings is the magnificent panoramic landscape almost three metres tall – it is the largest work in his oeuvre – signed and dated 22 December 1652, that hangs today in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (illus. 131).33 Perched on the bottom edge of the painting, its feet extending from the painted surface into the narrow strip of canvas between the painting proper and the frame, is a spot-backed puffbird (Nystalus maculatus) (illus. 132). It is clearly derived from the watercolour of a bird labelled ‘jaguaçati’ on folio 111 of the second volume of the Libri Principis (illus. 133). Since Post’s puffbird is perched on the edge of the painting, it is not immediately obvious that it is tailless, but no such ambiguity attached to the jaguaçati rendered in the middle of the folio of the Libri Principis, which has lost its tail.34 Facing the bird in Post’s painting is a grasshopper, which is unique in Post’s oeuvre. It closely resembles (in reverse) the tucuruçu (Tropidacris collaris) represented on folio 418 of the first volume of the Libri Principis (illus. 134). Though described by Marcgraf, this grasshopper was not illustrated in the Historia naturalis Brasiliae.35 There can thus be no doubt as to Post’s source. Perched on the other side of the puffbird, in the right-hand corner of the painting, is a lizard.Though its distinctive long curving tail does not fit entirely into the available space, its shape, colouring and pose lead us straight back to the Libri Principis again, this time to the ‘çenembijuba’ (Iguana sp.), perhaps the one kept by Marcgraf as a pet,36 depicted on folio 422 of the first volume (illus. 135). Some idea of the importance of the rediscovery of the Libri Picturati a. 32–8 can be gauged from the above examples. In terms of both volume and quality, most of the images they contain surpass the 533 woodcuts of the Historia naturalis Brasiliae, making them far more useful to artists than the latter were.The value of the woodcuts to scientists was also limited. Indeed, if we bear in mind that in the first decades of the century Federico Cesi had already manifested his awareness of the limitations 209

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

132 Detail of illus. 131.

of the woodcut for scientific illustration,37 the crudeness of the woodcuts in a work published in mid-century is all the more striking. Moreover, as Whitehead and Boeseman point out, ‘These seven Libri picturati volumes not only “flesh out” the Historia, however. They also underpin a large body of secondary or related iconographic sources 210

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Sloth Proceeds 133 Puffbird, from Libri Picturati a. 37, folio 111.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

134 Grasshopper, from Libri Picturati a. 36, folio 418.

mostly derived (directly or at one or two removes) from the pictures of the Handbooks,Theatrum, Miscellanea Cleyeri or earlier sketches’.38 Finally, one of the implications of this intricate network of iconographic connections is that the kind of neat and tidy watershed envisaged by Ashworth fails to do justice to the historical record. As we have seen, 211

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

135 Lizard, from Libri Picturati a. 36, folio 422.

the case of Athanasius Kircher’s sloth shows not the slightest awareness of any such epistemological rupture. A more nuanced approach has more to offer in two respects. First, it helps to bring out the role, not only of the big names in history like Ulisse Aldrovandi or Conrad Gesner, but also of the relatively obscure figures like Wagener and Schmalkalden. Second, it takes into account the fact that if the seventeenth century witnessed an attenuation of that symbolic vision of reality and that necessary dependence on ancient authorities on which the natural history of the sixteenth century had been founded, this did not take place without the different political, economic and religious differences determining more or less evident discrepancies between different countries.39 212

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Sloth Proceeds

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

enter albert eeckhout Further light is thrown on the iconography of Dutch Brazil from another relatively obscure source: the decoration of the ceiling of the hunting lodge known as Schloss Hoflössnitz in Radebeul, on the outskirts of Dresden, which was constructed soon after the termination of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 on the orders of Johann Georg i, Prince-Elector of Saxony.The main hall and four other rooms on the first floor of the Schloss were sumptuously decorated according to an elaborate iconographic programme that included the presence of eighty ceiling panels filled with oil paintings of Brazilian birds.40 One of the birds depicted there, labelled ‘cúauna’, is the puffbird without a tail that is now familiar to the reader from the Libri Principis and from Frans Post’s Brazilian panorama. And since the name of the Dutch painter Albert Eeckhout has been connected with the decoration of this ceiling, our investigation has to be widened even further at this point to consider the relation between the Libri Picturati a. 32‒8 and the work of this artist.41 One of the twelve still-lifes now in Copenhagen that have been – plausibly – attributed to Albert Eeckhout represents a whole and two sliced Brazilian fruits, melons, a melon plant and an unidentified fruit, sliced in half, on top of which is a grasshopper (illus. 136).42 An identical grasshopper perched on top of the same fruit is to be found among the crayon sketches in volume a. 38 of the Libri Picturati, a collection of oil paintings and crayon drawings known as the Miscellanea Cleyeri, ranging from Brazilian subjects to representations of animals, plants and people from the East Indies, drawings of a comet, a star map and a series of plants from the Cape of Good Hope (illus. 137).43 This grasshopper, however, differs from the one in Frans Post’s panorama of Dutch Brazil taken, as we have seen, from the first volume of the Liber Principis (illus. 134). Whitehead and Boeseman selected these two grasshoppers to contrast the approaches to natural history and human subjects of the two painters: ‘Post’s grasshopper is in side view, very detailed, but motionless, almost inert. Eckhout’s, by contrast, is three-quarter frontal, its detail largely brought out by judiciously placed highlights, and it is totally alive and quite obviously feeding on the nutmeg’.44 Did Eeckhout draw on the images in the Libri Principis too, as Post repeatedly did? The issue in the case of Eeckhout is more complicated. 213

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

136 Albert Eeckhout, Still-life, c. 1640, oil on canvas.

137 Grasshopper and fruit, from Libri Picturati a. 38, folio 12r.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Sloth Proceeds

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

138 Troupial from Libri Picturati a. 36, folio 236.

Take, for instance, the bird perched on a tree trunk, labelled as ‘guirâtayeima’ in volume i of the Libri Principis (folio 236) (illus. 138).45 Though the distinctive black, red and white markings of the troupial (Icterus icterus) are clearly visible, the image is a very summary one for an artist to use compared with the detailed puffbird in volume ii of the same work (illus. 131).We know that Eeckhout painted the troupial, because an infrared photograph of the oil painting of a Tupi man signed ‘æckhout fecit 1643 brasil’ reveals the presence of the same bird, now covered by the green landscape.46 However, his model may have been the more detailed image of the bird bearing the same distinctive markings of the troupial and labelled ‘guirâtânheuna’ in the second volume of the Theatrum Rerum Naturalium Brasiliae (Libri Picturati a. 33, folio 50) (illus. 139). What is more, we find a very similar version of the bird, though with a less curved beak and a more splayed tail, labelled ‘cuirataieima’,47 perched on a cactus in one of the oil paintings of Brazilian birds from Schloss Hoflössnitz.48 The cactus on which the ‘cuirataieima’ is perched has been identified as ‘probably a cereus (Cereus jamacaru)’.49 There is a study of a C. jamacaru cactus in crayon on paper, catalogued in the library of the Manufacture Nationale de Céramique, Sèvres, under the name of François Desportes, which has been attributed to Eeckhout.50 Whatever truth there may be in this attribution, this study of a section of a 215

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

139 Troupial, from Libri Picturati a. 33, folio 50.

cactus, including fruit and flower but excluding any indication of the shape of the plant as a whole, can have been of little use to the artist of the full plant on which the ‘cuirataieima’ is perched in the oil painting from Hoflössnitz. In fact, there are closer parallels to this cactus plant in the paintings of Frans Post. The Cereus jamacaru on the lefthand side of the view of the São Francisco river, signed and dated 1638 216

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

The Sloth Proceeds

or 1639, is somewhat similar, but its tall trunk, flowers and thin segments do not correspond to the Hoflössnitz version. The same is true of the cactus that appears behind a papaya tree in a view overlooking a river with a prominent nine-banded armadillo in the left foreground from 1649.52 The same ensemble of armadillo, cactus and papaya tree reappears in the paintingThe Sacrifice of Manoah in a Brazilian Landscape, signed and dated 1648, that is, after the return of Frans Post from Brazil (illus. 140).53 In the latter painting, however, the cactus no longer has the spindly segments that characterize the cacti in the two other paintings by Post; they are fleshier, share the same morphology as those in the Hoflössnitz painting, and branch out at the same angle. It is interesting to note that the unconvincing way in which the latter cactus is rooted in the ground seems to betray an ignorance of the full plant on the part of the artist. The cactus in The Sacrifice of Manoah, or its model, would not have helped him, since that canvas fails to convey any information about its connection with the ground either. 51

a complex web of relations

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

In his classic study of the artists of Johan Maurits in Brazil, R. Joppien discusses the illusionistic appeal of the large panoramic view of Brazil by Frans Post (illus. 131) in the following terms: The picture is exceptional for its spatial recession.The life-size depiction of plants and animals in the foreground, their close proximity to the viewer, give this picture a strong illusionistic appeal, which is heightened by the painted frame around it and by the device of letting a bird sit on the frame, thus seemingly out of the picture. In its concern for illusion this picture is basically similar to Eeckhout’s paintings of still-lifes . . .The picture is signed and dated by Post 22 December 1652, so that the attribution is beyond doubt. Nevertheless some influence of Eeckhout can be discerned, not only in the illusionistic treatment of the picture, but in certain special details of the animals and plants.54 He goes on to list several flora and fauna in the Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae that reappear in Post’s paintings, and concludes: ‘The 217

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

140 Frans Post, The Sacrifice of Manoah in a Brazilian Landscape, 1648, oil on canvas.

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The Sloth Proceeds

artistic relationship between Post and Eeckhout in the post-Brazilian period is puzzling and has not yet been fully explained’.55 Joppien was aware that the question could only be settled if the Theatrum were made available. In 1979, the date of publication of his study, access to the Libri Picturati was restricted and difficult. At that time he attributed the Theatrum in its entirety, along with the Miscellanea Cleyeri, to Albert Eeckhout, conferring on Eeckhout an oeuvre of nearly 1,500 natural history sketches.56 Since Whitehead and Boeseman were first given access to the collection in 1979, it has been seen by a number of scholars from various countries,57 and many of Joppien’s statements are in need of revision. For instance, the total of almost 1,500 given by Joppien should be 417.58 In particular, the likelihood that a number of artists contributed to the collection makes it more difficult to pin down the precise extent of Eeckhout’s contribution. But it is not just in relation to the Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae that the picture of Albert Eeckhout has to be modified. His name has been connected with the paintings of Brazilian birds in Hoflössnitz, which were executed during the period when we know that Albert Eeckhout was employed at the court in Dresden by Johann Georg ii to paint portraits, history paintings, landscapes, hunting scenes, and whatever else the Elector required of him.59 However, there is no consensus that he was the artist who painted all eighty Brazilian birds in Hoflössnitz. Joppien already claimed that ‘only a few of the Hoflössnitz pictures attest to Eckhout’s former vivid and animated style of animal drawing’,60 and Teixeira has stated: ‘It is not inconceivable that, although the motifs were based on the iconography of Dutch Brazil, the paintings were not carried out by Eeckhout, whose jurisdiction was perhaps limited to supervision of the works produced’.61 While it has proved less difficult to build up a fairly substantial picture of the oeuvre of Frans Post, both during and after the Brazilian expedition, yielding a total of some 155 paintings according to the most recent catalogue raisonné,62 the oeuvre of Albert Eeckhout remains imprecise and elusive. If at this point we return to the four different versions of the troupial considered above – the (concealed) one in the oil painting of the Tupi man; the one in the oil painting in Schloss Hoflössnitz; and the two different versions in the Libri Picturati – it is important to stress that the name of Albert Eeckhout can only be linked firmly with one 219

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

of them, namely the oil painting of the Tupi man. As for the cactus on which the troupial is perched, if there is a demonstrable parallel in the work of an artist who had been in Brazil, it is in the work of Frans Post, not Albert Eeckhout, that it is found. The lesson to be drawn from this exploration of some of the relations between Albert Eeckhout, Frans Post and the Libri Picturati a. 32‒8 is that the links or filiations that can be detected between the images on the basis of iconographic analysis are of a very complex kind. If Joppien’s challenge to explore the artistic relationship between Post and Eeckhout in the post-Brazilian period is to be taken seriously, it will be necessary to clear away much of the speculation that has taken place during the last half century and to get back to basics: patient and meticulous image-by-image comparison, faithful to the emphasis on detail characteristic of the method elaborated and practised by Aby Warburg and his followers.The results may not change the face of natural history forever, but they will at least bring us closer to understanding the complex web of relations that links Albert Eeckhout, Frans Post and the Libri Picturati A. 32–8 in what was a pioneering combination of art and science.

220

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Epilogue

While adhering to the method followed in my previous book The Lives of Images, two shifts of emphasis can be detected. First, the focus has been not just on images of plants and animals in their various travels and vicissitudes, but also on material plants and animals themselves. Thus the discussion of the dragon tree ranged over the lives (and fates) of dragon trees themselves as well as over the images that were produced of them. The treatment of the barnacle goose included not only images but also a small barrel of salted tree-birds that had been sent as a present to Maria of Hungary and a barnacle goose plundered from a garden during the Dutch Revolt.The disentangling of various representations of the sloth did not pass in silence over the presence of stuffed sloths in European collections. Artists who wanted to depict a South American camelid like the guanaco or llama could draw on images (that went back to originals) produced in that continent, but they could also find some of the same creatures alive in the menageries of Europe. So the images of these plants and animals intersect not only with those of other images, but also with the routes traversed by live or dead exemplars. Second, more attention has been paid to the character, interests and activities of the persons through whose hands these images or objects passed.The scholarly secretary to Cardinal Federico Barberini, Cassiano dal Pozzo, and the other highly diverse members of the Accademia dei Lincei, the network of women and men who supplied the botanist Carolus Clusius with seeds, fruits, drawings and verbal information, the colourful Dutch beachcomber Adriaen Coenen, the ambassador in Spain, Hans Khevenhüller, who played such an 221

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment

important role in supplying drawings and other information about exotic creatures to the Habsburg courts, the Franciscan and Dominican missionaries in South America, the Rubens brothers, and many more have passed in review. Their roles as procurers of information, gobetweens, agents, friends, correspondents and so on played an important part in determining the duration of the lives of these particular images and their distribution. The argument has ranged over levels of expertise stretching from the amateur sketches of the German adventurer Caspar Schmalkalden to the consummate artistry of Peter Paul Rubens, from the painstaking antiquarian interests of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc or Cassiano dal Pozzo to the homely observations of the natural world by Adriaen Coenen. It is particularly important to stress that, even in the case of the Accademia dei Lincei, whose voluminous publication the Mexican Treasury has been taken by some to reveal the dependence of its compilers on voyages conducted largely within the walls of studies and libraries, much of that knowledge nevertheless derived from first-hand observations and encounters in the Americas. Neither should it be forgotten that an important intermediary in this chain of information, the missionary Gregorio de Bolívar, derived his knowledge in turn from the local expertise of the Apolobamba region of the Andes, home of the Kallawaya community, who are still famed for their knowledge of the natural world and natural medicine. The emphasis of the present text on such vernacular knowledge and on the qualities of the Gramscian organic intellectual has nothing in common with recent studies that have treated plants and animals and their images mainly as commodities, or information about them as something to be mediated by brokers. As the title Before Disenchantment suggests, this study has sought to present an alternative to that approach by stressing the aesthetic appeal of awe, wonder and enchantment that the natural world held for its early modern observers. I hope that you, the reader, have been enchanted too.

222

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

references

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Introduction 1 J. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (New York, 1969 [1841]), i, pp. 341–2. 2 Cornelis de Pauw claimed that the Portuguese had considered transporting elephants to Brazil – a project doomed to failure given his belief that elephants were more sensitive to changes of climate and diet than were the other large quadrupeds: Recherches philosophiques sur les américains (Berlin, 1774), i, p. 11. 3 R. T. Evans, Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820–1915 (Austin, tx, 2004), p. 38. Waldeck referred to the existence of several bones, ‘nearly fossils’, found near Lake Chalco, and a fragment of tusk that he saw at the University of Mexico. 4 35 of Waldeck’s drawings were later published in the work that he coauthored with Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, Monuments Anciens du Méxique (Paris, 1866). Distortions are also to be found in the set of prints that Waldeck manufactured, claiming to have copied them from an original set in a Franciscan convent in Mexico, of Marcantonio Raimondi’s engravings after drawings by Giulio Romano of various sexual positions, I Modi; see B. Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, nj, 1999), p. 238, n. 3. 5 I. Graham, Alfred Maudslay and the Maya: A Biography (London, 2002), p. 262. The publications by Elliot Smith are his Elephants and Ethnologists (London, 1922) and an article ‘Elephants in Maya Art: Links between America and Asia’ in the Illustrated London News, 15 January 1927, pp. 85–7. 6 Stephens, Incidents of Travel, i, p. 156. 7 For Kabah see H. Stierlin, Maya. Palais et pyramides de la forêt vierge (Cologne, 2001), pp. 31, 158–61. 8 J. Bruijntjes, ‘“Een met stroo ingelegd schryvtafeltje”. Een 17de-eeuws Augsburgs kunstkastje in de collectie Bisschop’, Antiek, xxvii/2 (1992), pp. 60–70. 9 Jan van Kessel the Elder, Veracruz, 1666, 14.5 × 21 cm, one of sixteen lateral panels that surround the allegory Americque, oil on copper, 48.5 × 67.5 cm, now in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; see D. M. Teixeira, A ‘Alegoria dos continentes’ de Jan van Kessel ‘o Velho’ (1626–1679). Uma visão seiscentista da fauna dos quatro cantos do mundo (Rio de Janeiro, 2002), p. 82. 10 K.-H. Kohl, ed., Mythen der Neuen Welt. Zur Entdeckungsgeschichte Lateinamerikas, exh. cat., Berliner Festspiele (Berlin, 1982), nos 8/26, 8/27. The engravings were made after drawings by Jacopo Amigoni.

223

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment 11 C. da Ripa, Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery:The 1758–60 Hertel Edition of Ripa’s ‘Iconologia’ with 200 engraved illustrations, introduction, trans. and 200 commentaries by E. A. Maser (New York, 1971), pp. 104–5. The engravings are after drawings by Gottfried Eichler the Younger. 12 R. Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London, 1977), pp. 15–44; A. Bettini, ‘“Americae Retectio”: ricostruzione di un processo creativo’, Columbeis, iii (1988), pp. 191–201; P. Mason, The Lives of Images (London, 2001), pp. 38–9. The engraving by Adriaen Collaert is after a drawing by Jan van der Straet. 13 P. Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore, md, 1998); Mason, The Lives of Images. 14 These oils on canvas were done as modelli for hardstone marquetry by Giuseppe Zocchi (1717–1767) and are in the Museo e Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence. 15 Mason, The Lives of Images, pp. 85–6, reproduced there. 16 W. Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, ed. N. L. Whitehead (Manchester, 1997), p. 172. The work was first published in 1596. 17 F. J. Cole, ‘The History of Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros in Zoological Literature’, in Science, Medicine and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice Written in Honour of Charles Singer, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood (London, 1953), i, pp. 337–56. 18 See especially W. B. Ashworth Jr, ‘The Persistent Beast: Recurring Images in Early Zoological Illustration’, in The Natural Sciences and the Arts, ed. A. Ellenius (Stockholm, 1985), pp. 46–66. 19 W. B. Ashworth Jr, ‘Remarkable Humans and Singular Beasts’, in The Age of the Marvelous, ed. J. Kenseth, exh. cat., Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (Hanover, nh, 1991), pp. 113–44 (137–9). On the emblematic view of nature before Marcgraf, see W. B. Ashworth Jr, ‘Natural History and the Emblematic World View’, in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. D. C. Lindberg and R. S. Westman (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 303–32, and ‘Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance’ in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 17–37. 20 J. de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, otherwise called America, trans. and ed. J. Whatley (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1990), p. 79. 21 J. de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil (Geneva, 1580), p. 235. 22 A. Thevet, La Cosmographie universelle (Paris, 1575), ii, fol. 941 recto. Clearly based on this woodcut, though without being tethered to the tree and with the addition of an armadillo and an opossum, is an engraving in Ulrich Schmidel’s Vera historia admiranda cuiusdam navigationis . . . in Americam vel novum mundum (Nuremberg, 1599), p. 8. It is reproduced, for example, in Immagine e Natura. L’immagine naturalistica nei codici e libri a stampa delle Biblioteche Estense e Universitaria. Secoli XV–XVII, exh. cat. (Modena, 1992), p. 103. 23 Le Brésil d’André Thevet. Les Singularités de la France Antarctique (1557), ed. with commentary by F. Lestringant (Paris, 1997), p. 200. 24 S. Fermor, Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention and ‘Fantasia’ (London, 1993), pp. 62–81. 25 A. Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650), p. 27. This work had a wide influence because 1,500 copies of it were printed in 1650 and distributed through the far-reaching channels of the Jesuit order. 26 The woodcut of Dürer’s rhinoceros that appeared in Kircher’s Arca Noë as late as 1675 has been characterized as a ‘deplorable caricature’ by Cole, ‘The History of Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros in Zoological Literature’, p. 349.

224

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

References 27 As Homi Bhabha has written, ‘The display of hybridity – its peculiar `replication’ – terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery’; see H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), p. 115. 28 Ashworth, ‘Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance’, p. 36. 29 In a recent study of the iconography of the toucan and the hornbill from the sixteenth century to Buffon, the author concluded: ‘I have found no traces at all of the “emblematized” vision of natural history that William Ashworth took to be typical of Renaissance zoology . . . Neither are there clear-cut epistemological ruptures, as is described by Michel Foucault in Les mots et les choses’. P. J. Smith, ‘On Toucans and Hornbills’, in Early Modern Zoology:The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. K.A.E. Enenkel and P. J. Smith (Leiden, 2007), pp. 75–119 (114). 30 G. Olmi, L’inventario del mondo. Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima età moderna (Bologna, 1992), p. 251. 31 J. Pardo Tomás, ‘Le immagini delle piante americane nell’opera di Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557)’, in Natura-Cultura. L’interpretazione del mondo fisico nei testi e nelle immagini, ed. G. Olmi, L. Tongiorgi Tomasi and A. Zanca (Florence, 2000), pp. 163–88 (185). 32 E. Battisti, L’Antirinascimento 2nd edn (Turin, 2005), p. 343. The interesting discussion of the difference between the planned sixteenth-century edition and the published eighteenth-century edition of Mercati’s work by A. Cooper, ‘The Museum and the Book: The Metallotheca and the History of an Encyclopaedic Natural History in Early Modern Italy’, Journal of the History of Collections, vii/1 (1995), pp. 1–23, curiously skates over the issue of this drop in quality. 33 L. Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘Toward the Scientific Naturalism: Aspects of Botanical and Zoological Iconography in Manuscripts and Printed Books in the Second Half of the xv Century’, in Die Kunst und das Studium der Natur von 14. zum 16. Jahrhundert, ed. W. Prinz and A. Beyer (Weinheim, 1987), pp. 91–101, in which she extends the insights on botanical illustration of F. A. Baumann, Das Erbario Carrarese und die Bildtradition des Tractatus de herbis (Bern, 1974) to include the field of zoological illustration. See too the reflections in the same anti-teleological vein by A. Touwaide, ‘L’illustrazione botanica negli erbari a stampa del xv e xvi secolo. Il programme di ricerca plant e il suo contributo all’analisi delle rappresentazioni di piante’, in Erbe e speziali. I laboratori della salute, ed. M. Breccia Fratadocchi and S. Buttò, exh. cat., Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Roma (Rome, 2007), pp. 111–16. 34 A. T. Woollett and A. van Suchtelen, Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship, exh. cat., J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague (Los Angeles, 2006), p. 116; A. Balis, ‘Facetten van de Vlaamse dierenschilderkunst van de 15de to de 17de eeuw’, in Het aards paradijs. Dierenvoorstellingen in de Nederlanden van de 16de en de 17de eeuw, exh. cat., Antwerp Zoo (Antwerp, 1982), pp. 36–55 (44). It has been suggested that the horned hare was the result of a virus, but projection of an American virus that is only documented for the twentieth century back to the early modern period, as proposed by E. Pokorny, ‘Der gehörnte Hase.Von der kaiserlichen Rarität zum Wolpertinger’, in Herrlich Wild. Höfische Jagd in Tirol, ed. W. Seipel (Innsbruck, 2004), pp. 64‒80, remains highly speculative. 35 Ibid., p. 138. The painting, which has traditionally been attributed to Hendrick de Clerck and Denis van Alsloot, is in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie, Neuburg an der Donau. 36 See the complementary remarks on zoological texts by K.A.E. Enenkel, ‘Zur

225

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

37

38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45

46

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

47 48

49 50

51

Konstituierung der Zoologie als Wissenschaft in der frühen Neuzeit: Diskurzanalyse zweier Grossprojekte (Wotton, Gesner)’ in Early Modern Zoology, ed. Enenkel and Smith, pp. 15–74. For example, M. de Asúa and R. French, A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America (Aldershot, 2005), or P. H. Smith and P. Findlen, eds, Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York and London, 2002). K. Sloan, ed., A New World: England’s First View of America, exh. cat., The British Museum (London, 2007), nos 48, 49, 52, 59, 65, 66. A. Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos:The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, ma, 1999), pp. 176–7. Olmi, L’inventario del mondo, pp. 250–51. Ashworth, ‘The Persistent Beast’, p. 54. A. Pérez de Tudela and A. Jordan Gschwend, ‘Renaissance Menageries: Exotic Animals and Pets at the Habsburg Courts in Iberia and Central Europe’, in Early Modern Zoology, ed. Enenkel and Smith, pp. 419–47, esp. 439–40, where the authors reproduce the painting in oils on canvas, 56 × 47 cm, from a private collection. M. Donattini, ‘Orizzonti geografici dell’editoria italiana (1493–1560)’, in Il Nuovo Mondo nella coscienza italiana e tedesca del Cinquecento, ed. A. Prosperi and W. Reinhard (Bologna, 1992), pp. 79–154, esp. 116–17. See the catalogue entry by M. Lucco in Sebastiano del Piombo 1485–1547, exh. cat., Palazzo Venezia, Rome, and Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (Rome, 2008), pp. 156–7. F. Lestringant, L’Expérience huguenote au nouveau monde (XVI e siècle) (Geneva, 1996), pp. 265–90 attributes the 134-leaf manuscript to an anonymous French Huguenot who served under Sir Francis Drake. The sloth is on folio 64. The facsimile edition is Histoire Naturelle des Indes:The Drake Manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York, 1996). A. Anselmi, Il diario del viaggio in Spagna del Cardinale Francesco Barberini scritto da Cassiano dal Pozzo (Madrid, 2004), p. 214. The drawing of a maned three-toed sloth in Cassiano’s Paper Museum (now in The Royal Collection, Windsor, rl 21144), on the other hand, is clearly derived from the Clusian print. R. Pieper, Die Vermittlung einer neuen Welt. Amerika im Nachrichtennetz des Habsburgischen Imperiums 1493–1598 (Mainz, 2000), pp. 255–7. A. Pérez de Tudela and A. Jordan Gschwend, ‘Luxury Goods for Royal Collectors: Exotica, Princely Gifts and Rare Animals Exchanged Between the Iberian Courts and Central Europe in the Renaissance (1560–1612)’, in Exotica: Portugals Entdeckungen im Spiegel fürstlicher Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Renaissance, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien iii ed. H. Trnek and S. Haag (Mainz, 2001), p. 38 and n. 88. Ibid., pp. 41–2. F. Korenyi, Albrecht Dürer and the Animal and Plant Studies of the Renaissance (Munich, 1985), pp. 19–21. For a collection of early naturalistic representations of animals by different hands in the northern countries compiled in the second half of the sixteenth century (the so-called Album of Charles V or Lambert-Lombard Album in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), see K. G. Boon, Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (The Hague, 1978), pp. 212–24. Some of the seven colossal animal heads in the cloister were found in the area of the Forum of Trajan in 1586 during the renovation of the Palazzo Bonelli (now the Palazzo Valentini) and must go back to the first centuries ad, but certainly the

226

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

References rhinoceros head, and possibly the elephant head, are of more recent origin. 52 A late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century head of a rhinoceros acquired for the Museo Pio-Clementino (Musei Vaticani) in 1783 goes back to the same model, but departs from it in a number of particulars, such as the fact that the head itself is covered with scales. See P. Liverani and G. Spinola, Vaticano 4: La Sala degli Animali nel Museo Pio-Clementino (Milan, 2003), p. 22 (text) and 42 (illus.). 53 S. Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant (Manchester, 1997). 54 M. Schatz, ‘La recepción de los grabados europeos en los murales de la época colonial temprana en el Nuevo Reino de Granada’, in Herencias indígenas, tradiciones europeas y la mirada europea, ed. H. von Kügelgen (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), pp. 123–66. 55 A. Okada, Le Grand Moghol et ses peintres. Miniaturistes de l’Inde aux XVIe et XVII e siècles (Paris, 1992). 56 Die Entdeckung der Natur. Naturalien in den Kunstkammern des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, exh. cat., Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck, and Kunsthistorisches Museum,Vienna (Vienna, 2006), pp. 122–3. The horn had been sawn off because the beast had killed a lot of people (Letter of Hans Khevenhüller to Rudolf ii in 1582, cited in Pérez de Tudela and Jordan Gschwend, ‘Luxury Goods for Royal Collectors’, p. 48, n. 160). This Indian rhinoceros, known as ‘the marvel of Lisbon’, and an elephant were given to Philip ii in 1582. For the pass to allow them to enter Castile see ibid., p. 57. The bones of the rhinoceros were later sent to Rudolf ii, ibid., p. 95. For a description by Fray Juan de San Gerónimo of the exhilarating effect produced on the Spanish monarch by the elephant and rhinoceros in El Escorial see J. Puerto, La leyenda verde. Naturaleza, sanidad y ciencia en la corte de Felipe II (1527–1598) (Valladolid, 2003), p. 186. Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant, overlooks the presence of this rhinoceros in Lisbon and Madrid, p. 223. 57 T. D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of ‘Tarih-i Hindi-i garbi’ and Sixteenth-century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden, 1990). For the Leiden manuscript of this work (Taeschner Coll. Or. 12.365) from which the illustrations in the text are taken, see J. Schmidt, Catalogue of Turkish Manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University and other Collections in the Netherlands (Leiden, 2006), iii, pp. 114–21. 58 G. Kutscher, G. Brotherston and G.Vollmer, Aesop in Mexico: A 16th Century Aztec Version of Aesop’s Fables (Berlin, 1987). 59 The learned iconography was probably suggested to Zucchi by Fernando’s humanist adviser Pietro Angeli. See Ph. Morel, ‘Jacopo Zucchi al servizio di Ferdinando de’ Medici’, in Villa Medici. Il sogno di un cardinale. Collezioni e artisti di Ferdinando de’ Medici, ed. M. Hochmann, exh. cat., Accademia di Francia a Roma (Rome, 1999), pp. 114–22, esp. 117. Gesner was also probably the source for many of the birds painted by the Flemish artist Paul Bril in 1611–12 in the vault of one of the loggie of the Palazzo Rospigliosi Pallavicini for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome: see A. Negro, Il giardino dipinto del Cardinal Borghese. Paolo Bril e Guido Reni nel Palazzo Rospigliosi Pallavicini a Roma (Rome, 1996), pp. 54–5. 60 C. García-Frías Checa, Gaspar Becerra y las pinturas de la Torre de la Reina del Palacio de El Pardo (Madrid, 2005), p. 83. The americana depicted by Becerra include porcupines, macaws, turkeys and black-chested buzzard eagles. 61 U. Aldrovandi, Quadrupedum omnium bisulcorum historia (Bologna, 1621), p. 409. Cf. Villa Medici. Il sogno di un cardinale. Collezioni e artisti di Ferdinando de’ Medici, ed. M. Hochmann, exh. cat., Accademia di Francia a Roma (Rome, 1999), no. 30. The head of this sheep is now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. The body of the sheep, to

227

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

62

63

64 65

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

which an erroneously white marble head was added in the eighteenth century, is in the Museo Pio-Clementino (Musei Vaticani); see Liverani and Spinola, La Sala degli Animali, pp. 28, 88–90. H. Friedmann, ‘Bacchiacca’s Gathering of Manna in the National Gallery’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th series, xxxii (1947), pp. 151–8; H. Brigstocke, Italian and Spanish Paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 22–5. The latter connects the elaborate designs of many of the jugs in the painting with a Florentine festival of 1525 sponsored by the Compagnia dell’ Orciuolo ( Jug Society). Battisti, L’Antirinascimento, p. 335. As the same author notes (pp. 359–61), the painting of a head of Medusa and other works by the young Caravaggio suggest that he may have sharpened his interest in the niceties of botanical and zoological illustration at the court of the Medici in Florence. The shield on which the head of Medusa was painted was dramatically displayed carried by an oriental figure in full armour in the Medici armoury in the Uffizi; M. Scalini, ‘Exotica in der mediceischen Kunstkammer’, in Exotica: Portugals Entdeckungen im Spiegel fürstlicher Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Renaissance, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien 111, ed. H. Trnek and S. Haag (Mainz, 2001), 129–143 (138). On the varying quality of botanical illustrators in the late sixteenth century, see the remarks in W. Blunt and W.Y. Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration, 2nd edn (Woodbridge, 1994), p. 97. See K. Barthelmess and J. Münzing, Monstrum Horrendum.Wale und Waldarstellungen in der Druckgraphik des 16. Jahrhunderts und ihr motivkundlicher Einfluss, 3 vols (Hamburg, 1991), ii, no. 5; F. Egmond, P. Mason and K. Lankester, eds, The Whale Book:Whales and Other Marine Animals as Described by Adriaen Coenen in 1585 (London, 2003), pp. 10–11; and L. Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘Arte e natura del Giardino dei Semplici: dalle origini alla fine dell’età medicea’, in F. Garbari, L. Tongiorgi Tomasi and A. Tosi, Giardino dei Semplici/Garden of Simples (Pisa, 2002), pp. 47–81 (57). The manuscript in the library of the University of Pisa is ms. 514, c. 246. The original engraving was done by Pieter Baltens for a pamphlet printed in Antwerp with a trilingual text by the local physician Hugo Favolius. C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms:The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi (London, 1980). Anselmi, Il diario del viaggio in Spagna, p. 256. Pérez de Tudela and Jordan-Gschwend, ‘Renaissance Menageries’, p. 425. A. MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, ct, and London, 2007), pp. 44–5. J. M. Morán and F. Checa, El coleccionismo en España. De la cámara de maravillas a la galería de pinturas (Madrid, 1985), p. 26. D. E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, ct, 2007), p. 40. G. Finocchiaro, Il Museo di curiosità di Virgilio Spada. Una raccolta romana del Seicento (Rome, 1999), p. 23. M. Rudwick, ‘Minerals, Strata and Fossils’, in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 266–86. ‘J. Thackray, Mineral and Fossil Collections’, in Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum, ed. A. MacGregor (London, 1994), p. 123. A. Schnapper, Le Géant, La Licorne, La Tulipe. Collections françaises au XVII e siècle (Paris, 1988), p. 18.

228

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

76 A painting of coral fishers executed for Cassiano dal Pozzo by Pietro da Cortona around 1619–22 neatly alludes to the famous collector’s interest in scientific matters, while the Ovidian theme recalls his literary interests; see F. Solinas, ‘La Pêche du Corail de Pierre de Cortone retrouvée à Tsarskoïe Selo’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, cxxxviii (2001), pp. 233–49. The artist to the Medici Jacopo Zucchi designed a fountain on the theme of the birth of coral, as well as painting no less than four versions of a composition, variously referred to as The Reign of Amphitrite or Coral-fishing, in which coral – along with pearls and shells – plays a prominent place; see Hochmann, ed., Villa Medici. Il sogno di un cardinale, nos. 77 (fountain) and 85–86 (paintings). 77 F. Garbari, L. Tongiorgi Tomasi and A. Tosi, Giardino dei Semplici / Garden of Simples (Pisa, 2002), p. 167. The skull is in the Museo di Storia Naturale, Calci. 78 H. Bredekamp, I coralli di Darwin. I primi modelli evolutivi e la tradizione della storia naturale (Turin, 2006), p. 15. 79 For a discussion of some of the difficulties in establishing the distinction between human and animal, see R. Corbey and P. Mason, ‘Limited Company’, Anthrozöos, vii/2 (1994), pp. 90–102. 80 Mason, The Lives of Images, p. 80–81. 81 J. Céard, La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au XVI e siècle, 2nd edn (Geneva, 1996 [1977]). 82 D. Parkin, ‘Nemi in the Modern World: Return of the Exotic?’, Man, xxviii (1993), pp. 79–99. 83 S. Sangl, ‘Indische Perlmutt-Raritäten und ihre europäischen Adaptionen’, in Exotica: Portugals Entdeckungen im Spiegel fürstlicher Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Renaissance, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien iii, ed. H. Trnek and S. Haag (Mainz, 2001), pp. 262–87 (272). For the German and Italian correspondence connected with this gift see L. Toorians, ‘The Earliest Inventory of Mexican Objects in Munich, 1576’, Journal of the History of Collections, vi (1994), pp. 59–67 and E. Bujok, Neue Welten in europäischen Sammlungen. Africana und Americana in Kunstkammern bis 1670 (Berlin, 2004), pp. 85–6. 84 My use of the term ‘Baroque’ is akin to that proposed by Robert Harbison, who plainly states that his version of the Baroque is ‘that of an unreconstructed individualist who thinks crucial stages of large historical processes are sometimes illustrated best by exceptions’, Reflections on Baroque (London, 2000), p. ix.

1 Marvels of the Canaries 1 J. Sörgel de la Rosa, San Borondón. La historia de una isla mítica (Barcelona, 2005), pp. 47, 252. 2 L. Torriani, Descripción e historia del reino de las Islas Canarias antes Afortunadas, con el parecer de sus fortificaciones, trans. with introduction and notes by A. Cioranescu (Tenerife, 1999), p. 325. 3 The exhibition was presented in the La Recova Art Centre in Santa Cruz de Tenerife from 14 January to 26 February 2005. 4 Tarek Ode and David Olivera, San Borondón: la isla descubierta (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2005). 5 A. Chapman, Chr. Barthe and Ph. Revol, Cap Horn 1882–1883. Rencontre avec les Indiens Yahgan (Paris, 1995). 6 C. Teixidor Cadenas, La fotografia en Canarias y Madeira. La época del daguerrotipo, el colodión y la albúmina 1839–1900 (Madrid, 1999).

229

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment 7 M. Jones, ed., Fake? The Art of Deception, exh. cat., The British Museum (London, 1990), pp. 87–90. 8 The classic study of this dichotomy is P. G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars 1660–1800 (New York, 1980). 9 On José de Viera y Clavijo, author of Noticias de la Historia General de las Islas Canarias (1783), see Sörgel de la Rosa, San Borondón. La historia de una isla mítica, pp. 79–83. 10 V.I.J. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton, nj, 1992), p. 91. As she notes, it was in Galway that Columbus came upon two shipwrecked corpses that he took to be Chinese; see C. Colón, Textos y documentos completos, with an introduction and notes by C.Varela (Madrid, 1984), p. 9. 11 Hesiod, Works and Days 170–74, Theogony 215. 12 For a full discussion see M. Martínez Hernández, Canarias en la mitología (Tenerife, 1992) and the same author’s Las Islas Canarias de la Antigüedad al Renacimiento. Nuevos aspectos (Tenerife, 1996). 13 Le Brésil d’André Thevet. Les Singularités de la France Antarctique (1557), ed. F. Lestringant (Paris, 1997), p. 64. 14 M. Hernández González, La ilustración canaria y los viajeros científicos europeos (1700–1830) (Tenerife, 2006), pp. 18–19. 15 Juan de Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias (México, 1591), 5v–6r, cited in J. Pardo Tomás, ‘Natural Knowledge and Medical Remedies in the Book of Secrets: Uses and Appropriations in Juan de Cárdenas’, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias (Mexico, 1591)’, in A Passion for Plants, ed. F. Egmond, S. Anagnostou and C. Friedrich (Marburg, forthcoming). Cárdenas is referring to the extremely popular Silva de varia lectión by Pedro Mexía, of which the first complete edition was published in Valladolid in 1551. 16 For a collection of texts on the tree, although it is neither entirely reliable nor complete, see A. S. Hernández Gutiérrez, Garoé. Iconografía del Árbol del Agua (Tenerife, 1998). A surprising omission is the description of the tree by Jan Huygen van Linschoten in chapter 96 of his Itinerario (Amsterdam, 1596). For modern explanations of the miraculous water in terms of dewfall, fog droplet precipitation or guttation, see E. Baldini, ‘A Magic “Rain Tree” of the Canary Islands’, Advances in Horticultural Science, vii (1933) pp. 37‒40; A Gioda et al., ‘Fountain Trees in the Canary Islands: Legend and Reality’, Advances in Horticultural Science, ix (1995), pp. 112‒18. 17 Torriani, Descripción de las Islas Canarias, p. 282. 18 Girolamo Benzoni’s La Historia del mondo nuovo was first published in Venice in 1565, followed by an expanded edition in 1572. Benzoni was also the first European author to describe and illustrate cacao; see J. Pardo Tomás and M. L. López Terrada, Las primeras noticias sobre plantas americanas en las relaciones de viajes y crónicas de Indias (1493–1553) (Valencia, 1993), p. 166. 19 Colón, Textos y documentos completos, pp. 30–31. 20 Ibid., p. 88. Half a century later, André Thevet remarked that Spanish attempts to gauge the height of the mountain had failed, perhaps thwarted by the presence of ‘Canarian savages’ who had retreated to the summit; see Le Brésil d’André Thevet, p. 59. Today the peak of El Teide on Tenerife is 3,718 metres above sea level. 21 Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, ed. R. D. Keynes (Cambridge, 1988), p. 19. 22 G. Symcox, ed., Italian Reports on America 1493–1522: Letters, Dispatches, and Papal Bulls (Turnhout, 2001), p. 48. The Italian text refers to ‘uno re saracino, o per dir meglio beretino di Canaria, di quelle ysole nuovamente trovate per il Re di Spagna’, ibid., p. 109. 23 One of the letters on the discovery of America is entitled ‘Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi’. See M. Pozzi, ed., Il Mondo Nuovo di Amerigo

230

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

References Vespucci (Milan, 1993). 24 R. Zapperi, Il selvaggio gentiluomo. L’incredibile storia di Pedro Gonzalez e dei suoi figli (Rome, 2005), pp. 12–13, describes this king as one of the native rulers of Tenerife – the confusion between the Canaries and the Americas appears to have confused the historian at this point. 25 A. Trevisan, Lettere sul Nuovo Mondo. Granada 1501, ed. A. Caracciolo Aricò (Venice, 1993), p. 29 calls them ‘gente nuda et senza alcuna religione’. 26 Running at the ring replaced jousting or tilting in the German courts around 1570; see H. Watanabe-O’Kelly, Court Culture in Dresden: From Renaissance to Baroque (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 20. 27 It was conventional for the head of court to play the leading part. For example, at the procession to celebrate the marriage between Johann von Kolowrat and Katharina von Payrsberg at the Innsbruck court in February 1580, Archduke Ferdinand appeared on a gilt carriage beneath a blue baldachin as Jupiter. Neither was there anything unusual about a male figure playing a female role: in the same celebration, the role of the Earth, personified as Cybele and mounted on a rhinoceros, was played by Christoph Freiherr zu Waldburg; see A. Auer and E. Irblich, eds, Natur und Kunst. Handschriften und Alben aus der Ambraser Sammlung Erzherzog Ferdinands II (1529–1595), exh. cat., Schloss Ambras (Vienna, 1995), pp. 92–8. 28 E. Bujok, Neue Welten in europäischen Sammlungen. Africana und Americana in Kunstkammern bis 1670 (Berlin, 2004), pp. 13–23. 29 The first volume of De Bry’s America included five engravings of Picts and ancient Britons, based on drawings by John White and Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, to show ‘how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie have bin in times past as savage as those of Virginia’. See K. Sloan, ed., A New World: England’s First View of America, exh. cat., The British Museum (London, 2007), pp. 153–63; F. Egmond and P. Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse: Microhistory and Morphology (Baltimore and London, 1997), pp. 158–60. 30 For a concordance of the figures in the procession and the corresponding engravings in De Bry’s America, see Bujok, Neue Welten in europäischen Sammlungen, pp. 155–7. For another case of the influence of De Bry on a three-dimensional representation – the ‘Moor with the emerald cluster’ carved around 1724 and now in the Grüne Gewölbe in Dresden – see H. Nickel, ‘The Graphic Sources for the Moor with the Emerald Cluster’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, xv (1980), pp. 203–10. 31 In fact, the dragon tree is not a tree but a shrub because the trunk is hollow – a fact which renders the dating of exemplars more difficult. 32 For an exhaustive bibliography on the dragon tree and its images, see the monograph by the botanist S. J. Casper, Die Geschichte des Kanarischen Drachenbaumes in Wissenschaft und Kunst.Vom ‘Arbor Gadensis’ des Posidonius zur ‘Dracaena draco’ (L.) L., Haussknechtia Beiheft, x (Jena, 2000). 33 C. Perdomo Ledesma, El Escudo de la Villa de La Orotava, antecedentes históricos (La Orotava, 2005). Far from being an antiquarian detail, the device of La Orotava is among the pictures created with volcanic earth and sand that are used to decorate the centre of La Orotava from time to time. 34 G. Frutuoso, Descripción de las Islas Canarias, trad. P.-N. Leal Cruz (Tenerife, 2004), pp. 151, 258. 35 M. A. Cabrera Pérez, Native Flora of the Canary Islands (León, 1999), pp. 104–5. 36 ‘943. Pablo Martín. Un asiento de colmenas en Ycode atrás de un drago grande

231

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

37 38

39

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

40

41 42

43

44 45

hacia Dabte en una fuente que está ahí, como es costumbre’; E. Serra Ráfols, Las datas de Tenerife (Libros I a IV de datas originales) (La Laguna, 1978), p. 188. The Libros de Datas (documents bearing on donations of land, water, etc.) are in the Archivo Municipal de La Laguna, Tenerife; the text in question is in the second book of the original datas. L. Ramón-Laca Menéndez de Luarca, ‘Las plantas vasculares de la península ibérica en la obra de Clusio: envíos de semillas de Sevilla a Leiden’, Anales Jardín Botánico de Madrid, lv/2 (1997), pp. 419–27 (423). Hieronymus Münster claimed to have seen a large dragon tree in the grounds of the monastery of the Holy Trinity in the same city of Lisbon in November 1494; there was an enormous crocodile suspended from the choir of the monastery. See M. de Paz-Sánchez, ‘Un drago en El Jardín de las Delicias’, in Flandes y Canarias. Nuestros orígenes nórdicos, ed. M. de Paz-Sánchez (Tenerife and Gran Canaria, 2004), i, pp. 13–109 (16). Since Münster’s manuscript was first published in full in the twentieth century, Clusius can be excused for not referring to it. L. Ramón-Laca, ‘The Spanish and American Plants in Clusius’ Correspondence’, in Studies in Renaissance Botany, ed. Z. Mirek and A. Zemanek, Polish Botanical Studies Guidebook Series no. xx (Kraków, 1998), p. 138. The woodblock (Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp, cat. no. hb 5225) is reproduced in De Botanica in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (einde 15de eeuw – ca. 1650), ed. F. de Nave and D. Imhof (Ghent, 1993), p. 133. The drawing, attributed to Van der Borcht, is in Libri Picturati a.23, fol. 28, Biblioteca Jagiellonska, Kraków. It is reproduced in Rámon-Laca, ‘The Spanish and American Plants in Clusius’ Correspondence’, p. 139. It was already reproduced in 1936 in H. Wegener, ‘Das grosse Bilderwerk des Carolus Clusius in der Preussischen Staatsbibliothek’, Forschungen und Fortschritte, xii (1936), p. 374, where the author drew attention to the fact that about one-third of the images in the manuscript correspond to the engravings that appeared in the printed works of Carolus Clusius; see further F. Egmond, ‘Clusius, Cluyt, Saint Omer. The origins of the sixteenth-century botanical and zoological watercolours in Libri Picturati a. 16–30’, Nuncius: Journal of the History of Science, xx/1 (2005), pp. 11–67. For a recent annotated Spanish translation of the Rariorum see Charles de l’Écluse de Arras, Descripción de algunas plantas raras encontradas en España y Portugal, ed. Luis Ramón-Laca Menéndez de Luarca and Ramón Morales Valverde (Valladolid, 2005). L. J.Vandewiele, ‘Wat groeide er in de tuin van Pieter van Coudenberghe’, in De Botanica in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (einde 15de eeuw – ca. 1650), ed. F. de Nave and D. Imhof (Ghent, 1993), p. 30. L. Tongiorgi Tomasi and P. Tongiorgi, ‘Persistenze e “migrazione” dell’immagine naturalistica’, in Immagine e Natura. L’immagine naturalistica nei codici e libri a stampa delle Biblioteche Estense e Universitaria. Secoli XV–XVII, exh. cat., Biblioteche Estense e Universitaria (Modena, 1984), pp. 175–6. J. L. Barona and X. Gómez Font, La correspondencia de Carolus Clusius con los científicos españoles (Valencia, 1998), p. 69; the English translation is taken, with slight modifications, from Ramón-Laca, ‘The Spanish and American Plants in Clusius’ Correspondence’, p. 144. Juan Fragoso, Discurso de las cosas aromáticas, árboles y frutales y de otras muchas medicinas simples que se traen de la India Oriental y que sirven al uso de la medicina (Madrid, 1572), pp. 89–90. Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651), p. 59. Cosimo ii, who had

232

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References

46 47

48 49

50 51

52

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

gardens in both Pisa and Florence, was particularly eager to promote botanical knowledge among his subjects; see L. Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘Arte e natura nel Giardino dei Semplici: dalle origini alla fine dell’ età medicea’, in F. Garbari, L. Tongiorgi Tomasi and A. Tosi, Giardino del Semplici/Garden of Simples (Pisa, 2002), p. 58. A proposal for a new coat of arms for La Orotava made in 1857 included, among other elements, the silhouette of the peak of Mt Teide and the dragon tree of Franchi. See Perdomo Ledesma, El Escudo de la Villa de La Orotava, p. v. D. J. Browne, Letters from the Canary Islands (1834), Letter xii. The New Hampshire naturalist Daniel Jay Browne (author of, among other things, a treatise on manure entitled American Muck Book, 1851) arrived in Tenerife in 1833. I have used the edition of his (unreliable) letters translated by Juan José Cruz with an introduction by Manuel Hernández and Juan José Cruz, Cartas desde las Islas Canarias (Tenerife, 2005), p. 98 n. 27. See Teixidor Cadenas, La fotografía en Canarias y Madeira, pp. 32–9. His photograph of ‘Young Dragon Trees, near Oratava, Teneriffe’, appeared as plate vi to his article ‘On the Manner of Growth of Dracaena draco in its Natural Habitat, as Illustrating some Disputed Points in Vegetable Physiology’, Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh vi (1859), pp. 250–61. C. Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem . . . (Leiden, 1605), p. 82. In ancient Rome a red sap, known as dragon’s blood, was used as a dye and medicinally. However, various trees supplied such a sap, so that it is impossible to connect it directly with the Macaronesian dragon tree. For its use in the seventeenth century, see, for example, A. MacGregor, M. Mendonça and J. White, Ashmolean Museum Oxford: Manuscript Catalogues of the Early Museum Collections 1683–1886 (Part I) (Oxford, 2000), p. 162 and A. MacGregor and M. Hook, Ashmolean Museum Oxford: Manuscript Catalogues of the Early Museum Collections (Part II).The Vice-Chancellor’s Consolidated Catalogue 1695 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 110, 154. H. Schedel, Chronicle of the World:The Complete and Annotated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, with an introduction and appendix by S. Füssel (Cologne, 2001), p. 7. On Schedel’s own graphic collection see B. Hernad, Die Graphiksammlung des Humanisten Hartmann Schedel, exh. cat., Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich, 1990). D. Landau and P. Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470–1550 (New Haven, ct, and London, 1994), p. 39. Various authors have tried to decipher the symbolism of the dragon tree in the composition by Bosch; on the various interpretations see R.H. Marijnissen and P. Ruyffelaere, Hieronymus Bosch:The Complete Works (Antwerp, 1987), p. 88 and De Paz-Sánchez, ‘Un drago en El Jardín de las Delicias’, pp. 68ff. R. A. Koch, ‘Martin Schongauer’s Dragon Tree’, Print Review, v (1976), pp. 114–19. Gospel of Mary’s Birth and the Saviour’s Childhood, chap. 18. G. Tigler, ‘Orvieto 1284–1334. Le sculture della parte bassa della facciata’, in La facciata del duomo di Orvieto.Teologia in figura. Fotografie di Elio e Stefano Ciol (Milan, 2002), pp. 12–24 (18). F. Cervini, ‘Tralci di vita e paradisi di marmo. Per una lettura iconografica della facciata’, in La facciata del duomo di Orvieto.Teologia in figura. Fotografie di Elio e Stefano Ciol (Milan, 2002), pp. 40–47 (42). M. Conway, ‘A Flemish Triptych for Melbourne’, Burlington Magazine, xl (1922), pp. 163–71 and U. Hoff, Catalogue of European Paintings before Eighteen Hundred, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, 1961). Flight into Egypt, 88.7 × 78 cm, Lee Bequest, Courtauld Institute, p.1947.lf.68. The

233

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

69

70 71

72 73

74

falling idol on top of a column in the right-hand background refers to another incident in the same apocryphal Gospel of Mary’s Birth: when the Holy Family entered a pagan temple in Egypt, the idols fell from their altars. It was illustrated, for example, by the Limbourg Brothers for Les Belles Heures de Jean de Berry (f. 63r) in the first decade of the fifteenth century. G. Bartrum, German Renaissance Prints 1490–1550 (London, 1995), p. 35; Dürers Dinge. Druckgraphik aus dem Besitz der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, ed. G. Unverfehrt, exh. cat. (Göttingen, 1997), no. 89. E. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, nj, 1971), p. 100. S. Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant (Manchester, 1997), pp. 198–9. See W. S. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth:The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting (Princeton, nj, 1989). The image of the bison appears to have been influenced by the woodcut of a ‘taureau sauvage’ in chap. 74 of Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique by André Thevet (Paris, 1557) and reproduced in Le Brésil d’André Thevet, p. 276. The tapestry is in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, and is reproduced in National Museums of Scotland Annual Report 1992–1993, p. 26. For analysis of the plants in these tapestries, see A. Kostuch and A. Zemanek, ‘Plants in the 16th-century Flemish Tapestries from Wawel Castle (Cracow, Poland)’, in Studies in Renaissance Botany, ed. Z. Mirek and A. Zemanek, Polish Botanic Studies Guidebook Series no. xx (Kraków, 1998), pp. 205–30, esp. 225. On American fauna, such as the turkey, in the tapestries, see J. Szablowski, A. Misiag-Bochenska, M. Hennel-Bernasikowa and M. Piwocka, Flemish Arrases of the Royal Castle in Cracow (Warsaw, 1994), p. 263. Although Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymus Bosch all represented the theme of St John on Patmos, neither Schongauer’s and Dürer’s prints nor Bosch’s painting (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) contain a dragon tree. H. Honour, ‘Wissenschaft und Exotismus. Die europäischen Künstler und die aussereuropäische Welt’, in Mythen der Neuen Welt, exh. cat., Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin, 1982), p. 36; Casper, Die Geschichte des Kanarischen Drachenbaumes in Wissenschaft und Kunst, p. 65. A hare, hidden today by a frame, was inserted in the bottom right-hand corner in the early seventeenth century; see F. Korenyi, Albrecht Dürer and the Animal and Plant Studies of the Renaissance (Munich, 1985), p. 132. P. Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London, 1998), chap. 2. The painting is now in the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby. See C. Greig, ‘Hodges and Attribution’, in William Hodges 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration, ed. G. Quilley and J. Bonehill, exh. cat., National Maritime Museum Greenwich (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004), p. 18. J. von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sammelwesens, 2nd edn (Braunschweig, 1978), pp. 19–23. C. Prandi, ‘Attilio Zanca e il coccodrillo’, in La natura e il corpo. Studi in memoria di Attilio Zanca, ed. G. Olmi and G. Papagno (Florence, 2006), pp. 35–47. The Bolognese cardinal Gabriele Paleotti planned to write a chapter of an unfinished work on the hanging of crocodiles and other exotic objects in churches; see A. Lugli, Naturalia et Mirabilia. Les cabinets de curiosités en Europe, 2nd edn (Paris, 1998), p. 53 n. 24. Catalogue entry by F. Korenyi in Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. J. A. Levenson, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (New Haven, ct, and London, 1991), p. 297; the date is confirmed by the watermark of the paper on

234

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References which the study is executed. See too the remarks on connoisseurship and ‘hard’ evidence by C. Ginzburg, ‘Vetoes and Compatibilities’, Art Bulletin, lxxvii/4 (1995), pp. 534–6. 75 Korenyi, Albrecht Dürer and the Animal and Plant Studies of the Renaissance, pp. 210–11.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

2 Birds that Grow on Trees 1 John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597), p. 1340. 2 See illus. 29. 3 Nicolás Monardes, Primera y segunda y tercera partes de la Historia medicinal, de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales . . . (Seville, 1574), p. 79. 4 C. Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem . . . (Leiden, 1605), p. 331. 5 Monardes, Primera y segunda y tercera partes, p. 80. 6 T. D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of ‘Tarih-i Hindi-i garbi’ and Sixteenth-century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden, 1990), p. 58. 7 J. Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C.W.R.D. Moseley (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 165. On the enormous dissemination and influence of Mandeville’s book, see C. Deluz, ‘Le Livre Jehan de Mandeville, autorité géographique à la Renaissance’, in Voyager à la Renaissance, ed. J. Céard and J.-Cl. Margolin (Paris, 1987), pp. 205–20. 8 Odorico da Pordenone, Relazione del viaggio in Oriente e in Cina (1314?–1330) (Pordenone, 1982), chap. 64. 9 Cl. Kappler, Monstres, démons et merveilles à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris, 1980), p. 136. 10 J. M. Levine, Dr Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1977), p. 124. 11 J.F.M. Cannon, ‘Botanical Collections’, in Sir Hans Sloane. Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, ed. A. MacGregor, exh. cat., The British Museum (London, 1994), pp. 136–49 (146–7). The same author contributed an entry on the Lamb of Tartary to M. Jones, ed., Fake? The Art of Deception, exh. cat., The British Museum (London, 1990), p. 85. 12 McGregor, ed., Sir Hans Sloane. Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, pp. 302, 305. 13 Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, p. 167. 14 Ibid., p. 165. 15 Odorico da Pordenone, Relazione del viaggio in Oriente e in Cina, chap. 64. 16 Heron-Allen, Barnacles in Nature and in Myth (London, 1928), p. xiv. 17 Ibid., pp. 109–24. 18 For a detailed study of the sources, see F. Egmond and P. Mason, ‘Report on a Wild Goose Chase’, Journal of the History of Collections, vii/1 (1995), pp. 25–43. 19 See The Whale Book:Whales and Other Marine Animals as Described by Adriaen Coenen in 1585, ed. with introduction and commentaries by F. Egmond, P. Mason and K. Lankester (London, 2003) and references there. Readers of Dutch can consult the more recent publication by F. Egmond, Het Visboek. De wereld volgens Adriaen Coenen 1514–1587 (Zutphen, 2005), with colour reproductions of Coenen’s illustrations of tree-geese, pp. 201–3. 20 Manuscript no. 78 e 54, referred to hereafter as msHague. The entire manuscript can be consulted on the Internet at www.kb.nl. 21 F. Egmond and P. Mason, ‘Armadillos in Unlikely Places: Some Unpublished Sixteenth-century Sources for New World Rezeptionsgeschichte in Northern Europe’, Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv, xx/1–2 (1994), pp. 3–52.

235

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment 22 ms Hague f. 103r. 23 Besides the 1550 Basel edition, issued by the influential publishing house of Heinrich Petri, I have consulted the Latin editions printed in Basel by the same publisher in 1552 and 1572. The passage appears with the addition of a lengthy citation from the Scottish historian Boethius in François Belleforest’s revised edition of Münster under the title La Cosmographie Universelle de tout le monde (Paris, 1575), pp. 100–1. Boethius attributed the origins of the oison d’arbre or clakis to the effects of the sea rather than to the nature of the wood or fruit in question. 24 Ff. 1004–05 in the 1552 Latin edition; inserted between ff. 1722 and 1723 in Belleforest’s 1575 edition. 25 It can also be found, for example, on the Hondius-Kaerius wall map of Europe printed in Amsterdam in 1595. 26 msHague f. 106v and 107. 27 msHague f. 107. 28 Occasionally the representation is of a tree standing improbably upright in the waves in an attempt to illustrate what some sources strangely refer to as ‘a tree on a water on a sea’. Clearly there was some confusion as to how the rotting wood from which the barnacle geese emerged was to be visualized. 29 Two English bestiaries from the second quarter of the thirteenth century, bl Harley 4751 and Bodl. Lib. Bodley 764, include representations of barnacle geese hatching from rotten wood; see W. George and B.Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (London, 1991), pp. 133–4 with pl. 87. 30 Coenen is here giving his version of Gerald of Wales’s story about the barnacle geese, contained in the report of a visit to Ireland by this courtier-cleric during the reign of Henry ii; see Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. J. J. O’Meara, revd edn (Harmondsworth, 1982). 31 msHague ff. 83–83v. 32 Charles de l’Écluse cites a communication that he had received from the Norwegian naturalist Henrik Høyer, according to whom ‘nobody had been found who dared to assert that he had ever seen a bird that was alive and a bird in every respect’ emerging from such driftwood; Exoticorum libri decem (Leiden, 1605), p. 368. For Høyer’s letter, dated 22 March 1604, see K. Lundquist, ‘Lilies to Norway and Cloudberry Jam to the Netherlands: On the Correspondence between Carolus Clusius and Henrik Høyer, 1597–1604’, in Carolus Clusius.Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist, ed. F. Egmond, P. Hoftijzer and R.Visser (Amsterdam, 2007), p. 166. 33 ‘Et hoc omnino absurdum est’; Heron-Allen, Barnacles in Nature and in Myth, pp. 15, 135–36, n. 51 and 52. 34 E. Baratay and E. Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London, 2002), p. 19. 35 The earliest is the work of Adelard of Bath, according to C. H. Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (Cambridge, ma, 1924), p. 346. 36 For the Latin text see ibid., p. 321. 37 On the contrast in attitude towards the barnacle goose on the part of Gerald of Wales and Frederick of Sicily, see R. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales 1146–1223 (Oxford 1982), pp. 136–7. 38 See the introduction to Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius ii), De Gestis Concilii Basiliensis Commentariorum Libri II, ed. and trans. D. Hay and W. K. Smith (Oxford, 1967), p. xxv. 39 See the passage cited earlier in this chapter from msHague, fol. 103r.

236

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

References 40 On this pattern, see P. Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other (London and New York, 1990), p. 100. 41 ‘Qua in Napole mi par star nell’ ultimo del mondo’, Ferrante Imperato to Joachim Jungerman, December 1590, cited in G. Olmi, ‘“Molti amici in varij luoghi”: studio della natura e rapporti epistolari nel secolo xvi’, Nuncius, vi/1 (1991), pp. 3–31 (13). For Imperato on the barnacle goose see Heron-Allen, Barnacles in Nature and in Myth, p. 42. 42 On Stelliola see G. Gabriele, Contributi alla storia della Accademia dei Lincei (Rome, 1989), pp. 889–911, 1505–7. On the scientific and cultural background of Naples in this period see G. Olmi, ‘La colonia lincea di Napoli’, in Galileo e Napoli, ed. F. Lomonaco and M. Torrini (Naples, 1987), pp. 23–58. 43 D. E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, ct, 2007), p. 42. 44 Heron-Allen, Barnacles in Nature and in Myth, p. 72. The professor was Pancrazio Mazzangha Bargoeus. 45 This form of address – an abbreviation of the diminutive of Adriaen, Adriaentge – clearly points to familiarity as well as to the considerable distance in terms of rank. 46 msHague 103v. 47 msHague f. 104r–104v. Jan Baen lived in Wijk op Zee (a coastal village not far from Scheveningen), earned a living selling fish, and had once travelled to Cologne together with Coenen, where both of them sold dried plaice. 48 The word is used here, by analogy with the subtitle of Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms:The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, md, 1980), to refer to the cosmos of a sixteenth-century beachcomber. 49 Heron-Allen, Barnacles in Nature and in Myth, p. 84 recalls a remarkable fish dinner which he enjoyed at a Belgian hotel in Ghent on Good Friday 1901, ending with a dish of piscatorial fowl which he took to be teal but hoped to have been barnacle goose. 50 Papal intervention often concerned matters which may strike one as curious today. For instance, when the Irish bishop of Salzburg, a certain Virgilius, was believed to have claimed that under the earth were another world (mundus), other peoples (homines) and another sun and moon, he was summoned to Rome by the pope, Zacharias, to give an account of himself. 51 msHague f. 103v. 52 The introduction of new products from the New World to the continent of Europe raised similar problems about whether they broke the Christian fast or not. For the case of cocoa, to which Juan de Cárdenas devoted more than forty pages, see J. Pardo Tomás, ‘Natural Knowledge and Medical Remedies in the Book of Secrets: Uses and Appropriations in Juan de Cárdenas’, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias (Mexico, 1591)’ , in A Passion for Plants, ed. F. Egmond, S. Anagnostou and C. Friedrich (Marburg, forthcoming). 53 B. J. Spruyt, `Verdacht van lutherse sympathieën. Maria van Hongarije en de religieuze controversen van haar tijd’, in Maria van Hongarije. Koningin tussen keizers en kunstenaars, 1505–1558, ed. B. van den Boogert and J. Kerkhoff, exh. cat., Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch, and Rijksmuseum Het Catharijneconvent, Utrecht (Zwolle, 1993), pp. 87–103. 54 Le Brésil d’André Thevet. Les Singularités de la France Antarctique (1557), ed. F. Lestringant (Paris, 1997), pp. 120–21. 55 Coenen would have been delighted to hear that scientists have discovered a

237

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

56 57

58

59

60

61

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69

mangrove killifish (Rivulus marmoratus poey) capable of surviving for months out of water on the branches of the trees that populate the mangrove swamps of Florida. ms Hague f. 390v. One collection in which an important part was played by objects bordering on the dividing line between art and nature was that of Archduke Ferdinand ii in Schloss Ambras near Innsbruck. See E. Scheicher, ‘The Collection of Archduke Ferdinand ii at Schloss Ambras: Its Purpose, Composition and Evolution’, in The Origins of XVIIMuseums, ed. O. Impey and A. MacGregor (Oxford, 1985), pp. 29–53. See A. Schnapper, Le Géant, La Licorne, La Tulipe. Collections françaises au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1988), p. 62; K. Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris,Venise: XVIe– XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1987), p. 63; Ambroise Paré, Des Monstres et Prodiges, ed. Jean Céard, (Geneva, 1971), pp. xxvii, xl. Gemeentearchief Leiden, Stadsarchief, inv. no. 44: Gerechtsdagboek Leiden deel A. f.234. There is no evidence to infer that Coenen displayed on the Leiden market every year from 1583, as is stated in the exhibition catalogue Dawn of the Golden Age: Netherlandish Art 1580–1620, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Zwolle, 1993), p. 355. ms Hague f. 193v. Charles de St Omer, lord of Renouteren and Moerkerke, owned XVIIa country house with a famous garden and a maze not far from Bruges. He was a collector of both naturalia and antiquities, and acted as patron of the most famous botanists of the period. See F. Egmond, ‘Clusius, Cluyt, Saint Omer: The Origins of the Sixteenth-century Botanical and Zoological Watercolours in Libri Picturati A. 16–30’, Nuncius, xx/1 (2005), pp. 11–67; J. de Koening, G. van Uffelen, A. Zemanek and B. Zemanek, Drawn After Nature:The Complete Botanical Watercolours of the thcentury ‘Libri Picturati’ (Zeist, 2008). W. George, ‘Alive or Dead: Zoological Collections in the Seventeenth Century’, in The Origins of Museums, ed. O. Impey and A. MacGregor (Oxford, 1985), pp. 179–87; cf. Ambroise Paré, Des Monstres et Prodiges, p. 130. Rembrandt owned a bird of paradise, of which two drawings are extant, see Rembrandt’s Treasures, ed. B. van den Boogert, exh. cat., Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam (Zwolle, 1999), p. 79. See further below, chap. Four. A. Schnapper, Le Géant, La Licorne, La Tulipe, pl. 23. Ibid., pp. 76–7. For the ‘Scottish barnacle’ in the poetic catalogue of the collection of Contant see Paul Contant, Le Jardin, et Cabinet Poétique, ed. M. Marrache-Gouraud and P. Martin (Rennes, 2004), p. 215. One of the two manuscript inventories of his collection includes a drawing by Peiresc himself of a barnacle goose copied from Pena and Lobel’s Stirpium Adversaria nova (London, 1570), as well as drawings of a barnacle goose from Joubert’s collection in Montpellier and of one formerly in the collection of Vincenzo Pinelli before it entered Peiresc’s own collection. Carpentras, Bibl. Inguimbertine, ms 1869, ff. 123–4. G. Olmi, L’inventario del mondo. Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima età moderna (Bologna, 1992), p. 295. The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, exh. cat., The British Museum (Milan, 1993), p. 209. M. Allan, The Tradescants:Their Plants, Gardens and Museum 1570–1662 (London, 1964), p. 253. See pl. clxxx in A. MacGregor, ed., Tradescant’s Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum 1683, with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections XVII(Oxford, 1983). Heron-Allen, Barnacles in Nature and in Myth, p. 105.

238

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References 70 A. MacGregor, M. Mendonça and J. White, Ashmolean Museum Oxford: Manuscript Catalogues of the Early Museum Collections 1683–1886 (Part I) (Oxford, 2000), p. 247. 71 [R]. Fuchs and J. Breen, ‘Aus dem “Itinerarium” des Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’, Jaarboek Amstelodanum, xiv (1916), pp. 201–56. 72 E. de Jong, ‘Nature and Art: The Leiden Hortus as “Musaeum”’, in The Authentic Garden: A Symposium on Gardens, ed. E. de Jong and L. Tjon Sie Fat (Leiden, 1991), pp. 37–60 (59). 73 Heron-Allen, Barnacles in Nature and in Myth, p. 107. 74 On the interplay between the presentation of exotic objects in collections and their visual and textual representation, see P. Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London, 1998).

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

3 Hybrids, Prodigies and Monstrous Races 1 Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, trans. and intro. by J. Whatley (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1990), p. 78. I have used the French edition edited by F. Lestringant, Jean de Léry. Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil 1557 (Montpellier, 1992). 2 Le Brésil d’André Thevet. Les Singularités de la France Antarctique (1557), ed. F. Lestringant (Paris, 1997), p. 194. 3 A. Paré, Des Monstres et Prodiges, ed. with comments by J. Céard (Geneva, 1971). On Paré’s use of Léry and Thevet, see Céard’s introduction, pp. xvi–xix. There is an English translation by J. L. Pallister, Ambroise Paré On Monsters and Marvels (Chicago and London, 1982). 4 F. Egmond and P. Mason, ‘Armadillos in Unlikely Places: Some Unpublished Sixteenth-century Sources for New World Rezeptionsgeschichte in Northern Europe’, Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv (1994), xx/1–2, pp. 3–52; F. Egmond and P. Mason, ‘“These are People who Eat Raw Fish”: Contours of the Ethnographic Imagination in the Sixteenth Century’, Viator, xxxi (2000), pp. 311–60. 5 M. de Certeau, La Fable Mystique XVIe–XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1982), p. 198. 6 See D. Wilson, Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (London and New York, 1993); J. Céard, La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au XVIe siècle, 2nd edn (Geneva, 1996); I. Ewinkel, De monstris. Deutung und Funktion von Wundergeburten auf Flugblättern im Deutschland des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1995); R. Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 9–50; L. Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘Scienza o Immaginario? Mostri, meraviglie e prodigi nell’ iconografia naturalistica del tardo rinascimento’ in L’art de la Renaissance entre science et magie, ed. Ph. Morel (Paris, 2005), pp. 385–97. I deliberately refrain from referring to works which use images of such deformed babies, or of other human deformities, particularly on their covers, in an insensitive or even exploitative way. 7 Ploutarchos, De curiositate 10, Mor. 520c. 8 Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of Marvels, trans. with introduction and commentary by W. Hansen (Exeter, 1996), pp. 46–7. 9 Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions, p. 22. On pp. 31–2 of the same book, the author lists 25 publications, mainly broadsheets, on monstrous births in England between 1562 and 1645. 10 J. Friedman, Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution:The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford’s Flies (London, 1993). 11 Belleforest’s first publication of prodigies goes back to 1571, when he contributed

239

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19

20 21

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

22 23

24 25 26

accounts of ten of them to a collective publication by Boaistuau and Tesserant. See M. Simonin, Vivre de sa plume au XVIe siècle, ou la carrière de François de Belleforest (Geneva, 1992), pp. 131, 254. For a modern translation, introduction and historical commentary on the relevant book of Pliny, see M. Beagon, The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal. Natural History Book 7 (Oxford, 2005). See the contributions to Part i of E. Magaña and P. Mason, eds, Myth and the Imaginary in the New World (Amsterdam, 1986). For example, Pierre de Changy’s Sommaire des Singularitez de Pline (Paris, 1542). For the medieval and Renaissance translations, commentaries and editions of Pliny see C.G. Nauert Jr, ‘Caius Plinius Secundus’, in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. Annotated Lists and Guides, ed. F. E. Cranz (Washington, dc, 1980), iv, pp. 297–422. Adriaen Coenen, Een Visboock, Royal Library, The Hague, 78 E 54 (1577–1579), fol. 9v. See Egmond and Mason, ‘“These are People who Eat Raw Fish”. See F. Egmond and P. Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse: Microhistory and Morphology (Baltimore and London, 1998), pp. 105–32. A. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. D. Britt (Los Angeles, 1999), p. 599 (translation slightly modified). On the significance of the phrase ‘is in fact timeless’ (ist eigentlich zeitlos) see G. Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris, 2002), pp. 188–90. P. Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other (London and New York, 1990); P. Mason, ‘Classical Ethnology and Its Influence on the European Perception of the Peoples of the New World’, The Classical Tradition and the Americas, vol. i: European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition, ed. W. Haase and M. Reinhold (Berlin and New York, 1994), pp. 135–72. Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. J. J. O’Meara, revd edn (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 73–4. They were located in India by Megasthenes in the fourth century bc, and can be found in later texts and graphic representations, such as the famous twelfth-century tympanum in Vézélay, France. J. Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C.W.R.D. Moseley (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 137. For discussions of the Greco-Roman tradition see J. B. Friedman,The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, ma, 1981), Fr. Pfister, Kleine Schriften zur Alexanderroman, Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie 61 (Meisenheim an Glan, 1955), pp. 120–42, R. Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London, 1977), pp. 45–74, J. S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton, nj, 1992), and Mason, Deconstructing America, pp. 70–94. Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.20.13ff.; cf. E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 188–9. I am here following the Middle Dutch version, Van Sente Brandane. See W. P. Gerritsen, D. Edel and M. de Kreek, De Wereld van Sint Brandaan (Utrecht, 1986). J. Le Goff, L’imaginaire médiévale (Paris, 1985), p. 27. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, p. 73, gives the following examples of this type of writing: the French and Latin Moralised Ovid, John Ridewall’s Fulgentius Metaforalis, Robert Holcott’s Moralitates, and the Gesta Romanorum. On the moralizing interpretation of animal lore in the Physiologus, see R. French, Ancient Natural History: Histories of Nature (London and New York, 1994), pp. 276–86.

240

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

References 27 Céard, La nature et les prodiges, pp. 43–59; Friedman, The Monstrous Races, pp. 123–30; Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, pp. 56–7. 28 R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford, 1994), p. 132; Cl. Lecouteux, Les monstres dans la littérature allemande du moyen âge. Contribution à l’étude du merveilleux médiéval (Göppingen, 1982), i, 318ff; and see the classic discussion by A. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, pp. 634–5. 29 Friedman, The Monstrous Races, p. 24. 30 On the dog-headed people, see D. G. White, Myths of the Dog-Man (Chicago, il, 1991). 31 According to H. Hosten, ‘The Mouthless Indians of Megasthenes’, Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, n.s. 8 (1912), cited with approval by Friedman, The Monstrous Races, p. 25. 32 Reprinted in Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, pp. 46–74. 33 R. Delort, Les animaux ont une histoire (Paris, 1984), p. 74. 34 Friedman, The Monstrous Races, p. 197. 35 G. Olmi, L’inventario del mondo. Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima età moderna (Bologna, 1992), p. 47; Céard, La nature et les prodiges, pp. 456–7. 36 Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, transcribed, annotated and introduced by N. L. Whitehead (Manchester, 1997), p. 178. 37 J. Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Men Transformed: or The Artificial Changling Historically presented . . . (London, 1650), cited in Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, p. 69. 38 Lafitau suggested that it might be the result of a deliberate act carried out in early childhood, like the binding of young girls’ feet in China. 39 J.-N. Démeunier, L’esprit des usages et des coutumes des différents peuples (Paris, 1776), ii, pp. 219–33. I have consulted the facsimile of the 1785 edition published by JeanMichel Place (Paris, 1988). 40 As pointed out by E. Magaña, ‘’Ethnographie imaginaire et pratiques culinaires’, Circé, xvi–xix (1988), pp. 7–47 (26). 41 A. Lugli, Naturalia et Mirabilia. Les cabinets de curiosités en Europe, 2nd edn (Paris, 1998), p. 53 n. 24. 42 The Whale Book:Whales and Other Marine Animals as Described by Adriaen Coenen in 1585, ed. with introduction and commentaries by F. Egmond, P. Mason and K. Lankester (London, 2003), p. 128. 43 H. Fischer, ‘The Ancient Egyptian Attitude Towards the Monstrous’, in Monsters and Demons in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds. Papers Presented in Honor of Edith Porada, ed. A. E. Farkas, P. O. Harper and E. B. Harrison (Mainz, 1987), pp. 13–26. 44 Solinus, Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium, 45.8. 45 D.J.A. Ross, ‘A Funny Name for a Horse: Bucephalus in Antiquity and the Middle Ages in Literature and Visual Art’, in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages:Ten Studies on the Last Days of Alexander in Literary and Historical Writing, ed. W. J. Aerts, J.M.M. Hermans and E.Visser (Nijmegen, 1978), pp. 302–3. 46 Vestiri frondium lanugine, Pliny, Hist. Nat. 7.25 (Pliny is here following Megasthenes); Avium ritu plumantibus, Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 9.4.10. See J.D.P. Bolton, Aristeas of Proconnesus (Oxford, 1962), pp. 30–31. 47 Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, p. 53. 48 Céard, La nature et les prodiges, pp. 43–59; Friedman, The Monstrous Races, p. 23. 49 Friedman, The Monstrous Races, pp. 26–36. 50 M. Rossellini and S. Saïd, ‘Usages de femmes et autres nomoi chez les “sauvages” d’Hérodote: Essai de lecture structurale’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa,

241

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

51 52 53 54

55 56 57

58 59 60

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68

ser. iii, viii/8 (1978), pp. 949–1005; Mason, ‘Classical Ethnography and Its Influence on the European Perception of the Peoples of the New World’. A. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man:The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982), p. 13. P. Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1979 (London, 1986), pp. 67–73. F. de Mély, ‘Le “Des Monstris” chinois et les bestiaires occidentaux’, Revue Archéologique, 3ème série, xxxi (1897), pp. 353–73. On the structure of the body see, besides Marcel Mauss’ classic essay ‘Les techniques du corps’ in his Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris, 1950), pp. 365–86, J. Bremmer and H. Roodenburg, eds, A Cultural History of Gesture (Cambridge, 1991), and H. Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body: Perspectives on Gesture in the Dutch Republic (Zwolle, 2004). Cl. Kappler, Monstres, démons et merveilles à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris, 1980), pp. 115–17. Lecouteux, Les monstres dans la littérature allemande du moyen âge, p. 5. The typology offered by Kappler, Monstres, démons et merveilles, pp. 120–83, though it contains more terms, can be reduced to the same triad. See C. Ballard, ‘Collecting Pygmies: the “Tapiro” and the British Ornithologists’ Union Expedition to Dutch New Guinea, 1910–1911’, in Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, ed. M. O’Hanlon and R. Welsh (Oxford, 2000), pp. 127–54. Lecouteux, Les monstres dans la littérature allemande du moyen âge, p. 6. D. Diderot, Oeuvres, ed. A. Billy (Paris, 1951), p. 908. Pliny’s note that the Abarimon ‘cannot breathe in a foreign climate and for that reason cannot be brought to the neighbouring kings’ (Natural history, vii.11) is one of the earliest loci that document the practice of putting on show, in a courtly or other setting, people who deviate in some way from what is taken to be the norm by the viewing public – a practice which has a long history. See C. Báez Allende and P. Mason, Zoológicos Humanos. Fotografías de fueguinos y mapuche en el Jardin d’Acclimatation de París, siglo XIX (Santiago de Chile, 2006). Kappler, Monstres, démons et merveilles, pp. 147–57. L. Freeman Sandler, ‘Reflections on the Construction of Hybrids in English Gothic Marginal Illustration’, in Art, the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H.W. Janson, ed. M. Barasch, L. Freeman Sandler and P. Egan (New York, 1981), pp. 51–65; cf. Ph. Morel, Les Grotesques. Les figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la renaissance (Paris, 1997), p. 17. The amphisbaena, a reptile with a head at each end of its body, is discussed in more detail in chapter Five. Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, vv. 276–85. Herodotos, Histories ii.68, 71. J. Boardman, ‘“Very like a whale” – Classical Sea Monsters’, in Monsters and Demons in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds. Papers Presented in Honor of Edith Porada, ed. A. E. Farkas, P. O. Harper and E. B. Harrison (Mainz, 1987), pp. 73–84. The list of animals on which I am drawing here is taken from the Old French translation of de Vitry, and differs from the list presented in the Latin text of the Historia Orientalis. The martichora (a Persian word meaning ‘man-eater’) was mentioned by the Hellenistic historian Ktesias, whose description was repeated by Pliny, Philostratos, Photios and others, though none of them believed it was true. Pausanias (9.21.4) sees in it a confused description of the tiger.

242

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

References 69 La traduction de l’Historia Orientalis de Jacques de Vitry, ed. Cl. Buridant (Paris, 1986), chap. 86. 70 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura v.890–924, a passage well known to art historians in connection with Piero di Cosimo’s paintings of the early history of humankind via E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1962), pp. 33–67. 71 Céard, La nature et les prodiges, p. 46; M.-H. Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge and London, 1993). 72 Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum, 4, lxxxvii. Thomas of Cantimpré wrote this work between 1228 and 1244. He was heavily influenced by the work of his predecessor, Jacques de Vitry, whose Historia Orientalis dates from 1219–21. Neither of these authors was interested in compiling a natural history: their purpose was devotional, to instruct their congregations in the wonders of the divinely created world. In Book iii, Thomas casts doubts on the theory that hybrids were born from intercourse between humans and animals, and inclines to the view that they were born in the remote areas of the Orient. 73 Léry, History of a Voyage, p. 181. 74 Ibid., p. 85. 75 Angelo Trevisan, Lettere sul Nuovo Mondo, ed. A. Caracciolo Aricò (Venice, 1993), p. 58. Trevisan is drawing on the work of Peter Martyr in manuscript (the first decade of Martyr’s De Orbe Novo was not printed until 1511). Martyr called the opossum ‘that monster of an animal’ (monstrosum illud animal); see G. Eatough, ed., Selections from Peter Martyr (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 102, 190, 433. There is a sketch of this creature, labelled as an ‘animale monstruoso’, in the margin of a manuscript collection of texts on the early voyages to America between 1492 and 1506 compiled by Alessando Zorzi; see L. Laurencich-Minelli, Un ‘giornale’ del Cinquecento sulla scoperta dell’ America. Il Manoscritto di Ferrara (Milan, 1985), fig. 81. 76 G. Lascault, Les monstres dans l’art occidental (Paris, 1973), p. 220. 77 Lecouteux, Les monstres dans la littérature allemande du moyen âge, i, 187; Le Goff, L’imaginaire médiévale, p. 171, n. 3. 78 Alkman fragment 184 in D. L. Page, Lyrica Graeca Selecta (Oxford, 1968). 79 Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, p. 58; Lecouteux, Les monstres dans la littérature allemande du moyen âge, ii, pp. 151–2. 80 E. Magaña, ‘El señor del bosque y la etnografía imaginaria de los indios de Surinam’, Anthropologica vi/6 (1988), pp. 411–37, esp. 420. The curupirá, first recorded in America by José de Anchieta in 1560, was a dangerous dwarf with red hair and long ears; see L. da Câmara Cascudo, Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1962), i, pp. 261–2. 81 Lecouteux, Les monstres dans la littérature allemande du moyen âge, i, p. 84. 82 Mason, Deconstructing America, pp. 97–117. 83 J. Goimard, ‘Je est une bête’, Traverses, viii (1977), pp. 125–35. 84 Kappler, Monstres, démons et merveilles, p. 149. 85 Freeman Sandler, ‘Reflections on the Construction of Hybrids’, p. 56. 86 An engraving by Jan Collaert after J. Stradanus, Venationes Ferarum, Auium, Piscium. Pugnae Bestiariorum et mutuae bestiarum shows two-legged Sciapodes in Ethiopia. It is reproduced in Magaña and Mason, Myth and the Imaginary in the New World, p. 44. 87 R. Needham, Reconnaissances (Toronto, 1980), 17–40. An even stranger variant is the lop-sided Chinese mythical being with a right arm and a left leg only, ibid., p. 27. 88 P. Mason, Deconstructing America, pp. 41–68. See too R. Bartra, The Artificial Savage: Modern Myths of the Wild Man (Ann Arbor, mi, 1997).

243

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104 105 106

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

107

De Certeau, La Fable Mystique, p. 198. M. Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses (Paris, 1966). E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 98–9. Freeman Sandler, ‘Reflections on the Construction of Hybrids’, p. 59. Ibid., p. 62. Illustrated in A. E. Farkas et al., Monsters and Demons in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, plate xli. On Bosch see J. Le Goff, L’imaginaire médiévale, p. 31; Cl. Kappler, Monstres, démons et merveilles, p. 147. Freeman Sandler, ‘Reflections on the Construction of Hybrids’, p. 55. Such combinations are rare in grotesques; Morel cites the example of the grotesques by Giacomo Rossignolo in the castle of Lagnasco (Piemonte), dating from around 1580, Les Grotesques, pp. 97–9. J. Baschet, ‘Les conceptions de l’enfer à France au xive siècle: Imaginaire et pouvoir’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, xl ⁄1 (1985), pp. 185–207. voi che pel mondo gite errando vaghi ⁄ di veder maraviglie alte e stupende ⁄ venite qua dove son faccie horrende ⁄ elefanti leoni orsi orche et draghi. The bears (orsi) are a punning allusion to Vicino Orsini, who had the garden created in the second half of the sixteenth century. On the interpretation of these inscriptions see M. Calvesi, Gli incantesimi di Bomarzo. Il Sacro Bosco tra arte e letteratura (Milan, 2000), pp. 185–91. E. Battisti, L’Antirinascimento, 2nd edn (Turin, 2005), p. 158. J. W. von Goethe, Italian Journey, ed.W. H. Auden and E. Meyer (London, 1970), pp. 237–8. Ibid., p. 239. Work on the villa began in 1715. The sculptural decorations were added to the complex in 1749 by Francesco Ferdinando Gravina e Alliata, the seventh prince of Palagonia. Ibid., p. 240. Battisti, L’Antirinascimento, pp. 157ff. Ibid., 468. For a survey of changes in critical attitudes to Bomarzo see M. Calvesi, Gli incantesimi di Bomarzo, pp. 21–9, and the brief but evocative pages in E. Battisti, Iconologia ed ecologia del giardino e del paesaggio (Florence, 2004), pp. 329–32. Battisti, L’Antirinascimento, p. xxxiv.

4 Americana in the Exoticorum libri decem of Charles de l’Écluse 1 W. B. Ashworth Jr, ‘The Persistent Beast: Recurring Images in Early Zoological Illustration’, in The Natural Sciences and the Arts, ed. A. Ellenius (Stockholm, 1985), pp. 46–66 (65). 2 Although a reasonably accurate rendering of an armadillo is set in a patently oriental landscape by Joachim Camerarius in his Symbola et Emblemata (Nuremberg, 1595), ii, lxxxiii; see L. Tongiorgi Tomasi and P. Tongiorgi, ‘Natura, verbum, signum. Brevi note su impresse e storia naturale’, in La natura e il corpo. Studi in memoria di Attilio Zanca, ed. G. Olmi and G. Papagno (Florence, 2006), pp. 49‒72 (67‒9). 3 F. Egmond and P. Mason, ‘Armadillos in Unlikely Places: Some Unpublished Sixteenth-century Sources for New World Rezeptionsgeschichte in Northern Europe’, Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv, xx/1–2 (1994), pp. 3–52. 4 On the presence of Americana in European collections, see C. F. Feest, ‘European Collecting of American Indian Artefacts and Art’, Journal of the History of Collections,

244

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References

5 6 7

8

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

9 10 11 12

13

14

15

v/1 (1993), pp. 1–11; P. Mason, ‘From Presentation to Representation: Americana in Europe’, Journal of the History of Collections, vi/1 (1994), pp. 1–20; P. Mason, ‘Faithful to the Context? The Presentation and Representation of American Objects in European Collections’, Anuário antropológico, xcviii (2002), pp. 51–95; E. Bujok, Neue Welten in europäischen Sammlungen. Africana und Americana in Kunstkammern bis 1670 (Berlin, 2004); I.Yaya, ‘Wonders of America: The Curiosity Cabinet as a Site of Representation and Knowledge’, Journal of the History of Collections, xx/2 (2008), pp. 173‒88. A. Ubrizsy in Savoia and J. Heniger, ‘Carolus Clusius and American Plants’, Taxon, xxxii/3 (1983), pp. 424–35, list more than fifty American plants in the Exoticorum libri decem. H. J. Cook, Matters of Exchange. Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, ct, and London, 2007), p. 90. Fundamental for the life and work of Clusius is still F.W.T. Hunger, Charles de l’Escluse (Carolus Clusius) Nederlandsch kruidkundige 1526–1609, of which the first volume (The Hague, 1927) is written in Dutch and the second (The Hague, 1945) in German. On the Clusius correspondence, a large part of which is now available online, see F. Egmond, ‘Correspondence and Natural History in the Sixteenth Century: Cultures of Exchange in the Circle of Carolus Clusius’, in Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, ed. F. Bethencourt and F. Egmond (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 104–42 and F. Egmond, ‘Clusius and Friends: Cultures of Exchange in the Circles of European Naturalists’, in Carolus Clusius:Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist, ed. F. Egmond, P. Hoftijzer and R.Visser (Amsterdam, 2007), pp. 9–48. Specifically on the Montpellier period see G. Lewis, ‘Clusius in Montpellier, 1551–1554: A Humanist Education Completed?’, in Carolus Clusius, ed. Egmond, Hoftijzer and Visser, pp. 65–98. See chap. One. On Clusius’s Iberian journey see J. L. Barona, ‘Clusius’ Exchange of Botanical Information with Spanish Scholars’, in Carolus Clusius, ed. Egmond, Hoftijzer and Visser, pp. 99–116. Exoticorum libri decem, p. 364. Ibid., p. 372. Ibid., p. 69. On the agave, which features under the same – Catalonian – name of filagul not only in the Rariorum aliquot stirpium . . . but also in the herbarium that Pier’Antonio Michiel compiled between the beginning of the 1570s and his death in August 1576, see J. Pardo-Tomás, ‘Tra “oppinioni” e “dispareri”: la flora americana nell’erbario di Pier’Antonio Michiel (1510–1576)’, in La natura e il corpo. Studi alla memoria di Attilio Zanca, ed. G. Olmi and G. Papagno (Florence, 2006), pp. 73–100, esp. 91–2. See L. Ramón-Laca Menéndez de Luarca, ‘Charles de l’Écluse y la flora ibérica’, in Charles de l’Écluse de Arras, Descripción de algunas plantas raras encontradas en España y Portugal, ed. L. Ramón-Laca Menéndez de Luarca and R. Morales Valverde (Valladolid, 2005), p. 22. A. Ubrizsy in Savoia and J. Heniger, ‘Carolus Clusius and American Plants’, p. 433, list twenty American plants in the Rariorum aliquot stirpium. An exemplar of the Rariorum aliquot stirpium . . . preserved in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I in Brussels (vh 6773 a lp), was a gift by Clusius to Ogier van Busbeck. See E. Cockx-Indestege and F. de Nave, eds, Christoffel Plantijn en de exacte wetenschappen in zijn tijd, exh. cat., Museum Plantin-Moretus Antwerp (Ghent, 1989), no. 32. Exoticorum libri decem, p. 69.

245

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment 16 Ibid., pp. 60–61. Clusius refers in this work to James Garet Jr more than to any other source. The Garet family belonged to the community of naturalists who all lived in or near Lime Street in the last decades of the sixteenth century. On Americana in the London collections of the period, see D. E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, ct, and London, 2007), p. 33. On Clusius’s correspondence with the three members of the Garet family (James Sr and his sons James Jr and Pieter) in particular, and on his European correspondence more generally, see F. Egmond, ‘A European Community of Scholars: Exchange and Friendship among Early Modern Natural Historians’, in Finding Europe. Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images, c. 13th–c. 18th Centuries, ed. A. Molho, D. Ramada Curto and N. Koniordos (New York and Oxford, 2007), pp. 159–83. 17 As pointed out by S.Varey and R. Chabrán, ‘Mexican Medicine Comes to England’, Viator, xxvi (1995), pp. 333–55, the second edition of José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias, published in 1590, mentioned Hernández and the expedition to New Spain. Acosta’s work was soon translated into Italian, German, French, Dutch and English, so that the European scholarly community was soon apprised of the existence of Hernández’ work. 18 That it was, however, accessible to the group of Italian artists who frequented the Escorial around 1580 is demonstrated by borrowings from it in a collection of watercolours of animals and plants given by Philip ii to Jaume Honorat Pomar (c. 1550–1606), who was the successor to Joan Plaça – a correspondent of Clusius – to the chair of botany in Valencia. Besides containing illustrations of Old World fauna and flora, the Codex Pomar has representations of seven animals and more than twenty plants from the Americas, some of which correspond more or less exactly to the illustrations from Hernández’ work that found their way into the Mexican Treasury. See J. M. López Piñero and J. Pardo Tomás, Nuevos materiales y noticias sobre la Historia de las Plantas de Nueva España, de Francisco Hernández (Valencia, 1994), pp. 87–101, and J. M. Camarasa and J. I. Català, Els nostres naturalistes (Valencia, 2007), pp. 34–9. 19 I. Baldriga, ‘The Influence of Clusius in Italy: Federico Cesi and the Accademia dei Lincei’, in Carolus Clusius, ed. Egmond, Hoftijzer and Visser, pp. 249–65 (259). Clusius’s interest in Recchi’s treatise is attested in a letter to him from Ferrante Imperato in Naples of 7 January 1598, though it did not reach Clusius until June of the same year. The letter is published in G. B. De Toni, Il carteggio degli italiani col botanico Carlo Clusio nella Biblioteca Leidense (Modena, 1911), p. 64. 20 Exoticorum libri decem, p. 10. 21 Ibid., p. 23. 22 M. de Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, ed. A. Thibaudet and M. Rat, introduction and notes M. Rat (Paris, 1962), p. 206. 23 Exoticorum libri decem, p. 25. 24 Hunger, Charles de l’Ecluse, i, p. 175. 25 Exoticorum libri decem, pp. 132–5. On the curiosities on show in the Leiden hortus see E. de Jong, ‘Nature and Art: The Leiden Hortus as “Musaeum”’, in The Authentic Garden: A Symposium on Gardens, ed. E. de Jong and L. Tjon Sie Fat (Leiden, 1991), pp. 37–60. Among the inventories published by De Jong, the first 25 items in the list of contents drawn up in 1617 must date from between 1600 – when the old gallery was in operation – and 1610–12 – when the new gallery was opened. The ‘two Indian hanging rope beds’ mentioned there must be hammocks (the 1659 inventory uses the word ‘hamack’), but these are the only objects in that list that can be clearly

246

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33

34 35 36

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

identified as American. Once again, Michel de Montaigne had helped to disseminate knowledge about the Amerindian hammock in his essay Des Cannibales. Hunger, Charles de l’Ecluse, i, pp. 266–8. Exoticorum libri decem, p. 62. See J. Pardo Tomás, ‘Two Glimpses of America from a Distance: Carolus Clusius and Nicolás Monardes’, in Carolus Clusius, ed. Egmond, Hoftijzer and Visser, pp. 173–93. Exoticorum libri decem, p. 8. Ibid., pp. 53–4. For Garet’s account of the episode, see his letter to Clusius dated 10 August 1604. Leiden University Library, vul 101. Peiresc (Paris) to Clusius (Leiden), 15 February 1606. There are eight extant letters from Peiresc to Clusius, dating from between 1602 and 1606, in Leiden University Library, vul 101. A further four, two of which are copies of the letters now in Leiden, are in Aix-en-Provence. Barent Jansz. Potgieter, Wijdtloopigh verhael van tgene de vijf schepen (die int jaer 1598 tot Rotterdam toegherust werden, om door de Straet Magellana haren handel te drijven) wedervaren is . . . (Amsterdam, 1600). See also W. Klooster, The Dutch in the Americas 1600–1800 (Providence, 1997), p. 11. O. van Noort, Beschryvinghe vande voyagie, om den geheelen werelt cloot, ghedaen door Olivier van Noort . . . (Amsterdam, 1602). A summary account of the voyage, Extract oft kort verhaal wt het groote journael, was published by Jan van Waesberghe within a month of Van Noort’s return in August 1601. Leiden University Library, vul 101 (= cluy202). There are eighteen letters in French from Jan de Maes to Clusius covering the period from 1596 to 1607. Exoticorum libri decem, pp. 113–14. J. Balis, Hortus Belgicus, exh. cat., Bibliothèque Albert I, Brussels (Brussels, 1962), pp. 33–4; H. Honour, L’Amérique vue par l’Europe, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris (Paris, 1976), no. 35 (though he is wrong in asserting that Clusius received a branch with flowers: what Clusius himself says that he received was a coloured drawing of a branch with flowers); P.Vandenbroeck, ed., America Bride of the Sun, exh. cat., Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp (Antwerp, 1992), no. 206. C. Clusius, Rariorum plantarum historia (Antwerp, 1601), lxxx. The verbal description of the potato in the Rariorum plantarum historia follows the earlier description given by Pedro Cieza de León in the Parte Primera dela chronica del Perú (Seville, 1553). Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, v, chap. 43. André Thevet, Les singularitez de la France Antarctique, autrement nommée Amerique (Paris, 1557), f. 99v. For a modern edition, see Le Brésil d’André Thevet. Les singularités de la France Antarctique (1557), ed. with commentary by F. Lestringant (Paris, 1997), p. 200. Exoticorum libri decem, p. 111. N. F. de Peiresc, Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo (1626–1637), ed. and comm. by J.-F. Lhote and D. Joyal (Clermont-Ferrand, 1989), pp. 126–7. Peiresc is criticizing the illustration published in Basil Besler, Fasciculus rariorum et aspectu dignorum varii generis . . . (1616). Exoticorum libri decem, p. 373. For fuller discussion of the iconography of the sloth, see below, chap. Seven. Exoticorum libri decem, p. 362. F. Lestringant, Écrire le monde à la Renaissance (Caen, 1993), p. 323. Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage. A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation, trans. and ed. R. A. Skelton (New Haven, ct, 1969), i, p. 126.

247

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment 47 J. Sebastián de Elcano, A. Pigafetta, M. Transilvano, F. Albo, G. de Mafra et al., La primera vuelta al mundo (Madrid, 2003), p. 62. 48 ‘Item, ung oyseau mort, appellé oyseau de paradis, envelopé de taffetaf, mis en ung petit coffret de bois’; see D. Eichberger, ‘Dürer’s nature drawings and early collecting’, in Dürer and his Culture, ed. D. Eichberger and C. Zika (Cambridge, 1998), p. 26, and D. Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst,Wirken durch Kunst. Sammelwesen und Hofkunst unter Margarete von Österreich, Regentin der Niederlande (Turnhout, 2002), p. 185. 49 F. Koreny, Albrecht Dürer and the Animal and Plant Studies of the Renaissance, exh. cat., Albertina,Vienna (Boston, 1988), p. 100. 50 Exoticorum libri decem, pp. 359ff. 51 Ibid., p. 360. 52 Jehan de Weely to Clusius, 13 June 1605. Leiden University Library, vul 101. 53 A. Schnapper, Le géant, La licorne, La tulipe. Collections françaises au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1988), p. 81. 54 See the astute remarks on the Venetian patrician Pier’Antonio Michiel, who faced similar problems in the compilation of his herbarium, which included illustrations of and comments on more than forty American plants, in J. Pardo-Tomás, ‘Tra “oppinioni” e “dispareri”: la flora americana nell’erbario di Pier’Antonio Michiel (1510–1576)’, pp. 73-100. 55 Some examples in P. Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London, 1998), p. 70. 56 G. Olmi, ‘Science and the Court: Some Comments on “Patronage” in Italy’, in Science and Power:The Historical Foundations of Research Policies in Europe, ed. L. Guzzetti (Luxembourg, 2000), pp. 25–45 (30–31). 57 Exoticorum libri decem, p. 92. 58 Ibid., p. 109. The object in question looks as though it may have belonged to a pangolin. I am grateful to Espen Waehle for further information on this identification. 59 A watercolour of an eastern brown pelican, labelled ‘Alcatrassa’, by John White is also confined to the head and neck. The decapitated head may have been all he had to draw from; see K. Sloan, A New World: England’s First View of America, exh. cat., British Museum (London, 2007), pp. 204–5. 60 Exoticorum libri decem, p. 106. 61 Willem Janszoon Parduijn to Clusius, 8 September 1599. Leiden University Library, vul 101. 62 On the toucan in early modern ornithology see P. J. Smith, ‘On Toucans and Hornbills’, in K.A.E. Enenkel and P. J. Smith, eds, Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts (Leiden, 2007), pp. 75–119. 63 Exoticorum libri decem, p. 116. 64 Ibid., p. 3. 65 Ibid., p. 11. On Oviedo’s illustrations of New World plants see J. Pardo Tomás, ‘Le immagini delle piante americane nell’ opera di Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557)’, in Natura-cultura. L’interpretazione del mondo fisico nei testi e nelle immagini, ed. G. Olmi, L. Tongiorgi Tomasi and A. Zanca (Florence, 2000), pp. 163–88. 66 There are fourteen extant letters from Juan de Castañeda to Clusius for the period from September 1600 to February 1604. See J. L. Barona, ‘Clusius’ Exchange of Botanical Information with Spanish Scholars’. 67 Exoticorum libri decem, p. 74.

248

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 101. B. J. Potgieter, Wijdtloopigh verhael van tgene de vijf schepen (die int jaer 1598 tot Rotterdam toegherust werden / om door de Straet Magellana haren handel te drijven) wedervaren is . . . (Amsterdam, 1600). There is one extant letter from Johan Theodore and Johan Israel De Bry to Clusius, dating from 1604. See R. K. Kinzelbach and J. Hölzinger, eds, Marcus zum Lamm (1544–1606). Die Vogelbücher aus dem Thesaurus Picturarum (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 59–60. The authors accuse Clusius of improving on the woodcut by Potgieter by adding a rear toe to the penguin. This is not true: Potgieter’s illustration already has the (biologically accurate) rear toe. P. J. Smith, ‘Sympathy in Eden: On Paradise with the Fall of Man by Rubens and Brueghel’ (Leiden, in press), considers that the two Magellanic penguins in Brueghel’s Allegory of Air (1621, Musée du Louvre) should be regarded as corrections to Clusius’s account, though he adds that ‘the bizarre way Brueghel depicted the penguin’s feet proves that he used some awkwardly stuffed animals as models’. See J. Balis, Van diverse pluimage.Tien eeuwen vogelboeken, exh. cat., Antwerp, The Hague and Brussels (Antwerp, 1968), p. 27. Exoticorum libri decem, p. 96. Clusius adds that Everard Vorstius claimed to have seen a similar one from Mexico in the collection of Cardinal Paleotti’s secretary. On Clusius’s drastic changes to the illustrative material of Monardes, see J. Pardo Tomás, ‘Two Glimpses of America from a Distance’. Exoticorum libri decem, 330. For a list of Clusius’s other borrowings from Thevet, see F. Lestringant, André Thevet. Cosmographe des derniers Valois (Geneva, 1991), p. 327 n.75. Exoticorum libri decem, p. 109. The German Johannes Schreck, who was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei for a while, recorded having seen the armadillos in Plateau’s collection; see his annotations to the Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651), p. 315. An armadillo can be seen hanging from the ceiling of Athanasius Kircher’s Colegio Romano Museum in the frontispiece to the 1678 catalogue of that museum: see E. Capanna, ‘Zoologia Kircheriana’, in Athanasius Kircher. Il Museo del Mondo, ed. E. Lo Sardo, exh. cat., Palazzo di Venezia (Rome, 2001), p. 172. But Bernini’s armadillo shows a clear resembance to the Clusian woodcut, which he would have been able to consult. Exoticorum libri decem, p. 375. Ibid., p. 374. Ibid., p. 370. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 364. J. L. Barona and X. Gómez Font, La correspondencia de Carolus Clusius con los científicos españoles (Valencia, 1998), p. 84. I. Baldriga, ‘”La fatiga di pigliar i disegni delle piante”: Federico Cesi, la pittura filosofica e la riproduzione del mondo vegetale’, in Federico Cesi: un principe naturalista, ed. A. Graniti (Rome, 2006), pp. 503–23, esp. 513ff. P.J.P. Whitehead, ‘Georg Markgraf and Brazilian Zoology’, in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil, ed. E. van den Boogaart (The Hague, 1979), p. 437; P.J.P. Whitehead and M. Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th century Brazil: Animals, Plants and People by the Artists of Johan Maurits of

249

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment Nassau (Amsterdam, 1989), p. 71. 88 G. Olmi, ‘Lettere di Fra Gregorio da Reggio, cappuccino e botanico del tardo rinascimento’, in Musa Musaei. Studies on Scientific Instruments and Collections in Honour of Mara Miniati, ed. M. Beretta, P. Galluzzi and C. Triarico (Florence, 2003), pp. 117–39, esp. 121. 89 Leiden University Library 755 a. 3. Hunger, Charles de l’Écluse, i, p. 298 n.1 refers to this work. 90 The text runs Aucta omnia et recognita partim ope exemplaris . . . Clusii emendati, partim ex praescripto scedulae ab ipso paucis ante obitum suum septimanis Iusto Raphelengio commisse. Suis videlicet locis ubique accomodatis, quae ex Appendicibus Auctariisve, necnon Curis Posterioribus, dictisque exemplari emendato ac scedula, addi vel mutari Autor voluerat. Interserta etiam alicubi nonnulla ab eodem Raphelengio, quae diversitate characterum scholii instar distinguuntur.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

5 Americana in the Enterprise of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome 1 It thus stems from before Rocchi’s brief period as Prefetto of the botanical garden in Pisa after the death of the passionate collector Francesco Malocchi in January 1613. 2 L. Tongiorgi Tomasi and F. Garbari, ‘Carolus Clusius and the Botanical Garden of Pisa’, in J. Tjon Sie Fat and E. de Jong, eds, The Authentic Garden: A Symposium on Gardens, (Leiden, 1991), pp. 68–9; L. Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘Arte e natura nel Giardino dei Semplici: dalle origini alla fine dell’ età medicea’, in F. Garbari, L. Tongiorgi Tomasi and A. Tosi, Giardino dei Semplici/Garden of Simples (Pisa, 2002), p. 58 and fig. 64. The drawing is on folio 9r of ms. 461, Biblioteca Universitaria di Pisa. 3 A classic study of the Accademia Lincea is still G. Olmi, the chapter ‘“In essercitio universale di contemplatione, e prattica”: Federico Cesi e l’Accademia dei Lincei’, in L’inventario del mondo. Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima età moderna (Bologna, 1992), pp. 315–79. 4 G. Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo (Rome, 1996), pp. 228–9 (Cesi to Galileo, 2 June 1612). 5 The vernacular (Nahuatl) name for the plant is given in the Index alphabeticus plantarum Novae Hispaniae by Francisco Hernández as ‘coatzonte coxochitl’; see J. M. López Piñero and J. Pardo Tomás, Nuevos materiales y noticias sobre la Historia de las Plantas de Nueva España, de Francisco Hernández (Valencia, 1994), p. 214. 6 L. Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘La conquista del visible. Rimeditando Panofsky, rileggendo Galilei’, Galilæana, iv (2007), pp. 5–46 (32). 7 I. Baldriga, L’occhio della lince. I primi Lincei tra arte, scienza e collezionismo (1603–1630) (Rome, 2002), p. 255. 8 Folio 22 of Stamp. i, 80, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. 9 It has been suggested that the monogram was designed by Adam Elsheimer, who, as we shall see, was closely involved with the community of the Lincei; see R. Klessmann, ‘Adam Elsheimer: His Life and Art’, in Adam Elsheimer 1578–1610, ed. R. Klessmann et al., exh. cat., National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, and Städelsches Kunstinstitut Frankfurt (London, 2006), p. 22. 10 As Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc called it in a letter to Cassiano dal Pozzo; see Peiresc. Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo (1626–1637), ed. with commentary by J.-F. Lhote and D. Joyas (Clermont-Ferrand, 1989), p. 126. 11 Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651), p. 266. In the exemplar

250

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References

12

13

14

15 16

17

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

18

19

20 21

22

containing marginal annotations in the hand of Federico Cesi (Biblioteca dell’Accademia dei Lincei, Arch. Linc. 31), the prince corrects Schreck’s text ‘ex varia radice faecundissimus provenit’ to ‘ex una radice faecundissimus provenit’ to strengthen the parallel between the flower and the Accademia. Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, p. 29 (16 February 1604) and p. 32 (20 March 1604); see I. Baldriga, ‘“La fatiga di pigliar i disegni delle piante”: Federico Cesi, la pittura filosofica e la riproduzione del mondo vegetale’, in Federico Cesi: Un Principe Naturalista, ed. A. Graniti (Rome, 2006), pp. 503–23. See I. Baldriga, ‘The Influence of Clusius in Italy: Federico Cesi and the Accademia dei Lincei’, in Carolus Clusius:Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist, ed. F. Egmond, P. Hoftijzer and R.Visser (Amsterdam, 2007), pp. 249–65. The letters of Clusius to Caccini have been published by P. Ginori Conti, Lettere inedite di Charles de l’Ecluse (Carolus Clusius) a Matteo Caccini, floricultore fiorentino (Florence, 1939). The fatal dispute was on the relative merits of medicines containing expensive exotic ingredients, as championed by Consolini, as against the remedies made from native plants that Van Heeck favoured. For more details on Van Heeck, who died around 1620 after a severe deterioration of his already frail mental health, see The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. A Catalogue Raisonné, Series B, Part Six: Flora. The ‘Erbario Miniato’ and other Drawings, ed. F. Garbari and L. Tongiorgi Tomasi (Turnhout, 2007), i, pp. 25–9. Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, p. 244 (Galileo to Cesi, June 1612). Baldriga, ‘La fatiga di pigliar’, p. 505. Clusius’s Exoticorum libri decem was also closely studied by another member of the Accademia, Cassiano dal Pozzo, who explicitly referred to the Clusian illustration of a carved and silver-mounted Maldive coconut on page 193 of that work; see A. Anselmi, Il diario del viaggio in Spagna del Cardinale Francesco Barberini scritto da Cassiano dal Pozzo (Madrid, 2004), p. 288. Baldriga, ‘The Influence of Clusius’, p. 260 n. 35; Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio, p. 614 (Schreck to Faber, September 1617). Schreck was obliged to leave the Accademia when he joined the Jesuit order. See G. B. Marini Bettòlo, Una guida alla lettura del Tesoro Messicano. Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1992); G. Olmi and O. Trabucco, ‘I nuovi mondi da Aldrovandi ai Lincei: viaggi reali e viaggi nello studio’, in Il Viaggio. Mito e Scienza, ed. W. Tega, exh. cat., Palazzo Poggi, Bologna (Bologna, 2007), pp. 149–67; S. Brevaglieri, ‘Il cantiere del Tesoro Messicano tra Roma e l’Europa. Pratiche di comunicazione e strategie editoriali nell’orizzonte dell’Accademia dei Lincei (1610–1630)’, in S. Brevaglieri, L. Guerrini and F. Solinas, Sul ‘Tesoro Messicano’ & su alcuni disegni del ‘Museo Cartaceo’ di Cassiano dal Pozzo, (Rome, 2007), pp. 1–68. On Hernández see J. M. López Piñero and J. Pardo Tomás, Nuevos materiales y noticias, op. cit., and the same authors’ La influencia de Francisco Hernández (1515–1587) en la constitución de la botánica y la materia médica modernas (Valencia, 1996), as well as the very accessible account in J. Pardo Tomás, Oviedo, Monardes, Hernández. El tesoro natural de América. Colonialismo y ciencia en el siglo XVI (Tres Cantos, 2002). It even included an oriental bird of paradise; see J. M. López Piñero and J. Pardo Tomás, Nuevos materiales y noticias, p. 91. Juan de Herrera to Mateo Vázquez, 5 May 1582. This letter was accompanied by two engravings, one in black and white and the other coloured by hand, of the ‘yervas simples’; Felipe II, el rey íntimo. Jardín y Naturaleza en el siglo XVI, exh. cat., Palacio del Real Sitio de Aranjuez (Madrid, 1998), p. 187. This was the same audience to which Juan de Cárdenas’s Problemas y secretos

251

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment maravillosos de las Indias was addressed; see above, chap. One. 23 There is an independent Spanish translation from Recchi in an anonymous manuscript, Materia mediçinal de la nueva España, now in the Universidad Complutense in Madrid; see M. Figueroa-Saavedra, ‘La materia mediçinal de la Nueva España: indagaciones sobre su origen e historia’, Revista Española de Antropología Americana, xxxiii (2003), pp. 133–5 and M. Figueroa-Saavedra, ‘Hallazgo de un manuscrito inédito del doctor Francisco Hernández: Materia mediçinal de la Nueva España’, Relaciones. Revista de El Colegio de Michoacán, xxi/81 (2000), pp. 127–60. 24 Baldriga, ‘The Influence of Clusius’, p. 259. 25 Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, p. 443. 26 See esp. S. Brevaglieri, ‘Il cantiere del Tesoro Messicano’, pp. 23–36. 27 Baldriga, L’occhio, p. 171. 28 Botanical instruction was one of the lowest-paid positions: the salary of the professor of practical medicine – a position that the German physician coveted – was more than six times that of Faber: S. De Renzi, ‘Un linceo alla sapienza: la natura del fuoco e dei metalli in un’orazione di Johannes Faber’, in All’origine della scienza moderna: Federico Cesi e l’Accademia dei Lincei, ed. A. Battistini, G. De Angelis and G. Olmi (Bologna, 2007), pp. 271–316 (272). 29 Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651), p. 663. 30 Baldriga, ‘La fatiga di pigliar’, p. 505. 31 Baldriga, L’occhio, pp. 190–95. 32 Ibid., pp. 253–9. 33 A reference, presumably to this work, as ‘the book of simples from the East Indies’ (il libro de’ semplici dell Indie orientali) occurs in a letter from Marcus Welser of 1613: Gabrieli, ed., Il Carteggio linceo, p. 363 (Welser to Faber, June 1613). 34 G. Gabrieli, Contributi alla storia della Accademia dei Lincei (Rome, 1989), p. 523, 1179, 1283; Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, p. 305 (Cesi to Faber, December 1612/January 1613) and p. 332 (Cesi to Galileo, March 1613). The bishop held eight audiences with Paul v, hoping to gain papal support for the campaign of the Holy Roman Emperor Matthias against the Turks. There is a manuscript detailing the stages of his journey, ‘Relatio Itineris a Reverendissimo atq. Illustrissimo Principe ac Domino Ioanne Godefrido, Episcopo Bambergensi in Italiam suscepti. Anno 1612’ in the Leipziger Stadtsbibliothek, but the pages on the bishop’s lengthy stay in Rome make no mention of Faber or of the Accademia Lincea. 35 Baldriga, L’occhio, p. 253. The authorship of the designs is uncertain. Some of them have been attributed to Isabella Parasoli, but in referring to the ‘disegni delle piante’, Cesi refers to an unidentified male painter (‘pittore’): Gabrieli, ed., Il Carteggio linceo, p. 191 (Cesi to Faber, January 1612). 36 Cesi gives the figure of eighty woodcuts: Gabrieli, ed., Il Carteggio linceo, p. 333 (Cesi to Galileo, March 1613). There is an exemplar of the book in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barberini, n. vi.175. An exemplar was also sent to Della Porta in Naples: Gabrieli, ed., Il Carteggio linceo, p. 344 (Cesi to Stelluti, April 1613), though not all copies may have been identical. 37 Gabrieli, ed., Il Carteggio linceo, p. 468 (Cesi to Faber, November 1614). The Lincei hoped that the Flemish poet, philologist and archaeologist Justus Ryckius (the Latinized name of Josse de Ryck) would use his talents to polish the style of the Mexican Treasury. See R. Ferro, ‘Accademia dei Lincei e Res Publica Litteraria: Justus Ryckius, Erycius Puteanus e Federico Borromeo’, in All’origine della scienza moderna, ed. Battistini, De Angelis and Olmi, pp. 203–70, esp. 209ff.

252

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

References 38 Gabrieli, ed., Il Carteggio linceo, pp. 506–7 (Cesi to Faber, August 1615). 39 The full title is Uccelliera overo discorso della natura e proprietà di diversi uccelli e in particolare di que’ che cantano, con il modo di prendergli, conoscergli, allevargli, e mantenergli (Rome, 1622). Essential reading, with a ‘synoptic’ facsimile edition of the work based on four different copies in Turin, is F. Solinas, L’Uccelliera, un libro d’arte e di scienza nella Roma dei primi Lincei (Florence, 2000). 40 On the life of Cassiano dal Pozzo and his collections see especially D. L. Sparti, Le collezioni dal Pozzo. Storia di una famiglia e del suo museo nella Roma seicentesca (Modena, 1992); the two exhibition catalogues rather confusingly edited by F. Solinas under the same title: I Segreti di un Collezionista. Le straordinarie raccolte di Cassiano dal Pozzo 1588–1657 (Rome, 2000), (Rome, 2002); and F. Solinas, ‘Cassiano dal Pozzo Linceo e alcuni fogli del Museo Cartaceo recentemente acquisiti per le collezioni accademiche’, in Brevaglieri, Guerrini and Solinas, Sul Tesoro Messicano & su alcuni disegni del Museo Cartaceo di Cassiano dal Pozzo, pp. 93–137. On Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo see D. L Sparti, ‘Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo (1606–1689). An Unknown Collector’, Journal of the History of Collections, ii/1 (1990), pp. 7–19. 41 Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, p. 1061 (Dal Pozzo to Faber, August 1625). 42 For Peiresc’s correspondence with Cassiano see N. F. de Peiresc, Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo (1626–1637), ed. and comm. by J.-F. Lhote and D. Joyal (Clermont-Ferrand, 1989). 43 I have examined this copy of the work from the former Lincean library and now in the British Museum (41.g.14). 44 Although Cassiano wrote that it came from ‘Mina, Città di S. Giorgio d’India’, the Portuguese stronghold of São Jorge da Mina was, albeit on the route to the East Indies, actually located on the Gold Coast of Africa. 45 Solinas, L’Uccelliera, p. 8. The French collector and apothecary Paul Contant describes a parrot that he saw in the home of a cardinal in Rome; Paul Contant, Le Jardin, et Cabinet Poétique, ed. M. Marrache-Gouraud and P. Martin (Rennes, 2004), pp. 167‒8. For an exhaustive treatment of the possession of parrots as pets by popes, kings and nobles, see H. Diener, ‘Der “Camera Papagalli” im Palast des Papstes. Papageien als Hausgenossen der Päpste, Könige und Fürsten des Mittelalters und der Renaissance’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, il (1967), pp. 43–97. More generally, see R. Verdi, The Parrot in Art, exh. cat., The Barber Institute of Fine Arts (London, 2007). 46 The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, exh. cat., British Museum, London (Milan, 1993), pp. 166–7. 47 N. F. de Peiresc, Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo (1626–1637), p. 59 (Peiresc to Cassiano, 28 February 1629). 48 Peiresc’s discourse on the flamingo, Du Phoenicopterus, written in 1605, has survived; see The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, p. 169. 49 On Pope Urban viii and his entourage see esp. F. Haskell, Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italy, 2nd edn (New Haven, ct, 1980), pp. 24–62; D. Jaffé, ‘The Barberini Circle: Some Exchanges between Peiresc, Rubens, and their Contemporaries’, Journal of the History of Collections, i/2 (1989), pp. 119–47. 50 See Gabrieli, Contributi, pp. 1567–76. 51 Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, ed., p. 826 (Cesi to Francesco Barberini, 25 November 1623). 52 Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651), p. 704. While Faber argued that the devil had transferred his activities to the Americas after the successful establishment of the true faith in Europe, the Mantuan Jesuit Antonio Possevino

253

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

53

54

55 56

57 58 59

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

60 61 62

63 64

65 66 67

68

published a work in 1593, the Tractatio de Poesi et Pictura ethica, in which the proliferation of indecent paintings in Spain was taken to be the work of the devil in revenge for the role played by the Spanish in spreading the gospel in America; see M. Morán Turina and J. Portús Pérez, El arte de mirar. La pintura y su público en la España de Velázquez (Madrid, 1997), p. 233. In a letter to Faber, Cassiano dal Pozzo declares his delight at the assistance that Faber says he is receiving from ‘the friar who has come from the Indies’, Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, p. 1061 (Dal Pozzo to Faber, August 1625). We do not know whether the reference is to Bolívar or to one of the others on whom Faber might have drawn. K. H. Dannenfeldt, ‘Europe Discovers Civet Cats and Civet’, Journal of the History of Biology, 18 ⁄3 (1985), pp. 403‒31; O. Trabucco, ‘Animalia Mirabilia e nuova anatomia nel Tesoro Messicano’, in All’origine della scienza moderna, ed. Battistini, De Angelis and Olmi, pp. 425–66. Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, p. 1068 (Faber to Cesi, 7 October 1625). Bolívar’s denunciations of evangelizing activities in the Andes already went back to 1620, when he had complained about the behaviour of a mestizo missionary from La Paz, a certain Diego Ramírez Carlos, whom Gregorio had escorted into the Apolobamba region between present-day Bolivia and Peru, for arrogantly passing himself off as an Inca king; D. J. Santamaría, ‘El rol de las alianzas entre misioneros e indígenas en la conquista de Apolobamba (siglos xvi‒xvii)’, Revista de Indias, lxvi/237 (2006), pp. 329–46, esp. 332 n. 6. Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, p. 1070 (Faber to Cesi, October 1625). Morán Turina and Portús Pérez, El arte de mirar, pp. 31–2. Anselmi, Il diario del viaggio, p. 168. The emphasis on ‘the voice and memory’ of Bolívar in S. De Renzi, ‘Writing and Talking of Exotic Animals’ in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. M. Frasca-Spada and N. Jardine (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 160–61, fails to do justice to the importance of the friar’s writings. Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651), p. 695. Ibid., p. 799. The Valtellina became a bastion of the Reformation after it was united to the Grisons in Switzerland in 1512. The massacre of the Protestants by the Catholics of the valley in 1620 was followed by twenty years of warfare. Despite the failure of the mission, it was the subject of several panegyrics; see Hieronymus Tetius, Aedes Barberinae ad Quirinalem descriptae / Descrizione di Palazzo Barberini al Quirinale, ed. L. Faedo and Th. Frangenberg (Pisa, 2005), p. 301 n. 57. Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, p. 1028 (Cesi to dal Pozzo, 6 March 1625). Il diario, p. 188. No animal pictures feature in the 1564 and 1591 inventories of the Escorial; the inventory of 1623 is the first to mention them; see C. García-Frías Checa, Gaspar Becerra y las pinturas de la Torre de la Reina del Palacio de El Pardo (Madrid, 2005), p. 66 n. 224. He was similarly struck by a painting of a toucan in the Alcázar Palace in Madrid, Il diario, p. 232. Il diario, p. 201. Founded in 1536, this college was to play a major role in the creation of a postconquest native and mestizo intelligentsia in and around the capital of New Spain; see S. Gruzinski, Painting the Conquest:The Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance (Paris, 1992), pp. 152–6. Il diario, p. 167. We do not know how or when the Codex Badianus, as it came to be

254

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

References called, entered into Cortavila’s possession. 69 In seventeenth-century Rome, the Barberini Library was second only to the Vatican Library, into which it passed in 1902. For an illustration of how the library may have looked in 1639, see F. Solinas, L’Uccelliera, i, tavola viiia; for a detailed description of the library published in 1642, see Hieronymus Tetius, Aedes Barberinae ad Quirinalem descriptae, pp. 196ff. 70 F. Solinas, ‘Il primo erbario azteco e la copia romana di Cassiano dal Pozzo’, in Il Museo Cartaceo di Cassiano dal Pozzo. Cassiano naturalista, ed. F. Haskell et al. (Milan, 1989), 77; cf. the same author’s ‘A Page from Cassiano’s Copy of the “Codex Badianus”: Mexican plants’, in The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, p. 237. See too L. Guerrini, A. Herrin and S.Varey, The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. A Catalogue Raisonné, Series B, Part Eight:The Aztec Herbal (Turnhout, 2008). 71 Baldriga, ‘La fatiga’, pp. 516–17. 72 Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo (Welser to Faber, 29 July 1611), p. 168. Cf. L. Guerrini, ‘Federico Cesi e il Tesoro Messicano’, in Brevaglieri, Guerrini and Solinas, Sul ‘Tesoro Messicano’ & su alcuni disegni del ‘Museo Cartaceo’ di Cassiano dal Pozzo, pp. 69–92, esp. 71–2. 73 Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, p. 1061 (Dal Pozzo to Faber, August 1625). 74 Sparti, Le collezioni, 208. A reference to ‘un pájaro guacamayo en dos ducados’ in the inventory of Van der Hamen’s possessions compiled after his death may be connected with the commission for Cassiano, and has been linked with the painting of a red macaw now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes but formerly in the collection of Cassiano; see W. B. Jordan, Juan van der Hamen y León y la Corte de Madrid, exh. cat., Palacio Real, Madrid (Madrid, 2005), p. 210 and F. Solinas, I Segreti di un Collezionista. Le straordinarie raccolte di Cassiano dal Pozzo 1588–1657 (Rome, 2002), p. 266. 75 Il diario, pp. 249–50. Cassiano was responsible for the first negative judgement on a painting by Velázquez (a portrait of Cardinal Barberini), which he considered ‘melancholy and severe’, and recommended Van der Hamen as a better painter: S. Salort Pons, Velázquez en Italia (Madrid, 2002), pp. 226–7. 76 Jordan, Juan van der Hamen, p. 210. 77 A. Merot, ‘The Conquest of Space: Poussin’s Early Attempts at Landscape’, in Poussin and Nature. Arcadian Visions, ed. P. Rosenberg and K. Christiansen, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, ct, and London, 2008), pp. 51–71 (61). Cf. Sparti, Le collezioni dal Pozzo, pp. 209–10. 78 Gabrieli, ed., Il carteggio linceo, p. 1058 (Faber to Cesi, 29 August 1625). 79 Exactissima descriptio rariorum quarundam plantarum quae continentur Romae in Horto Farnesiano . . . (Rome, 1625). This work was allegedly written by Tobia Aldini, whom Cassiano dal Pozzo described as ‘experienced in natural history and particularly in plants, stones, minerals and distillation’, A. Anselmi, Il diario, p. 410. The authorship of the work by the Messina doctor Pietro Castelli is, however, beyond doubt. On the Horti Farnesiani see D. R. Coffin, Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome (Princeton, nj, 1991), p. 208. 80 Ottaviani, ‘La parte di Fabio Colonna del Tesoro Messicano dei Lincei’, pp. 380–81. 81 On the nature and purpose of Cesi’s marginal annotations, see Guerrini, ‘Federico Cesi e il Tesoro Messicano’. 82 Gabrieli, ed., Il Carteggio linceo, p. 1024 (Faber to Cesi, 4 February 1625). 83 Brevaglieri, ‘Il cantiere del Tesoro Messicano’, p. 12. 84 Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651), p. 792.

255

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment 85 Claudius Aelianus, a Roman who wrote seventeen books On the Characteristics of Animals in Greek in the second century ad, resolved the problem in the following manner (ix, 23): ‘When it advances, as need for a forward movement impels it, it leaves one end behind to serve as tail, while the other it uses as a head. Then again if it wants to move backwards, it uses the two heads in exactly the opposite manner from what it did before’. 86 Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, pp. 793–5. 87 Ibid., p. 796. Cassiano had already commissioned an illustration of a ‘serpe stravagantissimo’ in Paris in 1625; see Gabrieli, ed., Il Carteggio linceo, p. 1061 (Dal Pozzo to Faber, August 1625). 88 Ibid., p. 797. 89 Baldriga, L’occhio, pp. 235–7. 90 A completely different, but unconvincing, interpretation of this episode is offered in D. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx (Chicago, il, 2002), pp. 361–5. 91 Gabrieli, ed., Il Carteggio linceo, p. 1058 (Faber to Cesi). 92 A. T. Woollett and A. van Suchtelen, Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship, exh. cat. Mauritshuis, The Hague and J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 2006), no. 24. 93 Lucan, Pharsalia, ix, pp. 706–7; see L. Bodson, ‘A Python, Python sebae (Gmelin, 1789), for the King: The Third Century bc Herpetological Expedition to Aithiopia’, Bonner zoologische Beiträge, lii/3–4 (2004), pp. 181–91. 94 ‘ . . . et grauis in geminum uergens caput amphisbaena’, Lucan, Pharsalia, ix, p. 719. S. Koslow, ‘“How looked the Gorgon then…”: The Science and Poetics of ‘The Head of Medusa’ by Rubens and Snyders’, in Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive, ed. C. P. Schneider, A. I. Davies and W. W. Robinson (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 147–9. 95 For a survey of the ancient and medieval literary sources see Cl. Lecouteux, Les monstres dans la littérature allemande du moyen âge (Göppingen, 1982), ii, p. 167; for the medieval visual sources see W. George and B.Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (London, 1991), pp. 199–200. At some time in the sixteenth century, an illustration of a two-headed amphisbaena was among the miniatures of animals added to the manuscript De omnium animalium naturis atque formis (Cod. Urb. Lat. 276, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana) that Pietro Candido Decembrio had dedicated to Ludovico ii Gonzaga a century or so earlier. It is reproduced in Einhorn und Nachtigall. Die 200 schönsten Miniaturen aus dem Tierbuch des Petrus Candidus (Stuttgart and Zurich, 1993), p. 74. 96 Nicolas Poussin’s practice of referring to recondite sources was similar; see P. Mason, ‘The Letter as Deferred Presence: Nicolas Poussin to Paul Fréart de Chantelou, 28 April 1639’ in Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, ed. F. Bethencourt and F. Egmond (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 163–86. 97 P. Sutton, cat. entry no. 12, in P. C. Sutton et al., The Age of Rubens, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Museum of Art, Toledo (Boston, ma, 1993), p. 247. The amphisbaena was already spotted by A. Balis, ‘Facetten van de Vlaamse dierenschilderkunst van de 15de to de 17de eeuw’, in Het aards paradijs. Dierenvoorstellingen in de Nederlanden van de 16de en de 17de eeuw, exh. cat., Antwerp Zoo (Antwerp, 1982), pp. 36–55 (45). The painting is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum,Vienna. 98 C. White, The Later Flemish Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London, 2007), no. 32. The same amphisbaena can be found later in the lateral panel ‘Angola’

256

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References

99 100 101 102 103

104 105

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

106 107 108 109 110 111

112

113 114

of Asia by Jan van Kessel painted around 1664–6, that is, after the sale of Rubens’s Head of Medusa in Antwerp in 1648 had given other artists the opportunity to copy it. Other creatures from The Head of Medusa are recycled in the panel representing ‘Arkhangelsk’ in the same painting. See D. Martins Teixeira, Brasil Holandês. A “Alegoria dos continentes” de Jan van Kessel “o Velho” (1626–1679) (Rio de Janeiro, n.d.), pp. 47 and 39 respectively. The geographical references in these panels have clearly become completely aleatory – a concept discussed further in P. Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London, 1998), pp. 16–41. U. A. Harting, Studien zur Kabinettbildmalerei des Frans Francken II 1581‒1642 (Hildesheim, 1983), p. 149. J. M. Muller, ‘Rubens’s Collection in History’, in A House of Art: Rubens as Collector, ed. K. L. Belkin and F. Healy, exh. cat., Rubenshuis (Antwerp, 2004), pp. 11‒85 (61). Ibid., no. 65. There is an English translation of the letter in Ruth Saunders Magurn, The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston, il, 1991), pp. 52–3. The original text is reproduced in Baldriga, L’occhio, pp. 292–3. Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651), p. 831. A large painting of a cock, The Rooster and the Jewel, in the Städtisches Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, has been brought into connection with this anecdote, although it lacks the dedication; see P. Sutton, cat. entry no. 118, in Sutton et al., The Age of Rubens, p. 560; G. Gabrieli, Contributi, p. 1579. Interpretation of Socrates’ words as recorded by Plato has, not surprisingly, provoked scholarly dissent. For the suggestion that they refer to Plato’s recovery from illness, see G. W. Most, ‘“A Cock for Asclepius”’, Classical Quarterly, xliii/1 (1993), pp. 96–111. As Baldriga points out (L’occhio, op. cit. 154 n. 12), the first scholar to have emphasized the importance of this influence was Giuseppe Olmi; see Olmi, ‘In essercitio’, p. 356 n. 161. However, S. De Renzi, ‘’Un linceo alla sapienza’, pp. 288, 315, questions the total hegemony of Neo-Stoic thought in Rome during this period and mentions Faber’s critique of the Neo-Stoics in his oration of 1622. Klessmann et al., Adam Elsheimer 1578–1610, pp. 8–9. Belkin and Healy, eds, A House of Art, no. 4; Klessmann et al., Adam Elsheimer 1578– 1610, pp. 138–45. The tale was narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses v, 441–61. Letters, pp. 53–4. As noted in the previous chapter, there are eight extant letters from Peiresc to Clusius, dating from between 1602 and 1606, in Leiden University Library, vul 101. A further four, two of which are copies of the letters now in Leiden, are in Aix-en-Provence. N. F. de Peiresc, Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo, p. 11. See also D. Jaffé, ‘Peiresc, Rubens, dal Pozzo and the Portland Vase’, Burlington Magazine, cxxxi (1989), pp. 554–9. N. F. de Peiresc, Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo, pp. 114–15. It should be remembered that, from Columbus onwards, the Canary Islands were a stopping place for ships sailing from Europe to the Americas, and in many respects these islands and the continent of America were seen as forming a pan-Atlantic whole. See further chap. One. On the genesis of the cycle, and in particular on the role of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in a number of practical, scholarly and personal ways, see S.-S. Durante, ‘The Medici Cycle’, in Peter Paul Rubens: A Touch of Brilliance, exh. cat., Courtauld Institute of Art, London (Munich, New York and London, 2003), pp. 86–8. Gabrieli, Contributi, p. 1578. Philip Rubens arrived in Rome in 1605, where he spent almost a year, to present the Lipsian edition of Seneca to Pope Paul v.

257

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment 115 116 117 118 119

Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome, 1651), p. 831. N. F. de Peiresc, Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo, p. 114. J. M. Muller, ‘Rubens’s Collection in History’, p. 33. Belkin and Healy, eds, A House of Art, no. 51. Ruth Saunders Magurn, The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, p. 403 (Rubens to Peiresc, 16 March 1636); Jaffé, ‘The Barberini Circle’, pp. 131–2. On the Barberini Landscape see The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. Quaderni Puteani 4, exh. cat., The British Museum (Milan, 1993), pp. 113–14. Nicolas Poussin drew on it for the landscape of his The Israelites Gathering the Manna; see A. Blunt, Nicolas Poussin (London, 1995), pp. 271–2; A. Merot, ‘The Conquest of Space: Poussin’s Early Attempts at Landscape’ in Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, ed. Rosenberg and Christiansen, pp. 51–71 (65–8). 120 Moreau drew on at least three printed sources as well as, perhaps, on first-hand observation in the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris; see G. Lacambre et al., Gustave Moreau 1826–1898, exh. cat., Grand Palais (Paris, 1998) no. 58.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

6 The Camel-sheep 1 Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, p. 661. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid, pp. 662–3. The earlier part of the Mexican Treasury compiled by Recchi and edited by Johannes Schreck also referred to bezoar stones found in vicuñas; ibid., p. 325. On the medicinal properties attributed to bezoar stones both by native Americans and by Europeans, see S. Anagnostou, Jesuiten in Spanish-Amerika als Übermittler von heilkundischem Wissen (Marburg, 2000), pp. 151–4. 4 Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, p. 667. 5 Employed as a teacher in Santa Cruz de la Palma, he was brought before the Inquisition for having exclaimed to his pupils, ‘God has not suffered as much as I have to bear from you’. See F. Fajardo Spinola, ‘Los flamencos ante el Santo Oficio’, in Flandes y Canarias. Nuestros orígenes nórdicos, ed. M. de Paz-Sánchez, ii (Tenerife and Gran Canaria, 2005), pp. 95–122, esp. 105–6; F. Fajardo Spinola, Las víctimas de la Inquisición en las Islas Canarias (La Laguna, 2005), pp. 146–7. 6 Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, p. 670. 7 Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation, trans. and ed. R. A. Skelton (New Haven, ct, 1969), i, p. 47. Not all manuscripts include the words ‘and it neighs like a horse’. 8 H. Honour, ‘Science and Exoticism: The European Artist and the Non-European World before Johan Maurits’, in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil, ed. E. van den Boogaart (The Hague, 1979), p. 271. The anonymous engraving was published in Lorenz Fries, Underweisung und uszlegung Der Cartha Marina (Strasbourg, 1525), a booklet prepared to accompany the slightly reduced version of the Waldseemüller world map that Fries first printed in 1525. 9 J. Portús, ‘I camelidi andini e l’Europa: Immagini e parole per una storia d’integrazione culturale’, in J. Flores Ochoa, K. MacQuarrie and J. Portús, Oro delle Ande. Lama, Alpaca,Vigogne e Guanachi del Sudamerica (Barcelona, 1995), ii, pp. 8–99 (23). I am very grateful to the author for providing me with a copy of this fundamental study. 10 Pedro Cieza de León, Primera parte de la Crónica del Perú (Toledo, 1553), chapter cxi. 11 Portús, ‘I camelidi andini e l’Europa’, pp. 14–17.

258

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

References 12 Ibid., p. 26. The gold-plated silver medal is in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid. 13 C. Gesner, Icones Animalium Quadrupedum . . . , 2nd edn (Zurich, 1560), pp. 42–3. 14 F. Egmond, ‘Clusius, Cluyt, Saint Omer: The Origins of the Sixteenth-century Botanical and Zoological Watercolours in Libri Picturati A. 16–30’, Nuncius, xx/1 (2005), pp. 11–67, esp. 40–45. 15 Colour reproduction in M.-C. Maselis, A. Balis and R.H. Marijnissen, De Albums van Anselmus de Boodt (1550–1632). Geschilderde natuurobservatie aan het Hof van Rudolf II te Praag (Tielt, 1989), pl. 11. 16 Die Entdeckung der Natur. Naturalien in den Kunstkammern des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, exh. cat., Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck, and Kunsthistorisches Museum,Vienna (Vienna, 2006), pp. 80–81. 17 The manuscript of A través de la América del Sur by Fray Diego de Ocaña is in the library of the University of Oviedo, Spain. One of the drawings is reproduced in Fray Diego de Ocaña, Viaje a Chile (Santiago de Chile, 1995), p. 74. 18 B. J. Potgieter, Wijdtloopigh verhael van tgene de vijf schepen (die int jaer 1598 tot Rotterdam toegherust werden / om door de Straet Magellana haren handel te drijven) wedervaren is . . . (Amsterdam, 1600). 19 Joris van Spilbergen, Speculum Orientalis Occidentalis que Indiae Navigationum / Oost ende West-Indische Spiegel der nieuwe Navigatien (Leiden, 1619). The engraving in Part 2 of Book xi of De Bry’s America is virtually identical. 20 Ibid., p. 26. 21 C. de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les américains (Berlin, 1774), i, p. 11. 22 Portús, ‘I camelidi andini e l’Europa’, pp. 42–3. 23 Alonso de Ovalle, Histórica Relación del Reyno de Chile (Rome, 1646), p. 52. 24 ‘Sijnde een Kameel-Schaep. Nevens een Chilees met sijn Vrouw’, Journael ende historis verhael van de reyse gedaen by oosten de straet le Maire, naer de custen van Chili, onder het beleyt van den Heer Generael Hendrick Brouwer, inden jare 1643 voor gevallen, vervatende der Chilesen manieren, handel ende ghewoonten . . . Alles door een liefhebber uyt verscheyden journaelen ende schriften te samen gestelt en met eenighe kopere platen verrijckt (Amsterdam, 1646), p. 39. In the edition consulted (Nationaal Archief, The Hague), the plate has been inserted after page 94. The two other illustrations are maps. An English translation, A Voyage to the Kingdom of Chili in America, performed by Mr. Henry Brawern and Mr. Elias Herckeman, in the years 1642 and 1643, appeared in A. and J. Churchill, A collection of voyages and travels . . . (London, 1732–). 25 Ibid. 26 See B. Schmidt, ‘Exotic Allies: The Dutch-Chilean Encounter and the (Failed) Conquest of America’, Renaissance Quarterly, lii (1999), pp. 440–73. 27 Journael ende historis verhael . . ., p. 60. 28 The Mapuche cacique in Quevedo’s La hora de todos firmly turns down the Dutch proposals.Y. Rodríguez Pérez, The Dutch Revolt through Spanish Eyes (Bern, 2008), pp. 227‒8. 29 Journael ende historis verhael . . ., p. 88. 30 Ibid., p. 63 (Chiloé) and 88 (Valdivia). More precisely, the region between the River Valdivia and Chiloé was the territory of the Cunc(h)os, while the Araucanos were situated between the River Valdivia and the River Bio-Bio; see J. Ignacio Molina, Compendio de la historia geográfica, natural y civil del reyno de Chile (Santiago de Chile, 2000), i, p. 13. The first edition of this work in Spanish was published in Madrid in 1788, twelve years after the first edition in Italian.

259

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment 31 Oude West-Indische Compagnie (wic) 44, Nationaal Archief, The Hague. The dossier contains several diaries of the Brouwer expedition, sketches of the coastal profile from Cabo de los Barreros to Staten Island, a sketch of Puerto de Buen Suceso, a description of Chiloé, a map of Tierra del Fuego, the Le Maire Strait, and Staten Island, a sketch of the coastal profile from Chiloé to Valdivia, a map of the Golfo de Ancud (signed by Herckmans) and maps of Valdivia and its estuary. The two latter correspond more or less to the two maps printed in the Journal. 32 The 489-folio manuscript (20 × 17 cm), now in the Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek in Gotha (Chart b 533), was acquired by the Duke of Gotha in 1798. 33 Brasil Holandês.The Voyage of Caspar Schmalkalden from Amsterdam to Pernambuco in Brazil, ed. D. Martins Teixeira (Rio de Janeiro, 1998), i, p. 28. 34 Ibid., p. 120. 35 For biographical details see P.J.P. Whitehead and M. Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil: Animals, Plants and People by the Artists of Johan Maurits of Nassau (Amsterdam, 1989), pp. 58–65. 36 Brasil Holandês.The Voyage of Caspar Schmalkalden, vol i, p. 125. 37 Ibid., vol i, p. 146. 38 Ibid., ii, p. 47. 39 Guanaco: D. Martins Teixeira in ibid., i, p. 168, n. 201; llama or alpaca: P.J.P. Whitehead and M. Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 63. 40 Brasil Holandês.The Voyage of Caspar Schmalkalden, i, p. 152. 41 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1958), §66. 42 The corpus and the artists concerned are discussed in more detail in the following chapter. 43 G. Piso and G. Marcgrave, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden and Amsterdam, 1648), p. 244. 44 D. Martins Teixeira, ed., Brasil Holandês. Elementos do Brasil Holandês presentes nas “Nouvelles Indes” tapeçarias da manufatura Gobelins (Rio de Janeiro, 2002), pp. 6, 20; Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, pp. 131–2. 45 Martins Teixeira, ibid., p. 82. 46 This question is at the core of F. Egmond and P. Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse: Micro-history and Morphology (Baltimore and London, 1997). 47 Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 28. 48 Martins Teixeira, ed., Brasil Holandês; W. Joost, Die wundersamen Reisen des Caspar Schmalkalden nach West- und Ostindien 1642–1652 (Leipzig, 1983). 49 C. Darwin, Beagle Diary, ed. R. D. Keynes (Cambridge, 1988) and C. Darwin, Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle . . . vol. iii: Journal and Remarks, 1832–1836 (London, 1839). 50 Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 64. 51 G. Piso and G. Marcgrave, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden and Amsterdam, 1648), pp. 283–92. 52 The hypothesis that Albert Eeckhout accompanied the Brouwer expedition to Chile was advanced by P. Ehrenreich, ‘Über einige ältere Bildnisse südamerikanischer Indianer’, Globus. Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde, lxvi/6 (1894), p. 81. This possibility is judged ‘almost impossible’ by Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 62. Indeed, the identification of the persons as Chileans in the representations discussed by Ehrenreich is itself very doubtful. See further F. Egmond and P. Mason, ‘Albert E(e)ckhout, court painter’, in Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist in Brazil, ed. Q. Buvelot, exh. cat., Royal Cabinet of Paintings

260

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References Mauritshuis, The Hague (Zwolle, 2004), pp. 108–27 (120). 53 Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 175. 54 Buvelot, ed., Albert Eckhout, p. 104.

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

7 The Sloth Proceeds 1 See illus. 83. 2 W. B. Ashworth Jr, ‘The Persistent Beast: Recurring Images in Early Zoological Illustration’, in The Natural Sciences and the Arts, ed. A. Ellenius (Stockholm, 1985), pp. 46–66 (60–61). Among the versions in non-print form we can mention the drawing of a sloth in the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo (now in The Royal Collection, Windsor, rl 21144). In a letter to Peiresc of 26 September 1634, Cassiano wrote that he planned to include it in a series of tapestries to be produced by the Barberini tapestry workshop; see F. Solinas, L’Uccelliera, un libro d’arte e di scienza nella Roma dei primi Lincei (Florence, 2000) ii, p. 109. 3 A. Balis, ‘Naar de natuur en naar model’, in M.-C. Maelis, A. Balis and R. H. Marijnissen, De albums van Anselmus de Boodt (1550–1632). Geschilderde natuurobservatie aan het Hof van Rudolf II te Praag (Tielt, 1989), p. 63 and n. 52. The drawing is on folio 35 of the second volume of the De Boodt albums. 4 G. Piso and G. Marcgrave, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden and Amsterdam, 1648), p. 221. 5 Ashworth, ‘The Persistent Beast’, p. 63; the reference is to W. Piso, De Indiae utriusque (Amsterdam, 1658), pp. 321–2. 6 See especially L. Ramón-Laca, ‘Charles de l’Écluse and Libri picturati A. 16–30’, Archives of Natural History, xxviii/2 (2001), pp. 195–243, and F. Egmond, ‘Clusius, Cluyt, Saint Omer: The Origins of the Sixteenth-century Botanical and Zoological Watercolours in Libri Picturati A. 16–30’, Nuncius, xx/1 (2005), pp. 11–67. 7 For a survey of the natural history pictures in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska see P.J.P. Whitehead, G. van Vliet and W. T. Stearn, ‘The Clusius and Other Natural History Pictures in the Jagiellon Library, Kraków’, Archives of Natural History, xvi/1 (1989), pp. 15–32. The complete botanical watercolours have been published in J. de Koning, G. van Uffelen, A. Zemanek and B. Zemanek, Drawn after Nature (Zeist, 2008). 8 Ibid., p. 15. 9 Ashworth, ‘The Persistent Beast’, p. 62 n. 39. 10 Brasil-Holandês (Rio de Janeiro, 1995–). 11 Brasil-Holandês, v: Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae, Icones Animalium (Rio de Janeiro, 1995), p. 37. 12 There is a copy of this watercolour in a collection of drawings known as Animaux et Oiseaux (catalogued in the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett as Ca 221), reproduced as Plate 113 in Dutch Brazil,Volume II. Animaux et Oiseaux (Rio de Janeiro, 1998). The date and purpose of Animaux et Oiseaux are controversial. 13 See P.J.P. Whitehead and M. Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil: Animals, Plants and People by the Artists of Johan Maurits of Nassau (Amsterdam, 1989), p. 42. 14 Brasil-Holandês, ii: Libri Principis Volume I (Rio de Janeiro, 1995), p. 34. 15 There is a copy on folio 476r of the Naturalien-Buch by Jacob Wilhelm Griebe (Mscr. Dresd. q. 31M in the Department of Manuscripts of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden); see Dutch Brazil.Volume III. The Naturalien-Buch by Jacob

261

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment Wilhelm Griebe (Rio de Janeiro, 1998). 16 On the life of Wagener see S. Pfaff, Zacharias Wagener (1614–1668) (Haßfurt, 2001). 17 Dutch Brazil.Volume II. The ‘Thierbuch’ and ‘Autobiography’ of Zacharias Wagener (Rio de Janeiro, 1997), p. 138. In a note on a sloth in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the compiler of the consolidated catalogue of 1695 commented that the Portuguese called it a ‘nimble little puppy’ (Canicula agilis) by antiphrasis; see A. MacGregor and M. Hook, Ashmolean Museum Oxford. Manuscript Catalogues of the Early Museum Collections (Part II ):The Vice-Chancellor’s Consolidated Catalogue 1695 (Oxford, 2006), p. 97. 18 Brasil-Holandês, ii:The Voyage of Caspar Schmalkalden from Amsterdam to Pernambuco in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1998), pp. 65, 67. 19 K. Zandvliet, Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans and Topographic Paintings and their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 204–6. 20 Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 156, reproduced in their plate 80; P. and B. Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680). Catalogue Raisonné (Milan, 2007), pp. 408–11. 21 The same image of the sloth can be found in the vignette ‘Potosí’ (14.5 × 21 cm), one of the sixteen lateral panels that surround Jan van Kessel’s allegory of Americque (oil on copper, 48.5 × 67.5 cm, 1666), now in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; see D. M. Teixeira, A ‘Alegoria dos continentes’ de Jan van Kessel ‘o Velho’ (1626–1679). Uma visão seiscentista da fauna dos quatro cantos do mundo (Rio de Janeiro, 2002), p. 136. Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 93, suggested that ‘Present evidence hints that Van Kessel . . . made use of sketches of animals that were associated with those in the Handbooks, but closer comparison with the Handbook watercolours is needed’. However, in the case of the sloth, Van Kessel’s rendering bears little resemblance to the version of the sloth in the Handbooks. 22 G. Fernández de Oviedo, Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias, ed. M. Ballesteros Gaibrois (Madrid, 2002), pp. 116–17. On the importance of the images in Oviedo’s work see especially J. Pardo Tomás, ‘Le immagini delle piante americane nell’opera di Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557)’, in Natura-Cultura. L’interpretazione del mondo fisico nei testi e nelle immagini, ed. L. Tongiorgi Tomasi, G. Olmi and A. Zanca (Florence, 2000), pp. 163–88. 23 T. D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of ‘Tarih-i Hindi-i garbi’ and Sixteenth-century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden, 1990), p. 314. 24 Ashworth, ‘The Persistent Beast’, p. 62. 25 See R. Zarpellon, ‘La musica degli affetti’, in Athanasius Kircher. Il museo del mondo, ed. E. Lo Sardo, exh. cat., Palazzo di Venezia (Rome, 2001), pp. 261–73. 26 Itamaracá, signed and dated 1637, 63.5 × 89.5 cm, no. 915, Mauritshuis, The Hague; E. Larsen, Frans Post, interprète du Brésil (Amsterdam and Rio de Janeiro, 1962), no. 2; Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680), no. 1. 27 Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 154. The etchings themselves were probably carried out by Jan van Brosterhuizen: see the letter of Brosterhuizen to Constantijn Huygens dated 20 June 1645 in De briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens (1608–1687), Vol. 4, 1644–1649, ed. J. A. Worp (The Hague, 1915), p. 161. 28 Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 185. 29 107.5 × 172.5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no. a 742; Larsen, Frans Post,

262

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

References

30

31 32

33

34

35 36

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

37 38 39 40 41

42

43

interprète du Brésil, no. 65, reproduced in colour with frame in Zo wijd de wereld strekt, ed. E. van den Boogaart and F. J. Duparc, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Hague (The Hague, 1979), no. 98; Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680), no. 52. These are: (1) 49 × 62 cm, National Gallery, Dublin, inv. no. 847; Larsen, Frans Post, interprète du Brésil, no. 96, reproduced in colour in Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, Plate 96b; Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680), no. 56. (2) 69.8 × 106 cm, private collection; Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680), no. 57. Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 181. For this characterization of the transaction as a diplomatic gift rather than a sale, see M. Bencard, ‘Why Denmark? The Gift of Johan Maurits to Frederik iii’, in Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil 1644–2002: International Experts Symposium, ed. E. de Vries (Recife, 2002), p. 293 n. 45. 282.5 × 210.5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no. a 3224; Larsen, Frans Post, interprète du Brésil., no. 42. Reproduced in colour in Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, Plate 93; Zo wijd de wereld strekt, ed.Van den Boogaart and Duparc, no. 206; Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680), no. 19. Among the natural historical sketches by Samuel Niedenthal (1620–1685) is a crayon sketch of the puffbird (in volume Ca 215 of the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden). It is in black and white, but contains colour indications, as well as the words ‘Lebensgrösse’ and ‘Jaguacati’. Since both words also occur, in the handwriting of Johan Maurits, on the version of the same bird in the Libri Principis, it seems likely that Niedenthal copied it from that source. Cf. Dutch Brazil:The Niedenthal Collection (Rio de Janeiro, 1998), p. 73. R. Joppien, ‘The Dutch Vision of Brazil: Johan Maurits and his Artists’, in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil, ed. E.Van den Boogaart (The Hague, 1979), pp. 297–376 (336). Ibid., p. 321. On Marcgraf ’s pets see P.J.P. Whitehead, ‘Georg Markgraf and Brazilian zoology’, in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679, ed. van den Boogaart, pp. 424– 71, esp. 440. See I. Baldriga, L’occhio della lince. I primi Lincei tra arte, scienza e collezionismo (1603–1630) (Rome, 2002), p. 243. Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 22. G. Olmi, L’inventario del mondo. Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima età moderna (Bologna, 1992), pp. 250–51. P. Mason, ‘Eighty Brazilian Birds for Johann Georg’, Folk, xliii (2001), pp. 103–21. On the life of Albert Eeckhout, and the correct spelling of his name, see F. Egmond and P. Mason, ‘Albert E(e)ckhout, court painter’, in Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist in Brazil, ed. Q. Buvelot, exh. cat., Royal Cabinet of Paintings, Mauritshuis, The Hague (Zwolle, 2004), 108–27. For the botanical identifications see Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 82; B. Berlowicz, B. Due, P. Pentz and E. Wæhle, eds, Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil 1644–2002, exh. cat., National Museum of Denmark (Copenhagen, 2003), p. 36; D. M. Teixeira and E. de Vries, ‘Exotic Novelties from Overseas’, in Albert Eckhout, ed. Buvelot, p. 99. The two grasshoppers are reproduced side by side in Berlowicz, Due, Pentz and Wæhle, eds, Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil 1644–2002, p. 204.

263

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment 44 Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 192. 45 There is a copy of this watercolour in the collection of drawings Animaux et Oiseaux, reproduced as Plate 86 in Dutch Brazil.Volume II. Animaux et Oiseaux ( Rio de Janeiro, 1998). 46 R. Baier, B. Berlowicz and M.Chr. Christensen, ‘Albert Eckhout’s Brazilian Paintings’, in Conservation of the Iberian and Latin American Cultural Heritage, ed. H.W.M. Hodges, J. S. Mills and P. Smith (London, 1992), p. 3. 47 Thus in the photograph of the painting reproduced ibid., p. 4. It appears as ‘guirataieima’ in the photograph taken after restoration that is reproduced in D. M. Teixeira, ed., Dutch Brazil.Vol. III. The Pictures in the Hoflössnitz ‘Weinbergschlösschen’ (Rio de Janeiro, 1997), no. 50. 48 Although a number of the birds depicted in the Libri Principis are perched on branches or tree trunks, there is no parallel to be found there, nor in the other volumes of the Libri Picturati A. 32–8, for placing a bird on a cactus. 49 Teixeira, ed., Dutch Brazil.Vol. III, p. 12. 50 Joppien, ‘The Dutch Vision of Brazil’, p. 316. The attribution to Eeckhout is questioned by Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 149. It is described as belonging to a group of studies by Desportes after cartoons by Eeckhout in Van den Boogaart and Duparc, eds, Zo wijd de wereld strekt, no. 247. 51 60 × 88 cm, No. 1727, Louvre, Paris; Larsen, Frans Post, interprète du Brésil, no. 4; Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680), no. 5. 52 53 × 69 cm, cat. no. 1560, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; Larsen, Frans Post, interprète du Brésil, no. 14; Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680), no. 11. 53 191.5 × 166 cm, Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Larsen, Frans Post, interprète du Brésil, no. 12; Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680), no. 10. 54 Joppien, ‘The Dutch Vision of Brazil’, p. 337. 55 Ibid. It has been suggested that ‘the illusionistic perspective of the still lifes, open to the sky above, indicates that they were intended to be seen from below’, in A. Chong and W. Kloek, ed., Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550–1720, exh. cat., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and Cleveland Museum of Art (Zwolle, 1999), p. 192. 56 Joppien, ‘The Dutch Vision of Brazil’, p. 311. Cf. M. Boeseman ‘The Attribution of the Theatrum – to Albert Eckhout?’, in Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil 1644–2002. International Experts Symposium, ed. E. de Vries (Recife, 2002), pp. 339–40. 57 The present author examined it in the summer of 1997. 58 Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 36. 59 T. Thomsen, Albert Eckhout ein niederländischer Maler und sein Gönner Johan Maurits der Brasilianer. Ein Kulturbild aus dem 17. Jahrhundert (Copenhagen, 1938), pp. 56–8. 60 Joppien, ‘The Dutch Vision of Brazil’, p. 343. 61 Teixeira, ed., Dutch Brazil:Vol. III, p. 106. The attribution to Eeckhout has also been called into question by Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, p. 57. 62 Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post (1612–1680). The authors’ breakdown of Post’s post-Brazilian production into three phases represents an important refinement of our view of this significant oeuvre.

264

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

acknowledgements

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Earlier drafts of parts of this book have been presented in various places. For their kind invitations to do so, I would especially like to thank my hosts Margarita Alvarado Pérez and Jorge Montoya Véliz (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), Manuel Gutiérrez Estévez (Casa de América, Madrid), Paul Hoftijzer (Scaliger Institute, Leiden), Ken Mills (University ˘ of Toronto) and Ines Zupanov (Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin). The prominent place occupied by the Canary Islands in this book would not have been possible without the assistance of friends there: Francisco Fajardo Spinola, Manuel Hernández González, William Christian. Those who have provided valuable information, patiently answered my queries, and been excellent discussion partners include all of the foregoing as well as Rea Alexandratos, Irene Baldriga, Christian Báez Allende, Adrian Dyer, Elizabeth Honig, David Jaffé, Arthur MacGregor, Elizabeth McGrath, Natasja Peeters, Pedro Mege Rosso, Giuseppe Olmi, Kasper van Ommen, José Pardo Tomás, Pedro Pitarch, Javier Portús Pérez, Luís Ramón-Laca Menéndez de Luarca, Ian Rolfe, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, Andrea Ubrizsy Savoia, Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Arnoud Vrolijk. It would be improper to include Florike Egmond among these acknowledgements; she has a place all of her own, E la beltà delle cose più mire Avrà sol da te voce e colore

265

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

photo acknowledgements

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it: Photos courtesy Amsterdam University Library: 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73; Archivo Fotográfico, Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid: 108; photos by/courtesy of the author: 2, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 35, 36, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 98; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich (Alte Pinakothek): 37 (inv. 685); Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neuburg an der Donau (Staatsgalerie): 10 (inv. 1274); Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek, Gotha: 118 (folio 57v, inv. Chart b 533), 119 (folio 99v, inv. Chart b 533), 127 (folio 109, Chart b 533), 128 (folio 110, Chart b 533); Fries Museum, Leeuwarden: 3 (Bisschop collection, inv. fm 5738); photo courtesy Graphisches Sammlung Albertina,Vienna: 34 (dg1926/1440); Jagiellonska Library, Krakow: 110, 120, 121, 124, 125, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139; Koninklijke Bibliotheek,The Hague: 41 (Inv. no. ms 78 e54), 45, 46, 47, 49, 51; Koninklijke Maatschappij voor Dierkunde, Antwerp: 18 (inv. ms 30.021, fol. 6); Kunsthistorisches Museum,Vienna (photos © Kunsthistorisches Museum): 105, 106 (Gemäldegalerie, inv. 3834), 112 (inv. 8245); Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden: 126; Leiden University Library: 15 (Taeschner Collection, inv. Or. 12.365, fol. 207b), 16 (Taeschner Coll. Or. 12.365, fol. 209a), 40 (Taeschner Coll. Or. 12.365, fol. 97a–b); Museo del Prado, Madrid: 9 (inv. 1418), 33; Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam: 140; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh: 17 (inv. ng 2291 – photo © National Gallery of Scotland); Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen: 136; Rijksmuseum Amsterdam: 130 (inv. a 742), 131, 132 (inv. no. a 3224); Stiftung Weimarer Klassik und Kunstsammlungen, Schlossmuseum, Graphische Sammlung: 24; Universidad de Oviedo: 113 (ms 215.s).

266

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

index

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Individual species are listed under animals and reptiles; birds; hybrid human and animal forms; monstrous peoples; plants and trees. Accademia dei Lincei, Rome 149–72, 221 Codex Badianus 162–3 Mexican Treasury 107, 152–5, 157–60, 161, 163–7, 168, 169–72, 173, 175, 222 Uccelliera 156–7 Aesop 28 Albertus Magnus 73–5, 76, 98, 113 Aldrovandi, Ulisse 16, 20, 29, 31, 100, 102, 136, 172, 212 Alexander the Great 102–3 Alkman 114 America (De Bry) 23, 41, 42, 43, 44, 93–4, 115, 143, 181, 183 Anguissola, Sofonisba 24 animals and reptiles Amphisbaena Mexicana 103, 164–9, 171 anteater 15, 26, 29 armadillo 15, 15, 26, 29, 68, 95–8, 124– 5, 140, 143–7, 217, 218 ass, horned 10, 21–2, 169 baboon 18, 98 camelid see camelid chameleon 132 civet cat 31–2, 158 crocodile 59, 112 dragon 34, 35, 53–6, 99 elephant 1‒4, 11–14, 13, 25, 56, 97, 112, 172 giraffe 17, 30, 31, 32 hare, horned 9, 21, 169

hippopotamus 112, 172 horse, Bucephalus 102–3 hyena 99–100 iguana 100, 135, 209, 212 jaguar 15, 26, 29 lion 14, 159 lizard 139, 146 llama see under camelid lynx 99, 150 marmoset 24, 79, 126 monkey 16, 24, 30, 100 opossum 16, 26, 30, 114 ox 97, 102–3 petrified 33–4, 84 porcupine 30, 194, 205 rhinoceros 11‒14, 15–16, 25–6, 35, 56, 98, 112 serpent 103–6, 160, 164–9, 166, 167, 167–8, 169, 172 sheep, vervex aithiopicus 29 sheep, Peruvian see under camelid sloth see sloth tapir 26, 87–8, 113, 117 Tartary Lamb 34, 63–5, 84 unicorn 98 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 118 Ashworth Jr, William B. 16, 20, 24, 124, 197, 198–9, 205, 211 Augsburg casket, ‘Four Continents’ 3, 13–14 Aztec fables 28

267

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Before Disenchantment Bahuin, Caspar 131 Baldriga, Irene 127–8, 153, 154, 155, 163 Barberini, Francesco 157, 158, 159, 160–61, 162, 164, 170 barnacle goose 34, 45, 46, 71, 221 ‘Ye Ballade of Ye Barnacle’ 66–7 in Cosmographia 42, 43, 70, 72 fish or bird, religious concern about 78, 82–4 in The Fish Book 41, 47, 67–70, 72, 73–6, 77–82, 84–5, 89 myth of 65–7 tree bark with barnacles 48, 77, 79–81 Bartholomaeus Anglicus 103, 114–15 Bartolomeo de la Ygarza 159 Battisti, Eugenio 122, 123 Becerra, Gaspar 28–9 Belleforest, Nicolas 89 Benzoni, Girolamo 22, 41–2 Bernini, Gian Lorrenzo 98, 144, 147 Besler, Basil 132 birds Acitli 160 alcatraz 88, 138–9 barnacle goose see barnacle goose bird of paradise 84, 85, 85, 134–6 falcon 25, 163 flamingo 22, 157 parrot 17, 30, 32, 53, 102, 146, 157, 163 pelican 26, 157 penguin see penguin puffbird 131, 132, 133, 209, 210, 211, 213, 215 roc 4, 14, 100 toucan 139, 161 tree-goose see barnacle goose troupial 138, 139, 215, 216, 219 Blemmyae 57, 97, 98, 103, 107, 115, 116 Boaistuau, Pierre 44, 70, 72 Bolívar, Gregorio de 158–9, 162, 173–4, 222 Bosch, Hieronymus 33, 53, 56, 117, 118 Brouwer-Herckmans expedition, Journal 117, 185–6, 189, 193, 196 Brueghel the Elder, Jan 9, 10, 21–2, 167, 169 Bulwer, Dr John 100, 107 Burgkmair the Elder, Hans 37, 57

camelid camel-sheep 107, 109‒21, 158, 173–87 four-clawed 117, 119, 121, 186–96 guanaco 174, 176, 188, 221 hump-backed 175–84 Cardano, Girolamo 23, 35, 173 Cárdenas, Juan de 40 Cassiano dal Pozzo 24–5, 85, 157, 159, 160, 161–3, 164, 165, 166–7, 170–72, 221 Castañeda, Juan de 139, 146–7 Castelli, Pietro 163–4 Catherwood, Frederick 1, 12 Cattoir, Simon 49 Cesi, Federico 100, 147–55, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 172, 209–10 see also Accademia dei Lincei, Rome Chrétien de Troyes 112 Cieza de León, Pedro 173, 175–6 Clerck, Hendrik de 10, 21–2 Cleyer, Andreas 199 Clusius, Carolus (Charles de l’Écluse) 29, 46–7, 50, 61, 62, 79‒90, 92, 150–51, 152, 155, 170, 199, 221 Exoticorum libri decem 24, 79‒80, 82‒90, 95, 97, 124–48, 164, 197, 202 Codex Badianus 162–3 Coenen, Adriaen 18, 31, 33, 49, 83, 84, 87, 102, 221 The Fish Book 41, 47, 51, 67–70, 72, 73– 6, 77–82, 84–5, 89 Cole, F. J. 16 Collaert, Adriaen 4, 15 Colombe, Jean 53 Colonna, Fabio 153, 162 Columbus, Christopher 42–3, 105 composite creatures 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 113– 14, 115–18, 121–2, 175 see also hybrid human and animal forms; monstrous peoples Compte, Louis 38 Cortavila y Sanabria, Diego 162 Cosmographia (Sebastian Münster) 42, 43, 52, 70, 72, 89, 91 Coudenberghe, Pieter van 48 Darwin, Charles 43, 194 De Boodt, Anselmus 111, 179, 197 De Bry, Theodor 23, 41, 42, 43, 44, 93‒4, 115, 143, 181, 183

268

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Index De Certeau, Michel 88, 116 De Laet, Johan 122, 192, 193–4, 195 De Pauw, Cornelius 183 de Vitry, Jacques 82, 112, 113 Delort, Robert 99–100 Démeunier, Jean-Nicolas 100 Dick, A. L. 1, 12 Diderot, Denis 48, 106–7, 108, 109, 111, 114 Diego de Ocaña, Fray 113, 181, 182 dragon tree 25‒30, 32‒4, 34, 36, 38, 44–60, 61, 153, 221 on beer label 36, 56 fruit 38, 39, 61–2 oldest recorded 30, 49–50 oldest in world today 31, 50 religious connections 32, 33, 37, 50–53, 57 Dürer, Albrecht 15, 16, 25, 56, 59

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Eeckhout, Albert 136, 195, 196, 213–17, 219–20 Eisenhout, Antoni 20 Elliot Smith, Grafton 11–12, 13 Elsheimer, Adam 99, 150, 170 Faber, Johannes (Johannes Schmidt) 31, 152, 154–5, 157, 169–70, 172 and Mexican Treasury 153, 155, 158–9, 160, 164, 166–7, 170–71, 173–4 Febles, María Teresa 39 Ferroverde, Filippo 70, 111 The Fish Book (Coenen) 41, 47, 67–70, 72, 73–6, 77–82, 84–5, 89 fish and sea creatures coral 34 fish nesting in trees 49, 83, 84 flying fish 22 manatee 26, 80, 128 monster 97, 112 mother-of-pearl 35 mussel 76, 79, 81, 86 oyster (growing on trees) 84 sea serpents 100 shark 79 sperm whale 18, 31, 33 squid 100 turtle 84–5 Forer, Cunrat 82

fossils 11, 33–4, 84 Foucault, Michael 20, 23, 116 Francken the Younger, Frans 168–9 Frederick ii of Sicily 76–7 Freeman Sandler, L. 109, 111, 115 Fridolin, Stephan 51–3 Friedman, J. B. 98, 104 Frutuoso, Gaspar 46 Galilei, Galileo 149, 150, 152, 163 Garet Jr, James 127, 131 Garet, Peter 50, 129, 139 Garth, Richard 127, 128 Gellius, Aulus 103 Gerald of Wales 77, 82, 92–3 Gerard(e), John 38, 48, 61, 85 Gesner, Conrad 16, 28, 31, 82, 109, 177–9, 212 Goethe 120, 121–2, 123 Grafton, Anthony 23, 34–5 Gregorio da Reggio 147–8, 150 Hamen y Léon, Juan van der 163 Harvey, Edward 37–9 Hernández, Francisco 25, 48, 100‒1, 103‒4, 107, 127, 149, 151–4, 160–62, 165, 166, 174 Herodotos 104, 112 Heron-Allen, E., Barnacles in Nature and in Myth 65–7, 86 Heyden, Johannes 82 Historia naturalium Brasiliae (Piso and Marcgraf) 16, 123, 192, 193, 195, 197–8, 199, 200, 203, 209 Hochreiter, Adam 26 Hodges, William 57 Hoefnagel, Joris 21 Hoflössnitz (Schloss) paintings 213, 215– 17, 219 Holanda, Don Manuel António 56 Hondius, J. 60, 101 Hortus Sanitatis 45, 46, 72 Humboldt, Alexander von 30, 49 Hyades, Paul D. J. 38 hybrid human and animal forms 50, 53, 54, 68, 69, 70, 88, 93, 107, 109–15 Abominable 107 alterity, degrees of 115–19 ceucroquota 113

269

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment Lycosthenes (Wolffhart), Conrad 53‒4, 57‒ 9, 61‒2, 65‒7, 71‒3, 88, 89, 99, 106, 108, 116, 117, 118

dog-headed races 66, 107, 108 half-man, half-pig 50, 88 and hieroglyphics 102 manticora 112–13 onocentaurus 113 and oxymoron 116–17 Walscheranden 96, 107, 109 see also composite creatures; monstrous peoples insects, grasshopper 132, 134, 136, 137, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214 Isidorus of Seville 103, 108–9 Italy Accademia dei Lincei see Accademia dei Lincei, Rome Baths of Diocletian, Rome 11, 25 Duomo doors, Pisa 12, 25, 27 Sacred Grove, Bomarzo 74‒5, 119–21, 122, 123 Villa Medici, Rome 28, 29 Villa Palagonia, Sicily 76‒8, 121–2, 123 Joppien, R. 217–19, 220

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Kappler, Claude 105, 109 Khevenhüller, Hans 25, 221–2 Kircher, Athanasius 8, 18–19, 20, 205, 206, 212 Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian 85–6 Lafitau, Jean-François 100 Lancisi, Giovanni Maria 20 l’Écluse, Charles de (Carolus Clusius) see Clusius, Carolus Lecouteux, Claude 105–7 Leonardi,Vincenzo 102, 156 Léry, Jean de 5, 16–18, 19, 87, 88, 113, 117 Libri Picturati 110, 120‒21, 124‒5, 133‒5, 137‒9, 179, 190, 191, 198–200, 206–10, 213, 214, 215, 216, 219–20 see also Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae Libri Principis 134, 199, 200, 209, 213–14, 215 Linschoten, Jan Huygen van 128, 129 Lobel, Mathias 48, 150 Lucan 167–8, 172 Luther, Martin 97, 117–18

Macrobius 96 Magaña, Edmundo 115 Magellan, Ferdinand 4, 14 Maitani, Lorenzo 55 Mandeville, Sir John 63, 65, 84, 93–4 Mansur, Ustad 25 Marcgraf, Georg 16, 122, 123, 129, 192, 197– 8, 203, 205, 209 Marignolli, John de 100 Mattioli, Pietro 177, 192 Maurits, Johan 194, 195–6, 199, 200, 206, 217 Megenberg, Conrad 114 Metallotheca vaticana 20 Mexican Treasury 107, 152–5, 157–60, 161, 163–7, 168, 170, 171, 173, 175, 222 Monardes, Nicolás 61–2, 63, 96, 127, 129, 143, 145 monstrous peoples 50‒4, 68, 88–97, 103, 109, 113, 117 Abarimon 107 Acephalos 89 Albanians, owl-eyed 107 and alterity 115–18 Amazons 60, 100, 101–2, 107, 115, 116 Amyctyrae (Amyktyres) 54, 64, 93, 107 Androgini 107 Anthropophagi 98, 102, 104, 105, 116 Antipodes 65, 107, 108, 114, 115 Astomi (Apple Smellers) 58, 98, 100, 104, 106 cannibals 102, 105, 115, 116, 128 Centaur 67, 108 and cultural practices 104–5 Cyclops 61, 89, 103, 106, 107, 114, 115 Cynocephales (Kynokephaloi) 62, 66, 89, 97, 100–8, 115, 116, 175 Epiphagi 98, 107 Ethiopians, maritime 62, 104, 105, 107, 175 Ewaipanoma 60, 100 Fanesii 107 Hippopodes 53, 67, 93, 98, 107, 108 metaphorical interpretations 96–8 modern interpretations 99–102

270

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Index and oxymoron 116–17 Pandae 107 Panotii 97–8, 107 and physical appearance 61‒8, 105–9 Plinian 55‒6, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95–6, 98, 100–5, 112, 114–16 pygmies 97, 98, 107 Sciapods 59, 89, 98, 100, 103, 107, 114, 115 Sciritae (straw-drinkers) 98, 104, 106 Siamese twins 68, 109 Steganopodes 114 and tropologies 112–19 and typology 104–12 Walscheranden 96, 107, 109 Wild Man and Woman 71, 115–16 see also composite creatures; hybrid human and animal forms Montaigne, Michel de 128 Montanus, Arnoldus 7, 18, 20 Moscardo, Lodovico 85 Münster, Sebastian 42, 43, 52, 70, 72, 89, 91

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Needham, Rodney 115 Ode, Tarek 37, 39 Odoric of Pordenone 63–5, 84 Olina, Giovanni Pietro 102, 156–7 Olivera, David 37, 39 Olmi, Giuseppe 20, 23 Ortelius, Abraham 77 Ovalle, Alonso de 183–4 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de 20, 138–9, 143, 204–5 Palagonia, Prince of 121–3 Paleotti, Gabriele 102 Paludanus, Bernardus 128, 130, 139 Paré, Ambroise 87, 88, 89, 117 Parkin, David 34 Pauw, Pieter 135, 139 Peiresc, Nicolas de 21, 85, 129–30, 132, 157, 170–71, 172 penguin 118, 187, 188, 194 Magellanic 90‒94, 124, 140–3, 144, 181 Philip II of Spain 25, 48, 127, 149, 152, 161, 162, 176 Philippe de Sivry 131 Phlegon 88

Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius (Pope Pius ii) 70, 77 Piero di Cosimo 18 Pietro de Aloaysa 160, 167 Pigafetta, Antonio 134–5, 175 Pinzón,Yáñez 114 Piso, Willem 16, 122, 123, 192, 193, 197–8, 203 plants and trees Acacia Farnesiana 163–4 annatto seed 89, 139, 140 beans, South American 126, 127 cactus 27, 86, 136–7, 140, 144, 215–17, 218, 220 date-palm 32, 35, 36, 47, 51–2, 53, 55, 56 dragon tree see dragon tree gourd,Virginian Macoqwer 128 mandrake 34, 84 mangrove 149 orchid, American (Lyncei) 99, 100, 149– 50, 151–2, 161 peony 59–60 petrified 33–4, 84 potato 128, 131 tree bearing wool 65 tree of water 22, 23, 40–44 tulip 127 Wak-Wak (women hanging from trees) 40, 63, 64 Yccotli 101, 153, 154 Plateau, Jacques 138, 143, 144–6 Pleydenwurff, Wilhelm 32, 51–3 Plinian monstrous human races 55‒6, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95–6, 98, 100–5, 112, 114–16 see also monstrous peoples Pliny the Elder 75, 82, 102, 103, 168 Poggini, Giampaolo 108, 176–7 Porret, Christian 146 Post, Frans 130‒32, 140, 206–12, 213, 216, 217–19, 220 Potgieter, Barent Jansz. 91, 114, 141, 181, 182 Poussin, Nicolas 163 Ralegh, Sir Walter 15, 100, 128 Recchi, Nardo Antonio 127–8, 149, 152–3, 161, 162 reptiles see animals and reptiles Rocchi, Giovanni 149

271

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Before Disenchantment

Copyright © 2009. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Rubens, Peter Paul 9, 21, 105‒6, 167–8, 169–72 Rudolf ii 21, 25, 81, 135, 136, 179, 197 St Brendan 96, 107 St Brendan island 19, 20, 21, 37, 38, 39 Sánchez Coello, Alonso 25 Sangl, Siegfried 35 Schedel, Hartmann 32, 51–3, 55, 56, 69, 94–6, 110 Schmalkalden, Caspar 118‒19, 127‒8, 186–9, 192, 194–5, 196, 202–5, 212 Schmidt, Johannes (Johannes Faber) see Faber, Johannes Schnapper, Antoine 85 Schongauer, Martin 34, 53–6, 59–60 Schreck, Johannes (Johannes Terrentius) 149, 150, 152, 153, 164 sea creatures see fish and sea creatures Sebastiano del Piombo 24 Severin, Tim 39 Sloane, Sir Hans 65 sloth 5‒7, 16–20, 16, 24–6, 30, 81‒3, 113, 124‒9, 131–3, 197–206, 212, 221 and Frans Post 130, 206–9 song of 8, 18–19, 128, 202, 204–6 Smyth, Charles Piazzi 38, 50 Snyders, Frans 105, 167 Solinus 102–3 Spada,Virgilio 33 Spain Palacio de El Pardo, Madrid 24, 28–9 Monasterio Real de El Escorial 127, 161–2 Spilbergen, Joris van 116, 181–2, 185 Stelliola, Nicola Antonio 77 Stephens, John L. 1, 11, 12 Sutton, Peter 168 Sweerts, Emanuel 128, 132–3, 134 tapestries 31, 57, 192 Tarih-i Hindi-i garbi 15, 16, 26–7, 29, 30, 63, 205 Tempesta, Antonio 156 Terrentius, Johannes (Johannes Schreck) 149, 150, 152, 153, 164 Theatrum rerum naturalium Brasiliae 192, 194, 195, 196, 199, 202, 206, 211, 215, 217–19; see also Libri Picturati

Thevet, André 6, 17, 24, 40, 81, 84, 87, 131–2 Thierbuch (Wagener) 126, 200–2 Thomas of Cantimpré 97, 105, 113, 114 Torriani, Leonardo 41 Tovar, Simón de 48, 126 Tradescant, John 85 Transylvanus, Maximilian 135 trees see plants and trees Trevisan, Angelo 113–14 Trichet, Pierre 85 Trubbiani,Valeriano 14, 28 Tylor, Edward 97 Ubertini, Francesco 17, 30–31, 32 Uccelliera (Olina) 102, 156–7 Uffele, Johannes van 147 Uffenbach, Conrad von 65 Ulrich of Lilienfeld 118 Van Heeck, Johannes 150, 151 Virgil 84 Wagener, Zacharias 126, 200–2, 212 Waldeck, Jean Frédéric Maximilien 11–12, 13, 14 Warburg, Aby 92, 220 White, John 22 Whitehead, P. and M. Boeseman 195, 206, 210–11, 213, 219 Wittkower, Rudolf 98 Wolffhart (Lycosthenes, Conrad) see Lycosthenes Wolgemut, Michel 32, 51–3 Woodward, Dr John 65 Ximénez, Francisco 153 Yale Psalter 117 Zárate, Agustín de 174 Zucchi, Jacopo 28

272

Mason, Peter. Before Disenchantment : Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World, Reaktion Books, Limited,