The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750 1107122872, 9781107122871

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Atlantic World scholarship has traditionally tended to focus on the acts of conquest and the politics of colonialism, these essays consider the reception of ideas, images and goods from the Americas in the non-colonial state of Italy. Italians began to venerate images of the Peruvian Virgin of Copacabana, plant tomatoes, potatoes, and maize, and publish costume books showcasing the clothing of the kings and queens of Florida, revealing the powerful hold that the Americas had on the Italian Americas in Italy, this volume demonstrates how early modern Italian culture developed as much from multicultural contact - with Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and the Caribbean - as it did from the rediscovery of classical antiquity. Elizabeth Horodowich is Professor of History at New Mexico State University. Author name. ISBN. Jkt. C M Y K

She is the author of Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (Cambridge, 2008), and A Brief History of Venice (2009), and is the recipient of awards and fellowships from a variety of institutions, including the Harvard University Center, Villa I Tatti, Florence, The American Historical Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lia Markey is the Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She published Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (2016) and co-wrote the exhibition catalogue, Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum (2014). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Kress and Mellon foundations, the Renaissance Society of America, the Folger Library, the Warburg Institute, Harvard’s Villa I Tatti and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, New Jersey and worked at several museums.

Printed in the United Kingdom

Jacket image:

The New World in Early modern Italy, 1492–1750

imagination. By considering a variety of cases illuminating the presence of the

Horodowich and Markey

Italians became fascinated by the New World in the early modern period. While

The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492–1750 Edited by Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey

T H E N E W W O R L D I N E A R L Y M O D E R N I T A L Y , 1 4 9 2 –1 7 5 0

Italians became fascinated by the New World in the early modern period. While Atlantic World scholarship has traditionally tended to focus on the acts of conquest and the politics of colonialism, these essays consider the reception of ideas, images, and goods from the Americas in the non-colonial states of Italy. Italians began to venerate images of the Peruvian Virgin of Copacabana, to plant tomatoes, potatoes, and maize, and to publish costume books showcasing the clothing of the kings and queens of Florida, revealing the powerful hold the Americas had on the Italian imagination. By considering a variety of cases illuminating the presence of the Americas in Italy, this volume demonstrates how early modern Italian culture developed as much from multicultural contact – with Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and the Caribbean – as it did from the rediscovery of classical antiquity. Elizabeth Horodowich is professor of history at New Mexico State University. She is the author of Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (2008) and A Brief History of Venice (2009), and is the recipient of awards and fellowships from a variety of institutions, including Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, the American Historical Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lia Markey is the director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She published Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (2016) and co-wrote the exhibition catalog Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum (2014). The recipient of fellowships from the Kress and Mellon Foundations, the Renaissance Society of America, the Folger Library, the Warburg Institute, Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University.

THE NEW WORLD IN EARLY MODERN ITALY, 1 4 9 2 –1 7 5 0 Edited by

ELIZABETH HORODOWICH New Mexico State University

LIA MARKEY Newberry Library, Chicago

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi - 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107122871 doi: 10.1017/9781316389034 © Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-107-12287-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago. Call # Ayer 7 131051528

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

page vii

List of Figures

viii

List of Contributors

xii

Acknowledgments

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1 ITALY’S VIRTUAL DISCOVERY: AN INTRODUCTION Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey Part I: Italy before and after the Conquest

1

17

2 ITALY AND THE NEW WORLD Elizabeth Horodowich

19

3 DANTE AND THE NEW WORLD Mary Watt

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4 VENETIAN DIPLOMACY, SPANISH GOLD, AND THE NEW WORLD IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Federica Ambrosini

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Part II: The New World and Italian Religious Culture

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5 THREE BOLOGNESE FRANCISCAN MISSIONARIES IN THE NEW WORLD IN THE EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY Massimo Donattini

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6 MISSIONARY GIFT RECORDS OF MEXICAN OBJECTS IN EARLY MODERN ITALY Davide Domenici

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7 FEDERICO BORROMEO AND THE NEW WORLD IN EARLY MODERN MILAN Maria Matilde Benzoni

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C O NT E NT S

8 THE VIRGIN OF COPACABANA IN EARLY MODERN ITALY: A DISEMBODIED DEVOTION Karen J. Lloyd

118

9 JESUIT MARTYRDOM IMAGERY BETWEEN MEXICO AND ROME Katherine McAllen

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Part III: New World Plants in the Italian Imagination

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10 SOUTHERN ITALY AND THE NEW WORLD IN THE AGE OF ENCOUNTERS Mackenzie Cooley

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11 THE IMPACT OF NEW WORLD PLANTS, 1500–1800: THE AMERICAS IN ITALY David Gentilcore

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12 RENAISSANCE FLORENTINES IN THE TROPICS: BRAZIL, THE GRAND DUCHY OF TUSCANY, AND THE LIMITS OF EMPIRE Brian Brege

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Part IV: Representing America

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13 ALDROVANDI’S NEW WORLD NATIVES IN BOLOGNA (OR HOW TO DRAW THE UNSEEN AL VIVO) Lia Markey

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14 CESARE VECELLIO’S FLORIDIANS IN THE VENETIAN BOOK MARKET: BEAUTIFUL IMPORTS Ann Rosalind Jones

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15 BAROQUE ITALIAN EPIC FROM GRANADA TO THE NEW WORLD: COLUMBUS CONQUERS THE MOORS Nathalie Hester

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16 VIVALDI’S MOTEZUMA: THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO ON THE VENETIAN OPERATIC STAGE Ireri E. Chávez-Bárcenas

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Select Bibliography Index

309 336

Color plates are to be found between pp. 16 and 17

ILLUSTRATIONS

cover Benedetto Bordone, La Gran città di Temistitan, Venice, 1528. Photo Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Call no. Ayer 7 B65 1528.

plates 1 Cantino map, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena, 1502. With permission from the Ministero dei beni e della attività culturali e del turismo di Modena. 2 Placido Siculo (?), Virgin of Copacabana, Casa of the Augustinian Recollects, Rome, 1655. Photo by Michael Rubenstein with the permission of the Order of Augustinian Recollects, Rome. 3 Anonymous (Valencian), Virgin of Copacabana, Church of San Carlo, Turin, ca. 1690. Photo by Michael Rubenstein. 4 Anonymous, Virgin of Copacabana, Casa of the Augustinian Recollects, Rome, eighteenth century. Photo by Michael Rubenstein with the permission of the Order of Augustinian Recollects, Rome. 5 Artist unknown, Father Bernardo de Cisneros and Father Diego de Orozco, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome, 1616–17. Photo by James McAllen, Jr. with permission from the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome. 6 Artist unknown, Father Fernando de Santarén, Archivum Romanum Societatus Iesu (ARSI), Rome, 1616–17. Photo by James McAllen, Jr. with permission from the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome. 7 Artist unknown, Father Gerónimo de Moranta and Father Juan del Fonte, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome, 1616–17. Photo by James McAllen, Jr. with permission from the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome. 8 Jacopo Zucchi, Detail of Corn, Fresco in the Casino or Garden Room of the Villa Medici, Rome, ca. 1585. Photo by Lia Markey. 9 Artist unknown, Floridian, Tavole di animali di Ulisse Aldrovandi, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ca. 1570–90. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna. 10 Artist unknown, Brazilian, Tavole di animali di Ulisse Aldrovandi, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ca. 1570–90. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna.

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FIGURES

3.1 Giovanni Stradano, “The Astrolabe,” in the Nova Reperta series, late 1580s. [NC 266. St 81 1776 St 81], Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. page 44 5.1 Passio gloriosi martyris beati patris Andreae de Spoleto ordinis Minorum regularis observantie pro Catholice fidei veritate passi in Affrica civitate Fez. Anno Domini. MD.xxxij. De fratrum minorum regularis observantie profectu et animarum lucro in HUKETAN sive nova Hispania, Biblioteca Marciana, Venezia (Misc. 1104, op. 11), 1532. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e Attività Culturali e del Turismo-Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. 70 5.2 “Typus eorum que frates faciunt in novo Indiarum orbe,” in Diego Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana, Perugia, 1579. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna. 71 5.3 Frontispiece of La lettera mandata dal R. Padre frate Francesco da Bologna da Lindia ouer noua Spagna, & dalla Città di Mexico, Triv. G 758, Archivio Storico Civico Biblioteca Trivulziana, Castello Sforzesco, 1531. Copyright @ Comune di Milano. All rights reserved. 76 5.4 Frontispiece of Francesco dal Busco, Copia di una Lettera portata da gli Antipodi paese novamente ritrovato nella quale si narra del vivere et costumi di quelle genti cosa nuova et bella da leggere, Rari Triv. G 767, Archivio Storico Civico Biblioteca Trivulziana, Castello Sforzesco, 1532. Copyright @ Comune di Milano. All rights reserved. 78 6.1 “A Mexican Knife with Obsidian Prismatic Blade and Wooden Handle,” in Ulisse Aldrovandi, Musaeum Metallicum, Bologna, 1648. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna. 99 8.1 Francisco Tito Yupanqui, The Virgin of Copacabana, Sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, Bolivia, ca. 1583. Photo by Carlos Rúa, Courtesy of Rafael Ramos Sosa. 120 8.2 Francisco de Bejarano, “Virgin of Copacabana,” in Fernando de Valverde, Santuario de N. Señora de Copacabana en el Peru, Lima, 1641. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. 129 8.3 Anonymous Spanish, “Virgin of Copacabana,” in Ippolito Marracci, De diva virgine Copacavana in peruano novi mundi regno celeberrima. Liber unus, Rome, 1656. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. 131

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LIST OF FIGU RES

8.4 “Io. Bon.” Virgin of Copacabana in Andrés de San Nicolás, Imagen de N. S. de Copacavana portento del Nvevo Mvndo, ya conocido en Europa, Madrid, 1663. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de España. 8.5 “Virgin of Copacabana,” in Compendio dell’origine, e miracoli di Maria Vergine detta di Copacavana, Bologna, 1720. Courtesy of the Biblioteca communale dell’archiginnasio, Bologna. 8.6 “In Peru you can even find artful workers of gold,” in Theodor de Bry and Girolamo Benzoni, Das sechste Theil der neuwen Welt. Oder Der historien . . . das dritte Buch, Frankfurt, 1597. Copyright John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. 8.7 Giovanni Abbiati, Admirabilis Virgo de Cuppacavana, 1692. From Michele da Salvatore, Relatione compendiosa, e semplice della miracolosa imagine della beatissima vergine di Copacavana del Peru . . . Turin, 1692. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. 9.1 Francisco Martínez, The Martyrdom of San Sebastián, Colección de pintura religiosa de la Universidad Iberoamericana Torreón, Coahuila, Mexico, 1742. Courtesy of the Universidad Iberoamericana, Torreón. 9.2 Miguel Cabrera, The Martyrdom of Fernando de Santarén, La Parroquia de Santiago Apóstol. Santiago Papasquiaro, Durango, Mexico. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1749. Reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. 9.3 Frontispiece to Book Two in Louis Richeôme, La peinture spirituelle, Lyon, 1611. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 9.4 Melchior Kusell, “The Martyrdom of Cornelius Beudin,” in Matthias Tanner, Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis, Prague, 1675. 10.1 “Frontispiece,” of Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, Rome, 1651. Courtesy Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. 10.2 “America,” in Giovanni Lorenzo d’Anania, L’universale fabbrica del mondo, ovvero Cosmografia, Venice, 1582. University of Iowa Libraries, Call number: G 120. A5 1582. 10.3 “Granadilla Flos Passionis,” in Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, Rome, 1651. Courtesy Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. 10.4 “Draco,” in Carolus Clusius, Rariorum Aliquot Stirpium per Hispanias Observatarum Historia, Antwerp, 1576. Courtesy of Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, University of Minnesota. 13.1 Jacopo Ligozzi, Pineapple, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, ca. 1570. With permission from the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo. 13.2 “Pineapple,” in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, Seville, 1535. William H. Scheide Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

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LIST OF FIGUR ES

13.3 After Jacopo Ligozzi, Pineapple, Tavole di animali di Ulisse Aldrovandi, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ca. 1570–90. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna. 13.4 John White, Indian Woman of Florida with Ear Ornaments and Painted Marks or Tattoos, Pen and Brown Ink and Watercolour over Graphite, with Bodycolour, Touched with Gold and Silver. Inv. PD 1906,0509.1.23, British Museum, 1585–93. © The Trustees of the British Museum/ Art Resource, NY. 13.5 “Floridian,” in Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia, Bologna, 1642. Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 13.6 “Le Sauvage en pompe,” in François Despres, Recueil de la diversité des habits, Paris, 1562. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1940 (40.129). 13.7 “Brazilian,” in Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia, Bologna, 1642. Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 13.8 Artist unknown, Peruvian Satyr, Tavole di animali di Ulisse Aldrovandi, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ca. 1570–90. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna. 14.1 “Bresilienne” and “Bresilien,” in Francois Despres, Recueil de la diversité des habits, Paris, 1564 (Typ 515.64.734). Houghton Library, Harvard University. 14.2 “Habito del Centurione,” in Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo, Venice, 1598, Private collection, Leverett, Massachusetts. 14.3 “Outina’s Military Discipline,” in Theodor De Bry, Brevis narratio eorvm qvae in Florida Americæ provı̃ cia Gallis acciderunt, Frankfurt, 1591. Robert Dechert Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. 14.4 “The Ceremony in which His Chosen Wife is Brought to the Chief,” in Theodor De Bry, Brevis narratio eorvm qvae in Florida Americæ provı̃ cia Gallis acciderunt, Frankfurt, 1591. Robert Dechert Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. 14.5 “Habito dei paggi,” in Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo, Venice, 1598. Private collection, Leverett, Massachusetts. 14.6 “The King and the Queen Set Out on a Relaxing Stroll,” in Theodor De Bry, Brevis narratio eorvm qvae in Florida Americæ provı̃ cia Gallis acciderunt, Frankfurt, 1591. Robert Dechert Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. 14.7 “Habito della Regina,” in Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo, Venice, 1598, Private collection, Leverett, Massachusetts.

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LIST OF FIGU RES

16.1 “Tenochtitlan,” in Frederick Peypus Arthimesius and Hernán Cortés, Praeclara Ferdinandi. Cortesii de nova maris oceani Hyspania narration, Nuremberg, 1524. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93-B9631). 16.2 “Tenochtitlan,” in Giulio Ballino and Bolognini Zalterii, De’ disegni delle piu illustri città et fortezze del mondo, Venice, 1569. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (84-B32443). 16.3 Alessandro dalla Via, “Pag. I,” in Antonio de Solís, Istoria della conquista del Messico: Della popolazione, e de’ progressi nell’America Settentrionale conosciuta sotto nome di Nuova Spagna, Venice, 1704. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93-B9622). 16.4 Alessandro dalla Via, “Pag. 8i,” in Antonio de Solís, Istoria della conquista del Messico: Della popolazione, e de’ progressi nell’America Settentrionale conosciuta sotto nome di Nuova Spagna, Venice, 1704. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93-B9622). 16.5 Alessandro della Via, “Pag. 45i,” in Antonio de Solís, Istoria della conquista del Messico: Della popolazione, e de’ progressi nell’America Settentrionale conosciuta sotto nome di Nuova Spagna, Venice, 1704. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93-B9622). 16.6 Isabella Piccini, “Moctezuma,” in Antonio de Solís, Istoria della conquista del Messico: Della popolazione, e de’ progressi nell’America Settentrionale conosciuta sotto nome di Nuova Spagna, Venice, 1704. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93-B9622).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Federica Ambrosini is professor emerita of history at the Università degli Studi di Padova, Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Geografiche e dell’Antichità. Her research focuses on the image of America in Venetian culture and on the history of women and gender in early modern Europe. She is currently studying the reception and circulation of Reformation ideas in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Italy. Her major publications include: Paesi e mari ignoti. America e colonialismo europeo nella cultura veneziana (secoli XVI–XVII) (1982), Storie di patrizi e di eresia nella Venezia del Cinquecento (1999), L’eresia di Isabella. Vita di Isabella da Passano signora della Frattina (1542–1601) (2005), and Una gentildonna davanti al Sant’Uffizio. Il processo per eresia di Isabella della Frattina (1568–1570) (2014). Maria Matilde Benzoni is an assistant professor of modern history at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Dipartimento di Scienze della Mediazione Linguistica e di Studi Interculturali. Her research focuses on the relationship between Italy, Europe, and the Americas in the first global age. Her major publications include La cultura italiana e il Messico. Storia di un’immagine da Temistitan all’Indipendenza (1519–1821) (2004), and Americhe e modernità. Un itinerario fra storia e storiografia dal 1492 ad oggi (2012). She is currently working on a biography of Antonello Gerbi. Brian Brege is an assistant professor of history at Syracuse University. He was a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Boston College (2016–17) and a Fulbright Italy Fellow (2010–11). He completed his dissertation, “The Empire That Wasn’t: The Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Empire, 1574–1609,” at Stanford University in 2014; it won the Ezio Cappadocia Prize for Best Unpublished Manuscript from the Society for Italian Historical Studies (2016). Ireri E. Chávez-Bárcenas is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Music at Princeton University. Her dissertation focuses on devotional music and Tridentine thought in seventeenth-century Puebla de los Ángeles. She received her master’s degree (summa cum laude) in religion and music from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Her publications have appeared in Eighteenth Century Music, Discanto, and Heterofonía. She collaborated with xii

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

historian Vera Candiani on the project Listening to Colonial Latin America: Music, Sounds and Silence as Historical Sources (2013), a music and visual website designed for the undergraduate history course in colonial Latin America at Princeton University. She has been the recipient of several grants and fellowships from various institutions, including the Princeton Program in Latin American Studies and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Mackenzie Cooley is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the history of culture and science in Renaissance Italy, Spain, and the Spanish-American colonies and has been supported by the Council on Library and Information Resources, Fulbright Spain, and the Mellon Foundation. Her dissertation concerns Renaissance attempts to perfect nature and centers on animals, natural history, and the knowledge of reproduction. Davide Domenici is an assistant professor in the Dipartimento di Storia, Culture, Civiltà (DISCI) at the Università di Bologna, where he teaches “Native American Art and Culture” and “Historical Anthropology.” He has directed archaeological projects in Chiapas, Mexico (1998–2010) and Cahokia, Illinois, USA (2011–present). He is currently studying Mesoamerican artefacts and manuscripts held in Italian and European collections, including their early modern arrival in Europe and their material composition. His recent publications include “The Colours of Indigenous Memory: Non-invasive Analyses of Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican Codices” (with D. Buti; C. Miliani; B. G. Brunetti; A. Sgamellotti), in Science and Art: The Painted Surface (2014); “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts to Pope Clement VII in 1532–1533: Tracking the Early History of Some Mexican Objects and Codices in Italy (with L. Laurencich Minelli), Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl (2014); “The Wandering ‘Leg of an Indian King’: The Cultural Biography of a Friction Idiophone Now in the Pigorini Museum in Rome, Italy,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes (2016). Massimo Donattini is professor emeritus of early modern history in the Dipartimento di Storia, Culture, Civiltà (DISCI) at the Università di Bologna. His research examines the history of Renaissance geography and the Italian cultural response to the Age of Discovery in the sixteenth century. He is the author of Spazio e modernità. Libri, carte e isolari nell’età delle scoperte (2000) and Dal Nuovo Mondo all’America. Scoperte geografiche e colonialismo (2004). He is also the editor of L’Italia dell’Inquisitore. Storia e geografia dell’Italia del Cinquecento nella Descrittione di Leandro Alberti (2007), and (with Giuseppe Marcocci and Stefania Pastore) L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi. Per Adriano Prosperi, vol. II (2011).

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David Gentilcore is a professor of early modern history and a fellow at the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Leicester. He is the author of seven books focused on both the history of medicine and the history of food, including Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (2006), which was awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s Jason A. Hannah medal. In 2012, he was awarded the Salvatore De Renzi International Prize by the Università degli Studi di Salerno for his research and publications on the history of medicine. His chapter in this volume benefits from his study of the reception of New World plants in Italy, made possible by a Leverhulme Trust Major Fellowship (2007–10), and from his study of maize and the pellagra epidemic, funded by a research grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (2013–16). Nathalie Hester is an associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on early modern French and Italian travel writing, historiography, and women’s writing. She is the author of Literature and Identity in Baroque Italian Travel Writing (2008). Her current work in progress includes a monograph titled Italy’s America: Baroque Epic Poetry and the New World, and an edition and translation of Marie-Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars’ letters from Spain (1679–81). Elizabeth Horodowich is professor of history at New Mexico State University. She is the author of Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (2008) and A Brief History of Venice (2009), and is the recipient of awards and fellowships from a variety of institutions, including Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, the American Historical Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Ann Rosalind Jones is professor emerita of comparative literature at Smith College. Her work includes two books on women writers of the Renaissance, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe 1540–1620 (1990) and a translation of The Poems and Selected Letters of Veronica Franco, with Margaret F. Rosenthal (1998). Her more recent work has focused on the meanings of dress in early modern Europe, including Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, with Peter Stallybrass (2000), winner of the Modern Language Association’s 2001 James Russell Lowell Prize, and a second translation with Margaret Rosenthal, The Clothing of the Renaissance World (Europe, Asia, Africa, America): Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni (2008). She is now finishing a study of European collections of prints representing dress, titled Global Habits: The Early Modern Costume Book, 1560–1660. Karen J. Lloyd is an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University. She is the coeditor of A Transitory Star: The Late Bernini and His

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Reception (2015), and the author of articles and book chapters on Bernini, art collecting and display in seventeenth-century Rome, and the polemics of the early modern devotional image. She has held fellowships at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, the Villa Medici – Académie de France à Rome, and Queen’s University. She is currently completing a monograph on the visual apologetics of nepotism in papal Rome. Lia Markey is the director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She published Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (2016) and co-wrote the exhibition catalog Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum (2014). The recipient of fellowships from the Kress and Mellon Foundations, the Renaissance Society of America, the Folger Library, the Warburg Institute, Harvard’s Villa I Tatti and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. Katherine McAllen is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She is the recipient of the Fulbright-Hays fellowship, and her research focuses on artistic exchange between colonial Mexico, Peru, and early modern Europe. She is the author (with Tom Cummins) of “New Cities of God: Art and Devotion in Colonial Peru and Bolivia,” in Highest Heaven: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art from the Collection of Roberta and Richard Huber (2016) and “Time and Space on the Missionary Frontier: Cultural Dynamics and the Defense of Northern New Spain,” in Circa 1718: Mexican Art During San Antonio’s First Century (2018). Mary Watt is an associate professor of Italian at the University of Florida. Her research considers medieval and early modern Italian literature and culture, with a particular focus on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her work has been supported by the Rothman Endowment for the Humanities, the Municipality of Ravenna, Italy, and the University of Oslo’s Norwegian Institute in Rome. She is the author of The Cross that Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade, and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy (2005), as well as numerous journal articles, book chapters, reviews, and translations. Her recent book Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition: Spiritual Imperialism in the Italian Imagination examines how Christopher Columbus relied on the cosmology of the Divine Comedy and the figure of Dante to legitimize his role in the Age of Encounters.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began as a set of conference panels at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Washington, DC in March 2012, and at the SixteenthCentury Studies Conference in San Juan in October 2013. The editors therefore thank these two scholarly organizations for supporting this project and the participants and audience members of these sessions. Numerous colleagues assisted us with this volume. We are especially grateful to Timothy McCall for first introducing us to one another and helping us to bring together our common interests in Italy and the New World. Paula Findlen put us in touch with two of her graduate students, who subsequently became critical contributors to this book. Massimo Donattini offered useful comments to the two essays that introduce this volume. We are particularly grateful to all of our contributors, whose patience, flexibility, and good spirit allowed for this project to come to fruition. We thank Eufemia Baldassarre for her careful edits of the final round of proofs. Thank you to former Cambridge editor Asya Graf for ushering us through the initial stages with the press, and to Beatrice Rehl for completing the publication with us. Finally, we are indebted to the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies and the New Mexico State University College of Arts and Sciences for their support of our volume.

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CHAPTER ONE

ITALY’S VIRTUAL DISCOVERY: AN INTRODUCTION Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey

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n 1494, the duke of ferrara, ercole d’este, sent an envoy, Alberto Cantino, on a secret mission to Lisbon to search for geographic information to confirm rumors at court that a new route to Asia had been found by sailing west. Cantino was an undercover agent, purportedly dispatched to Portugal to trade in horses while secretly, most likely, hunting for news about the Indie Orientali. Biding his time while he waited for the right materials, Cantino noted in his letters to the Duke how he had heard Gaspar Corte-Real describe his recent voyage to Newfoundland to King Manuel I of Portugal1. Around the same time that he sent Cantino to Portugal, Ercole wrote to Florentine ambassador Manfredo Manfredi looking for information about these newly discovered islands. Ercole noted to Manfredo that “we will gain great pleasure from [this information]” and “when you have gotten it, send it at once, but be careful to get everything there is, just as we desire.”2 Finally, in 1502, Cantino found the right dealer and paid the hefty sum of twelve golden ducats to procure a map of the New World from a Portuguese cartographer: a map he managed to smuggle successfully back into Italy, and that was one of the first European cartographic representations of the Americas.3

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Alberto Cantino, letter to Ercole d’Este, June 7, 1501, in Italian Reports on America, 1493–1522: Letters, Dispatches, and Papal Bulls, Repertorium Columbianum 10, ed. Geoffrey Symcox (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 49, 110. Ibid., June 26, 1494, 46, 107. 3 Ibid., November 19, 1502, 60–1, 118.

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The Cantino Planisphere (Plate 1), now in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, illustrates the location of various regions of the world in relation to one another with regard to latitude.4 It depicts the important sights, including the flora and fauna, of various locales; a walled town represents Germany, and orange and blue parrots inhabit the newly discovered Brazil. A vertical blue line traversing the map clearly indicates the 1493 papal bull that divided the world between Spain and Portugal. Most importantly, however, the Cantino Planisphere represents one of the earliest maps of North America’s east coast. It is the earliest surviving visual record depicting the Portuguese discoveries in the New World and offers the first cartographic image of the Brazilian coast explored by Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500. Ercole d’Este elicited this knowledge long before other European states had even heard of the existence of these lands. Shortly after its arrival, the Cantino map was copied onto the Canerio (or Caveri) map, which then became the primary source of geographic information for Martin Waldseemüller’s highly influential map of the world, produced in 1507 for Rene, the Duke of Lorraine, and famously the first map to name America in print. In all its details, the history of the Cantino Map neatly reveals Italians’ precocious curiosity about the New World: a curiosity that, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, was deeply felt along the Italian peninsula. Italians’ engagement with the Americas usually did not involve direct contact, but as for Alberto Cantino and Ercole d’Este, was more often virtual and intermediary in nature. The story of the Cantino Planisphere also reveals the significant and powerful role that learned Italians played in the collection and transmission of news and information about the New World in the early modern period. The Venetian miniaturist Benedetto Bordone’s map of “Temistitan” (Mexico City) that adorns the cover of this book similarly circulated widely for decades and offers evidence of the same: that Italy represented a clearinghouse for the dissemination of knowledge about the New World. Fernand Braudel argued that “the Italians took part in the great discoveries – Venezuela is after all, little Venice – but the Italian population was not short of space at this period; the bourgeoisie was not interested in the world beyond the Mediterranean 4

On the Cantino map, see Henry Harisse, The Discovery of North America: A Critical, Documentary, and Historic Investigation (London: Henry Stevens and Son, 1892), 423; Duarte Leite, “O mais antigo mapa do Brasil,” in História da Colonização Portuguesa do Brasil (Porto: Litografia Nacional, 1923), 2:227–32; Armando Cortesão and Avelino Teixeira da Mota, Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica, 6 vols. (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1987), 1:9; Edzer Roukema, “Brazil in the Cantino Map,” Imago Mundi 17 (1963): 7–26; Moacyr Pereira, “A Ilha Brasileira do Planisfério da Casa de Este,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 309 (1975): 680–718; Ernesto Milano, La carta del Cantino e la rappresentazione della terra nei codici e nei libri a stampa della Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria (Modena: Il Bulino, 1991); and Joaquim Alves Gaspar, “Blunders, Errors, and Entanglements: Scrutinizing the Cantino Planisphere with a Cartometric Eye,” Imago Mundi 64 (2012): 181–200.

I TA L Y’ S VIRTUAL DI SCOVER Y: AN INTRODUCTION

horizon.”5 The story of the Cantino Planisphere, however – as well as many others recounted in this volume – belies Braudel’s suggestion that Italians were uninterested in the Americas. The purpose of this book is to address such misconceptions and imbalances to examine more carefully the connections between Italy and the New World. These essays reveal how the Mediterranean and the Atlantic worlds were deeply connected, as well as how Italy was the recipient of early global culture as much as it was a donor of it. The New World in Early Modern Italy brings to light the ways in which ideas and images arriving from the Americas were just as significant as the people and commodities that crossed the Atlantic in the Age of Encounters. The turn toward global history and the study of cultural difference has encouraged scholars in many disciplines and fields to scrutinize more closely the myriad ways in which threads of economic, social, and cultural institutions have become woven together around the world.6 The early modern period saw some of the most crucial developments in the history of globalization. While cross-cultural relations abounded in the worlds of antiquity and the Middle Ages, across the Mediterranean or along the Silk Road, as Charles C. Mann put it in his iconic 1493: Uncovering the New World that Columbus Created, the Columbian voyages resulted in “nothing less than the forming of a single new world from the collision of . . . old worlds.”7 As Mann demonstrates, the world became exponentially more interconnected in the early modern period as a direct result of European interactions with the Americas. Sweet potatoes and maize appeared in China, resulting in deforestation and flooding; a massive influx of silver from Mexico to Spain and Europe produced hyperinflation in Europe; an even larger flood of silver from Potosí through the Philippines to China contributed to the collapse of the Ming Dynasty; for the first time, domesticated forms of cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and honeybees came to the Americas; and wherever the Columbian Exchange brought malaria to South America, the resulting catastrophic death rates allowed for the development of the slave trade from Africa. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz went so far as to hypothesize that the energy derived from Caribbean sugar plantations generated heightened productivity of labor that fueled the industrial revolution in

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Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volume 1 (London: Collins, 1971), 66, cited in Brian Brege, “The Empire that Wasn’t: The Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Empire, 1574–1609,” PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2014, 344. The work of Homi Bhabha has been instrumental for this shift in the field: The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Random House, 2011), xxv. See also Mimi Yiengpruksawan, Alexander Nagel, Christopher Wood, Eugene Wang, Alessandra Russo, David Joselit, and Barry Flood, “Roundtable: The Global before Globalization,” October 133 (2010): 3–19. See also Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972).

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England.8 Similar examples of the ramifications of early modern global interconnectedness exist ad infinitum; in Italy, perhaps most famously, in the arrival of the tomato.9 Biologically, economically, and culturally, Columbus’s journey prompted the world to turn the oceans from barriers into highways, to reshape economic and cultural systems globally, and, fundamentally, “to reknit the seams of Pangaea.”10 This new attention to global history and the significance of early modernity in the development of globalization has directly impacted the scholarship of early modern Italy. Historians, art historians, and literary scholars have recently begun to examine the cross-cultural relationships between Italy and the wider world much more carefully, especially the relationship between the cultures of Islam and Christianity.11 East–West interactions stretch back to the world of antiquity and the Middle Ages, to exchanges along the Silk Road and later, the Fourth Crusade, when European, Byzantine, and Muslim armies came into contact in and around Constantinople. As any reader of Marco Polo knows, early modern European contact with the Far East had medieval precedents, as well as Greek and Roman ones. The Columbian voyages and the discovery of the Portuguese route to India therefore by no means resulted in the first contact between Europeans and foreign populations; rather, they further extended a long-standing tradition of cultural contact, exchange, and negotiation. Political and cultural exchanges between Italy and a variety of “new worlds” nevertheless grew significantly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both with the East and the Islamic world, and also with the increasingly important economy and culture of the Americas.12 Reflecting this growing interest in cross-cultural history, historians of art and material culture have recently focused their scholarship on the cultural connections between Italy and the eastern Mediterranean. They have queried, for instance: How does looking to other cultural traditions allow us to better understand Western artistic phenomena? How did Florentine models of linear 8

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Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), 166. David Gentilcore, Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Mann, 1493, 11. The scholarship on this topic is vast and growing; for a useful overview, see Francesca Trivellato, “Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent Historical Work,” The Journal of Modern History 82 (2010): 127–55; Elizabeth Horodowich, “The Wider World: Foreigners, Travels, and Geography,” in Italian Renaissance Diplomacy. A Sourcebook, ed. Monica Azzolini and Isabella Lazzarini (Toronto: Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University and Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, Durham Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Translations, 6, 2017), 190–213. See, for instance, Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Chocolate and Tobacco in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

I TA L Y’ S VIRTUAL DI SCOVER Y: AN INTRODUCTION

perspective potentially have their roots in Arabic theories of optics?13 How can we explain the prevalence of Eastern motifs in Venetian architecture, for example, in the mosaics of San Marco that reveal Egyptian iconography, the planning of the Rialto market that reflected the urban configurations of Eastern trading cities like Aleppo and Damascus, or the profusion of Venetian balconies and the altana that imitated rooftop terraces from Damascus?14 How did hand-painted editions of Ptolemy serve as tools of community formation between Christian and Muslim cultures across the Mediterranean?15 Italian trade and travel made a permanent impression on Italian taste at home, and, as a result, Ottoman models for glass, textiles, ceramics, and metalwork acquired an elite status in early modern Italy. For instance, the Medici emulated Chinese blue-and-white porcelain in Florence and developed their own recipe for these ceramics.16 At the same time, Murano glass traveled to the Black Sea, the Ottomans became significant consumers of Italian luxury textiles, and Italian patterns were copied and imitated in Eastern paintings as well.17 The studies in this volume confirm how early modern culture developed as much from multicultural contact as it did from the rediscovery of antiquity. To put it another way, they suggest that the Renaissance occurred as a consequence of the discovery of global antiquities and cross-cultural knowledge, not just antiquities and texts from Greece and Rome. Acknowledging this fact has encouraged scholars to focus less on the intellectual and Western origins of the Renaissance – thereby curbing the centrality of the classical 13

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See Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100–1500 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Similarly, on the role of Egypt in Renaissance Italy, see Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). See Irene Backus, “Asia Materialized: Perceptions of China in Renaissance Florence,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2014, 52–97. See Rosamund E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also The Renaissance and the Ottoman World, eds. Anna Contadini and Claire Norton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); Stefano Carboni, ed. Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 27–July 9, 2007 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); and Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996). Historians and literary scholars have also examined numerous other cases of cross-cultural contact between East and West. See, for instance, Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); James Harper, ed., The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011); Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Transimperial Subjects Between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

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tradition – and more on the transmission of ideas and objects between various cultures.18 In short, by demonstrating Italy’s connections to the wider world beyond its shores, the pursuit of global and cross-cultural history has revived a period in Italian history that has otherwise risked marginalization. This collection of essays suggests some of the ways we can better understand significant aspects of early modern Italian society by examining its entanglements with other cultures: here, by looking from Italy to the West and the Atlantic world rather than to the East. As with the Ottoman world and the eastern Mediterranean, cross-cultural interactions between Italy and the Atlantic world also informed how Italian and Mediterranean peoples understood themselves and their world; connections between Italy and the New World, however, have tended to receive much less attention, especially in Anglophone scholarship. Early modern Italians extended their cultural interests not only to the eastern Mediterranean, but also to the Atlantic world, and Italian contact with the Americas had far-reaching consequences that merit more scholarly attention than they have hitherto received. By examining the links between Italy and the New World, this collection of essays shows the profound impact that knowledge, images, goods, and information from the Americas had on Italian ideas about spirituality, aesthetics, geography, modern science, wealth, history, and power. It further demonstrates how occupants of the Italian peninsula ardently sought to comprehend, experience, and at times even conserve the culture and nature of this new land. The New World in Early Modern Italy makes several fundamental contributions to scholarship on the Age of Encounters. Namely, it reassesses a venerable line of works on the reception of news and information from the New World in the Old in order to show how American ideas and images influenced early modern Italian culture. In particular, we reconsider the canonical studies of Giuliano Gliozzi, John Elliott, and Edmundo O’Gorman.19 Most famously, according to Elliott, the discovery of the New World had only a “blunted” 18

19

In this regard, we are informed by the following studies: Antonello Gerbi, La disputa del nuovo mondo: Storia di una polemica, 1750–1900 (Milan: Ricciardi, 1950); Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representing the Other (New York: Routledge, 1990); José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1977); John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). Other sources that argue for a slow and gradual response to the New World include Michael T. Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 519–38; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

I TA L Y’ S VIRTUAL DI SCOVER Y: AN INTRODUCTION

impact on the Old.20 It is a commonism of this “revisionist” scholarship that Europeans resisted acknowledging the significance of the New World and instead tended to incorporate new information about the Americas into old paradigms of knowledge as the authority of inherited classical texts proved incredibly durable. However, as these essays attest, Italians’ curiosity about and fascination with images and news arriving from the Americas was much more powerful than has been traditionally imagined. This knowledge, in fact, often made a profound impact on local European cultures. Like Anthony Grafton’s New Worlds, Ancient Texts, this volume seeks to nuance our understanding of the European engagement with the New World.21 Here, we hope to recast and expand on revisionist theories to show that the process of grappling with new knowledge of the Americas in Europe was never singular, homogenous, or comprehensive. It varied between authors, cities, and generations, and involved a great variety of perspectives and time frames. As we shall see, Italians managed, processed, and produced information about and images of the Americas in countless and distinct ways and in a variety of locations, some perhaps more quickly than others, but in many cases that do not appear in any way “blunted.” In addition, the vast majority of Atlantic world scholarship to date tends to focus on the acts of conquest, the imperial gaze, the politics of colonialism, and relationships between Europeans and indigenous peoples. In addition, it usually concentrates on Iberian, French, or English interactions in the Atlantic world. For instance, Barbara Fuchs’s study of early modern European literature demonstrates how the Spanish conquest of the Americas acted as an extension of the reconquista of the Moors, while Ricardo Padrón ties the invention of America in literature and cartography to the development of “Spanish grandeza.”22 Michael Househoulder’s edited volume Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery focuses on the English colonization of North America through the study of English travel writing, revising David Quinn’s comprehensive chronological survey of England’s engagement with the Americas.23 While a few works such as Benjamin Schmidt’s Innocence Abroad, Michael Wintroub’s A Savage Mirror, and Christine Johnson’s The German Discovery of the World have explored the reception of ideas about the New World in other parts of Europe 20

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John H. Elliott, “Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, vol. 1, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 11–23. Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 6–7. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 29. Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery: Narratives of Encounter, ed. Michael Householder (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).

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such as the Low Countries, France, and Germany, Anglophone scholarship has largely overlooked how ideas about the Americas were received in Italy.24 In a somewhat stereotypical reflection, historian Peter Burke remarked that “the Italians . . . responded warmly to the discoveries at first . . . but they seem to have lost interest in the course of the sixteenth century.”25 The Italian response is either conspicuously absent from or merely used anecdotally in panEuropean studies of the Encounter.26 Art historians and historians of collecting, on the other hand, have begun to explore Europe’s cultural engagement with the Americas, at times underscoring Italy’s role in particular.27 While some English-language scholarship has started to consider the place of the New World in the early modern Italian consciousness, most of these studies to 24

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Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Michael Wintroub, A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Christine R. Johnson, The German Discovery of the World: Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). See also Carina L. Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On France, also see the historical study of James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Peter Burke, “America and the Rewriting of World History,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1730, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 33–50, 45. It is striking that no contributor to Kupperman’s seminal conference and volume on the reception of the New World in Europe considered Italy. Benjamin Keen devotes only a few pages to the Italian textual response in The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 139–44. Similarly, Italy does not enter into Patricia Seed’s work Ceremonies of Possession: Europe’s Conquest of the New World 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Italy’s response does not enter substantially into the discussions of Elliott, Grafton, Greenblatt, or Pagden. See, for instance, the following art historical studies: Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); Jay A. Levenson, ed., Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, October 22, 1991–January 12, 1992 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Rachel Doggett, ed., New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492–1700, ed. Rachel Doggett, exh. cat. The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, October 8, 1992–March 6, 1993 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992); Claire Farago, ed., Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Some important studies on collecting American objects in Europe include Detlef Heikamp, “American Objects in Italian Collections of the Renaissance and Baroque: A Survey,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 455–82; Christian Feest, “American Indians and Ethnographic Collecting in Europe,” Museum Anthropology 16, 1 (1992): 7–11; ibid., “The Collecting of American Indian Artifacts in Europe, 1493–1750,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen O. Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 324–60; “Mexico and South America in the European Wunderkammer,” in The Origins of Museums, eds. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 237–44; Elke Bujok, “Ethnographica in Early Modern Kunstkammern,” Journal of the History of Collections 21 (2009): 17–32; Isabel Yaya, “Wonders of America: The Curiosity Cabinet as Site of Representation and Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Collections 20 (2008): 173–88.

I TA L Y’ S VIRTUAL DI SCOVER Y: AN INTRODUCTION

date have been undertaken by Italian scholars.28 The uneven shape of encounter studies, traditionally focused on European conquest in America, often diminishes the place of Italy as well as the effects of reception. While 28

See Elizabeth Horodowich, “Venetians in America: Nicolò Zen and the Virtual Exploration of the New World,” Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 841–77; Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016); Erin McCarthy-King, “The Voyage of Columbus as a ‘non pensato Male’: The Search for Boundaries, Grammar, and Authority in the Aftermath of the New World Discoveries,” and Andrea Moudarres, “The Geography of the Enemy: Old and New Empires Between Humanist Debates and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata,” in New Worlds and the Italian Renaissance: Contributions to the History of European Intellectual Culture, ed. Andrea Moudarres and Christiana Purdy Moudarres (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 25–44; 291–332; Liz Horodowich, “Armchair Travelers and the Venetian Discovery of the New World,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 36:4 (2005): 1039–62. For Italian scholarship on Italy and the New World, see, for instance, Paolo Revelli, Terre d’America e archivi d’Italia (Milan: Fratelli Treves editori, 1926); Samuel Hough, ed. Gli italiani e la creazione dell’America, 1440–1809, exh. cat. Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, May 23–June 22, 1981 (Providence, RI: John Carter Brown Library, 1981); Marisa Vannini De Gerulewicz, L’America agli occhi dei primi scopritori, Atti del III Convegno di Studi Colombiani (Genoa: Civico Istituto Colombiano, 1979); Federica Ambrosini, Paese et mari ignoti: America e colonialismo europeo nella cultura veneziana (secoli XVI–XVII) (Venice, Deputazione Editrice, 1982); Egidio Ortona, ed., Le Americhe: Storie di viaggiatori italiani (Milan: Electa, 1987); Rosario Romeo, Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento (Rome: Laterza, 1989); Angelo Caracciolo Aricò, ed., L’impatto della scoperta dell’America nella cultura veneziana (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990); Aldo Albònico, ed., Libri, idee, uomini tra l’America iberica, l’Italia e la Sicilia: Atti del convegno di Messina (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993); Uomini dell’altro mondo: L’incontro con i popoli americani nella cultura italiana ed europea (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993); Giuseppe Bellini, “La scoperta del Nuovo Mondo e la cultura del Cinquecento,” in Atti del Convegno Internazionale sulla scoperta colombiana e la cultura europea contemporanea, Erice 22–27 aprile 1992 (Palermo: Accademia nazionale di scienze lettere e arti di Palermo, 1993), 85–99; Adriano Prosperi and Wolfgang Reinhard, eds., Il Nuovo Mondo nella coscienza italiana e tedesca del Cinquecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992); Angelo Caracciolo Aricò, ed., Il letterato tra miti e realtà del nuovo mondo: Venezia, il mondo iberico e l’Italia, ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994); Gabriella Airaldi and Luciano Formisano, eds., La scoperta nelle relazioni sincrone degli italiani (Rome: Istituto Poligrafo dello stato, 1996); Daria Perocco, “Viaggiare verso le Americhe: reazioni [e relazioni] italiane nel primo secolo dopo la scoperta,” in Antonio Pigafetta e la letteratura di viaggio nel Cinquecento, ed. Adriano Chemello (Verona: Cierre, 1996), 81–102; Massimo Donattini, Spazio e modernità: libri, carte, isolari nell’età delle scoperte (Bologna: CLUEB, 2000); Francesco Surdich, Verso il nuovo mondo: L’immaginario europeo e la scoperta dell’America, 2nd ed. (Florence: Giunti, 2002); Maria Matilde Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico: Storia di un’immagine da Temistitan all’Indipendenza (1519–1821) (Milan: Unicopli, 2004). There exist numerous modern editions of early modern Italian sources about the New World beginning with: Guglielmo Berchet, ed., Fonti italiane per la storia della scoperta del nuovo mondo, 2 vols. (Rome: Il ministero della pubblica istruzione, 1892); Mario Farina, ed., I navigatori: La scoperta dell’America nelle lettere di Colombo de Cuneo, Vespucci, Verazzano (Turin: Loescher editore, 1971); Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi, 6 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1978); Pino Cimò, Il nuovo mondo: La scoperta dell’America nel racconto dei grandi navigatori italiani del Cinquecento (Milan: Mondadori, 1991); Paolo Collo and Pier Luigi Crovetto, Nuovo mondo, gli italiani 1492–1565 (Turin: Einaudi, 1991); Angelo Trevisan, Lettere sul nuovo mondo: Granada 1501, ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò (Venice: Albrizzi editore, 1993); Geoffrey Symcox, ed., Italian Reports on America 1493–1522, Letters, Dispatches and Papal Bulls, Repertorium Columbianum 10 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2001); Geoffrey Symcox, ed., Italian Reports on America 1493–1522: Accounts by Contemporary Observers, Repertorium Columbianum 12 (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2002).

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understanding the dynamics of imperial power remains essential in the study of New World colonialism, how ideas and images from the Americas were received in Europe remains a significant and understudied component of the Columbian Exchange. As the pivot of the European economy began to shift from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, how older, Mediterranean powers sought to position themselves in changing circumstances reveals the politics of knowledge: one of the fundamental contributions of these essays. The contemporary vibrancy of Mediterranean studies suggests the importance of considering the ways in which developments in the Atlantic world shaped Mediterranean thought. Historians have traditionally conceived of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds as separate and distinct, positing that as the Mediterranean economy declined, the growing power of the Atlantic economy replaced it.29 These essays demonstrate, however, the ways in which these worlds overlapped and were connected, mentally, cognitively, and intellectually, if not also through the exchange of goods and people.30 Before turning to a discussion of more substantive and specific examples, it is important to acknowledge that the term “Italy” did not, in the period with which we are concerned, define a single, unified state in the way it did for France or Spain. “Italy” remained a conglomeration of numerous, independent states in the early modern period, yet with a shared geography and, to some degree, a shared linguistic and cultural heritage. For these reasons, the use of terms such as “Italy” or “Italians” remains a matter of convenience; the idea of Italy as a single political entity is an arbitrary abstraction that arose largely in the nineteenth century, and one sixteenth-century individuals would have embraced little, if at all.31 Italy in this period was dominated by the Habsburgs and consisted of a variety of hybrid states that were culturally and politically both Italian and Spanish. Furthermore, transcultural interactions have typically occurred not between “Italy” and other parts of the world, but between individual Italian states and other cultures: for instance, between Venice and the Ottomans, or between Genoa, Spain, and the Americas. Translations of Ptolemy that revolutionized Europeans’ understanding of global geography, for instance, were the product of specific cross-cultural 29

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See, for instance, Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The Economic Decline of Empires (London: Methuen, 1970), 196–214. More recently, see Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic Growth,” The American Economic Review 95 (2005): 546–79. See Giuseppe Marcocci, “L’Italia nella prima età globale (ca. 1300–1700),” Storia 60 (2014): 7–50, esp. 16. Though some in the sixteenth century explicitly did. The Venetian chronicler of early modern global exploration Giovanni Battista Ramusio, for instance, often referred to “Italy” and “Italians,” and described Columbus as “an Italian man.” See Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 5:102.

I TA L Y’ S VIRTUAL DI SCOVER Y: AN INTRODUCTION

relationships between Byzantium and Florence at the turn of the fifteenth century, and not the product of Italian Renaissance humanism, generically. For these reasons, “Italy” as used here refers to the multiple and changing republics and principalities of the Italian peninsula, and their subjects, in the early modern period, while at the same time acknowledging the various and changing identities and loyalties that both individuals and particular Italian states experienced.32 As these essays will demonstrate clearly, regional centers on the Italian peninsula and various Italian states maintained decidedly distinct and different relationships to and interests in the Americas: interests that sometimes overlapped, but also varied regularly, and often remarkably. We have organized the essays in this volume into four thematic groups. Part I, “Italy before and after the Conquest,” offers a historical introduction to Italy’s relationship to and role in the Age of Encounters. Elizabeth Horodowich’s essay presents a broad overview of the links between Italian culture and European engagement with the New World. Italian commercial and intellectual life provided the background, impetus, and models for European conquest and colonialism in the Americas. She describes how, in the wake of the Columbian voyages, Italians played a crucial role in the collection of news and information about the Americas and their dissemination to the rest of early modern Europe. Mary Watt considers maritime imagery in Dante’s poetry, demonstrating how his writing, which prefigured the Columbian voyages, served as a cultural catalyst and an inspiration for maritime exploration and, in a broader historical context, fundamentally informed the Age of Encounters. Federica Ambrosini examines sixteenth-century Venetian diplomatic reports from Spain and in particular, Venetian reactions to the Spanish accumulation of wealth. Venetian ambassadorial letters and dispatches offer unique insights into Italian perceptions of and reactions to the Americas. She reveals Venice’s often ambivalent, wary, and sometimes even openly hostile attitudes toward Spain and Spanish activities in the New World. Part II, “The New World and Italian Religious Culture,” focuses on the ways in which the New World encounter affected Italian ideas about spirituality and religious practice. Through a close analysis of a series of letters and chronicles, Massimo Donattini reconstructs the histories of three Bolognese Franciscans who worked as missionaries in sixteenth-century Mexico. Donattini explores how apocalyptic culture in Bologna influenced how these Franciscans understood their missionary goals, as well as how their accounts reveal changing missionary attitudes toward Native Americans and a growing negative response to the Spaniards. This missionary correspondence illuminates 32

See Marcocci, “L’Italia nella prima età globale,” 11. For a discussion of the concepts of nation, state, and patrie in sixteenth-century Italy, see, for instance, Federico Chabod, “Alcune questioni di terminologia: Stato, nazione, patria nel linguaggio del Cinquecento” (1957), reprinted in ibid., Scritti sul Rinascimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 625–49.

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how both news of events and ideas traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, showing how thought and culture in the Old World and the New fertilized one another. Davide Domenici examines two sixteenth-century Italian lists of Indian objects given as gifts by Dominican missionaries. Through a close analysis of the descriptive language used to define these foreign objects, he demonstrates how these missionary gifts differed from secular gifts from the New World in this period. Rather than serving to materialize the political space of the Americas, these objects instead offered tangible evidence of Native Americans’ intellectual abilities and potential for conversion. Maria Matilde Benzoni describes how the archbishop of Milan, Federico Borromeo, had copious access to both oral and textual information about the Americas in seventeenth-century Milan and Rome, both of which represented hubs of global information. Borromeo commented extensively on the New World, sometimes employing examples from it to enlighten his flock about virtue and vice, as well as to suggest the ways in which it served as a model for evangelization in Milan and Europe. For Borromeo, the Americas were a mirror in which European societies were reflected. Karen Lloyd considers how the Peruvian Virgin of Copacabana became a compelling figure for seventeenth-century Romans. Members of the Augustinian order first brought “statue paintings” of the Virgin to Rome in the late sixteenth century and the cult of the Peruvian Virgin took hold in Rome, Milan, and Turin in the second half of the seventeenth century. However, an entrenched resistance to Spanish monarchical and colonial intrusions on Italian soil resulted in its eventual disappearance, once again reflecting Italian criticism of Spanish culture and imperialism. Similarly investigating the movement of religious imagery from the New World to the Old, Katherine McAllen explores how Jesuits traveled regularly between Italy and New Spain. They brought with them Jesuit martyrdom images from Mexico, which circulated in Rome and directly inspired the creation of new artworks in the city, transforming how Roman audiences understood New Spain and encouraging local Jesuit audiences to contemplate these instances of martyrdom in the Americas. While historian John O’Malley stated that the Catholic Church “does not seem to have sustained a high level of excitement over the prospect of the New World and the new peoples offered to its pastoral care,” these essays suggest that O’Malley’s generalization was not conclusive.33 Part III, “New World Plants in the Italian Imagination,” looks at the various ways in which an interest in American agricultural products took root among Italian naturalists, farmers, and merchants, enriching scientific collection, challenging botanical paradigms, and even inspiring Italian plans for conquest and 33

John W. O’Malley, “The Discovery of America and Reform Thought at the Papal Court in the Early Cinquecento,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, vol. 1, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 187.

I TA L Y’ S VIRTUAL DI SCOVER Y: AN INTRODUCTION

colonization in the Americas. Mackenzie Cooley’s essay reveals the understudied links between southern Italy and the Americas in the early modern period. Southern Italians regularly traveled to the New World through military and Jesuit networks, and Cooley demonstrates how the nexus of the Habsburg Empire connected southern Italy to the Americas, both symbolically and physically, more regularly and deeply than has been traditionally acknowledged. She shows how the famed Tesoro messicano, a book of nature begun in Mexico, left unfinished by the Spanish, and ultimately completed by Italian naturalists, represents one of the great Neapolitan contributions to European knowledge of the New World. David Gentilcore’s essay examines the Italian assimilation of New World foods – especially tomatoes, maize, and potatoes – as a means of illuminating Italy’s engagement with the Americas. He finds that while Italian elites initially expressed a deep curiosity about New World plants, they paid little attention to their Native American uses, and the naturalization and regular consumption of these foodstuffs in Italy sometimes took hundreds of years. Brian Brege narrates the events surrounding Tuscan incursions into the New World in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, inspired by dreams of sugar and undertaken in the hopes of establishing a colonial presence in Brazil. Brege charts the mercantile activities of Florentine families and Medici attempts, following the creation of the port at Livorno, to develop relations with Brazil with an eye to importing sugar and other commodities. This was the Italian peninsula’s only endeavor in the early modern period to build a colony in the New World: an impossible feat, he shows, due to the powerful Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch empires and their relentless monopolization of trade with the Americas. Part IV, “Representing America,” considers the ways in which knowledge and information from the New World influenced early modern Italian art and literature, as well as the ways in which Italians depicted this new knowledge. In late sixteenth-century Bologna, naturalist and physician Ulisse Aldrovandi studied the nature of the New World and produced a vast library of watercolor drawings of plants, animals, and peoples to document the Americas. Lia Markey’s essay reflects on Aldrovandi’s conception of al vivo in relation to his images of unseen New World natives, demonstrating what sources, images, and artifacts inspired their production. Ann Rosalind Jones examines the textual and visual depiction of six Floridians in Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo (1598) and the text’s place in the Venetian book trade. She explores why Vecellio excerpted only single figures from Theodore de Bry’s renowned America Occidentalis (1591), as well as how these images reflected and informed sixteenth-century European ideas about exoticism. Nathalie Hester analyzes the poetry of exploration in Modenese court writer Girolamo Graziani’s depiction of Christopher Columbus in his seventeenthcentury epic Il conquisto di Granata (1650). In a convenient reworking of the

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historical timeline, Graziani’s Columbus returns to Spain from his first voyage to the Americas (presumably in early 1493) in time to fight the Moors and plays a decisive role in their defeat. Graziani creatively refashioned Columbus as a central protagonist of the reconquista, and as a prophetic, larger-than-life figure that directly linked Reconquest and Conquest and affirmed Italian participation in European imperialism. The volume concludes with Ireri Chávez Bárcenas’s essay, which reassesses Vivaldi’s Motezuma (1733) in the broader context of Italian discussions about the New World and in relation to the development of opera seria in eighteenth-century Venice. She demonstrates how his opera represented the culmination of a long tradition of Venetian intellectual engagement with the Americas, dating back to the early sixteenth century. Vivaldi used his opera to express an ambiguous position about Spanish imperialism, echoing Venetian ideas about Spain and the New World from the very beginning of the Age of Encounters, as well as the Italian sentiments depicted in the essays by Ambrosini and Lloyd. One of the goals of this collection is to question and interrogate the very notion of discovery: a loaded and problematic concept. Contemporary Ottoman activity in the Indian Ocean, for instance, tends to be lesser known than the time-honored narratives of the European landing in the Americas, but in terms of the territory added to their sovereigns’ sway, the achievements of Columbus and Cortés were dwarfed by those of their Turkish contemporaries. Far from a pale imitation of the European voyages of discovery, Ottoman expansion into the Indian Ocean was much greater than that of Europeans in the Atlantic. As historian Felipe Fernández-Armésto put it, where Muslim merchants were extremely well connected, the European age of expansion was launched “from the insecure edges of a contracting civilization” on the part of small and sparsely populated states that were only scantily endowed in natural resources compared to the wealthy Ottoman Empire at the height of its power.34 The concept of discovery – historians are quick to remind us – is entirely relative. Furthermore, as Eviatar Zerubavel has persuasively argued, America was by no means “discovered” in 1492; it took Europeans hundreds of years to fully grasp its geography alone.35 The essays in this volume expand on these ideas, querying the ways in which Italian intellectuals continued to explore and grapple with the idea of America hundreds of years after Columbus’s landfall in the Caribbean: a process that continued well into the eighteenth century. 34

35

Felipe Fernández–Armésto, Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years (London: Black Swan, 1996), 155. See also Caroline Finkel, “‘The Treacherous Cleverness of Hindsight’: Myths of Ottoman Decay,” in Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East, ed. Gerald MacLean (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 168–9, and Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Eviatar Zerubavel, Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 2003).

I TA L Y’ S VIRTUAL DI SCOVER Y: AN INTRODUCTION

Though we were unfortunately unable to include an example in this volume, the research of Laura Laurencich-Minelli focused on the circulation of ideas from the New World in eighteenth-century Italy. For instance, she has considered the impact of Jesuit scholars and teachers such as Francisco Saverio Clavijero and Rafael Landivar after they were expelled from New Spain in 1767. When they returned to Bologna, their knowledge of the Americas challenged local thought and culture by valorizing Mexican history and emphasizing the nobility of Native American cultures. Jesuit linguists and naturalists who returned to Bologna in the eighteenth century prompted a renewed interest in the history of the Americas and transformed the attitudes of learned Bolognese toward the New World. Through this and other research, Laurencich-Minelli has left a significant imprint on our understanding of Italy’s relationship to the Americas, and on the dynamic exchange of ideas and culture between the New World and the Old as it continued to take place hundreds of years after the Columbian voyages.36 While we must recognize its limitations and Eurocentric bias, we believe that the concept of discovery is not to be jettisoned entirely, since, where the reception of ideas and information about the Americas in Europe was concerned, Europeans “discovered” a lot during the Age of Encounters. These essays demonstrate how the act of discovery – of both the self and of the other – happened as much in Italy as it did in the New World. Italians were among the most significant virtual and vicarious explorers of the Americas. Recognizing the myriad ways in which Italians received and configured knowledge and representations of the New World involves continuing to move discussions about the discovery of America beyond the acts of conquest and domination, as well as beyond the more obvious commercial, political, and economic components of conquest. Terms such as “New World” and “Age of Exploration/ Discovery” – and indeed, even “the Americas” – are necessarily laden with imperial and colonial meanings. Such terminology recognizes only one side of global interactions that were in fact much larger and more complex. This was an age of encounters among different parts of the world rather than the “discovery” of one part by another. While the actual activities and experiences of Iberian and other agents in the Americas was of course entirely structured by their colonial ambitions, Italian engagement with the Americas, we must again 36

Laurencich–Minelli’s bibliography on Italy and the New World is too vast to list in its entirety here. Her most important contributions include: Un giornale del cinquecento sulla scoperta dell’America: il manoscritto di Ferrara (Milan: Cisalpino–Goliardica, 1985); Indiani delle Grandi Pianure nella raccolta di Antonio Spagni (Reggio Emilia: Comune di Reggio nell’Emilia, 1992); Bologna e il Mondo Nuovo (Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1992); “Le culture del Nuovo Mondo,” in Il teatro della natura di Ulisse Aldrovandi, ed. Raffaella Simili (Bologna: Editrice Compositori, 2001), 90–4; “From the New World to Bologna, 1533: A Gift for Pope Clement VII and Bolognese Collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” Journal of the History of Collections 24:2 (2012): 145–58.

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note, was largely devoid of colonial implications. This study recognizes, therefore, the complexity of the term “discovery” for a land that always existed. If and when we employ the term “discovery” here, it is often to evoke the exploratory nature with which Italians reacted to the New World. While some Italians traveled to the Americas in the early modern period, for the most part, Italians did not “discover” the New World by going there, but by reading about it and seeing objects from the New World at home. They made their own discovery of America mostly second hand, and in “discovering” America, discovered themselves, in turn producing and disseminating knowledge about it in a European context. The Columbian Exchange, we emphasize, was not just one of plants and animals, commodities, diseases, conquistadors, missionaries, and slaves. It was also one of images, ideologies, and ideas, as much in countries that did not play an active role in the colonization of the New World as in those that did.

1 Cantino map, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena, 1502. With permission from the Ministero dei beni e della attività culturali e del turismo di Modena.

2 Placido Siculo (?), Virgin of Copacabana, Casa of the Augustinian Recollects, Rome, 1655. Photo by Michael Rubenstein with the permission of the Order of Augustinian Recollects, Rome.

3 Anonymous (Valencian), Virgin of Copacabana, Church of San Carlo, Turin, ca. 1690. Photo by Michael Rubenstein.

4 Anonymous, Virgin of Copacabana, Casa of the Augustinian Recollects, Rome, eighteenth century. Photo by Michael Rubenstein with the permission of the Order of Augustinian Recollects, Rome.

5 Artist unknown, Father Bernardo de Cisneros and Father Diego de Orozco, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome, 1616–17. Photo by James McAllen, Jr. with permission from the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome.

6 Artist unknown, Father Fernando de Santarén, Archivum Romanum Societatus Iesu (ARSI), Rome, 1616–17. Photo by James McAllen, Jr. with permission from the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome.

7 Artist unknown, Father Gerónimo de Moranta and Father Juan del Fonte, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome, 1616–17. Photo by James McAllen, Jr. with permission from the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome.

8 Jacopo Zucchi, Detail of Corn, Fresco in the Casino or Garden Room of the Villa Medici, Rome, ca. 1585. Photo by Lia Markey.

9 Artist unknown, Floridian, Tavole di animali di Ulisse Aldrovandi, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ca. 1570–90. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna.

10 Artist unknown, Brazilian, Tavole di animali di Ulisse Aldrovandi, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ca. 1570–90. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna.

PART I

ITALY BEFORE AND AFTER THE CONQUEST

CHAPTER TWO

ITALY AND THE NEW WORLD Elizabeth Horodowich

I

taly occupies a paradoxical place in the history of travel, exploration, and the New World. Italians claim Marco Polo as one of the greatest historical travelers, but other notable Italian explorers such as Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Giovanni da Verrazzano, and Antonio Pigafetta all worked for Spanish, French, and English monarchs. Italian presses disseminated the vast majority of texts, maps, and information about the New World to the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century, but Italian states never became colonial powers in America, and Italians are often described as having “failed” both to grasp the significance of the Americas and to develop colonies in the New World.1 The American continent bears Amerigo Vespucci’s name, but as any reader of the history of the New World knows, this appellation was a misnomer. It was the product of an erroneous textual citation on Martin I am grateful to Massimo Donattini for reading a draft of this chapter in progress. Fernand Braudel, for instance, noted that Genoa was “just as well placed as Hamburg or Amsterdam for access to the maritime routes to America, the Indies or China,” suggesting that its failure to develop greater interests in the New World represented a missed opportunity. See Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., 2nd revised ed., 1966, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2:821. I thank Brian Brege for this citation. See also Deborah Howard, “The Status of the Oriental Traveller in Renaissance Venice,” in Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East, ed. Gerald MacLean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 31–2; and Geoffrey Symcox, “Introduction,” in Italian Reports on America, 1493–1522: Letters, Dispatches, and Papal Bulls, ed. Geoffrey Symcox, Repertorium Columbianum 12 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 23–4.

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Waldseemüller’s 1507 map that resulted in the christening of this continent after a self-promoting member of the popolo grosso from landlocked Florence, mistakenly advancing the conception of events on the other side of the world in terms of Italy, Italians, and Italian leadership. Offering a brief introduction to the relationship between the Italian states and the New World in the early modern period – in part through a consideration of such paradoxes – this chapter presents an overview of the ways in which Italian culture played a crucial role in the European encounter with the New World, including the ways in which it provided the background, impetus, and models for European conquest and colonialism in the Americas, as well as the ways in which Italians were fundamental to the collection and spread of news and information about the New World in early modern Europe.2 The Italian contribution to the discovery, understanding, and “creation” of America began well before Columbus’ voyage.3 Italian missionaries and merchants regularly traded across vast swathes of the world during the later Middle Ages, traveling to China, around the Mediterranean, and along the west coast of Africa, helping to create a European desire for exotic, foreign wares and commodities, as well as the potential routes by which to get them.4 Italian bankers, moreover, were regularly involved in financial ventures in Spain. The commercial and banking city of Genoa directly influenced Spanish affairs, since Genoese immigrants, and bankers among them, became deeply involved in the economic, political, and cultural life of the Iberian Peninsula in the later Middle Ages, where they developed a symbiotic and complementary relationship of political and economic exchange. As political economist Giovanni Arrighi put it, “on the one side, the pursuit of power of the territorialist component [Iberia] created profitable trade opportunities for the capitalist component [Genoa] and, on the other side, the pursuit of profit of the latter [Genoa] strengthened the effectiveness and efficiency of . . . the territorialist component [Iberia].”5 Genoese bankers resident in Seville, in fact, financed one of Columbus’ ships, the Santa Maria, with funds belonging to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de’ Medici.6 Venetian merchants similarly operated in a variety of cities around Spain during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and were active in Seville on the eve of the Columbian 2

3

4

5

6

For a discussion of the meanings of “Italy” and “Italians” in the early modern period, see the introduction to this volume. See Giuseppe Marcocci, “L’Italia nella prima età globale (ca. 1300–1700),” Storia 60 (2014): 7–50, esp. 15. See Folker E. Reichert, Begegnungen mit China: Die Entdeckung Ostasiens im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Sigmaringen, 1992). Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 120–1. I am grateful to Kenneth Hammond for pointing out this study. Francesco Surdich, Verso il nuovo mondo: L’immaginario europeo e la scoperta dell’America, 2nd ed. (Florence: Giunti, 2002), 69–73.

I TA L Y A ND THE NE W W OR L D

voyages.7 Italian merchant capital, and especially that of Genoese, Florentine, and Venetian merchants, bankers, and investors, therefore played a crucial role in the Iberian exploration of the Atlantic, often funding expeditions originating in other states, including the early Bristol expeditions and the voyages of John Cabot.8 In addition, the Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese were the most significant – if not the only – colonial powers in the European Middle Ages. They developed a model for maintaining mercantile communities in foreign cities, establishing groups of merchants and traders in cities such as Alexandria, Constantinople, Aleppo, and Tyre who conducted business between these foreign lands and the metropole. The Spanish and Portuguese in the New World built on the experiences of these Italian colonial businessmen and traders in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and along the western coast of Africa. Italian merchants developed the Portuguese port city of Lagos into an important harbor for the coral trade, and Lagos later became the starting point for early Portuguese maritime exploration. Many features of Iberian colonialism in the New World, such as convoy navigation or the development of sugarcane farming (including the use of African slaves in sugar production on both sides of the Atlantic), had Italian precedents. Italian colonialism directly influenced Iberian colonialism, and Italian capital and experience in the colonial economy on the islands off the coast of West Africa in particular served as a prototype for colonialism in the Americas.9 Furthermore, as its imperial dimensions grew, Spain consistently maintained an imaginative dependence on the Roman model of empire. The identity of the Spanish monarchy was inherently linked to Roman imperial visions of a single orbis terrarium, and early modern Spaniards often cast themselves as new Romans.10 Italian textual contributions and practices, in particular the humanist revival of classical literature, also greatly facilitated the “discovery” and “creation” of the New World. It remains an enduring trope of the literature on the New World discoveries that the “Age of Discoveries [was] an essential manifestation of 7

8

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10

See Luisa D’Arienzo, “La presenza dei veneziani in Andalusia all’epoca di Cristoforo Colombo,” in Il letterato tra miti e realtà del nuovo mondo: Venezia, il mondo iberico e l’Italia: Atti del convegno di Venezia, 21–23 ottobre 1992, ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994), 203–30. Marcocci, “L’Italia nella prima età globale,” 30. Archival evidence suggests that the Italian merchant colony in London and London-based Italian bankers, including the Bardi family in Florence, funded John Cabot’s voyages and the early Bristol expeditions. See Evan T. Jones, “Alwyn Ruddock: ‘John Cabot and the Discovery of America,’” Historical Research 81 (2008): 224–54, and Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli, “John Cabot and His Italian Financiers,” Historical Research 85 (2012): 372–93. Charles Verlinden, “Italian Influence in Iberian Colonization,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 33 (1953): 199–211. See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c.1800 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 1–62, and Thomas Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 1500–1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 34–52.

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Renaissance culture”: of an early modern Italian “spectacular outburst of curiosity,” an “impulse to experience and to know,” and a “passion for observation.”11 As Italian literary scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta put it, “when Renaissance man discovered himself and his freedom vis a vis history, he also discovered new worlds and new perspectives.”12 While it is objectively difficult to link the revival of antiquity and ancient texts to enthusiasm, “freedom,” and “discovery,” it is nevertheless certain that the recuperation of Ptolemaic texts, first made possible when Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras gave Florentine banker Palla Strozzi copies of them in early fifteenth-century Florence, allowed for the development of an influential new model of geography.13 The revival of Ptolemaic texts under Florentine patronage revolutionized the means of geographical representation available to Europeans by generating a spatial grid and coordinates for any place on earth. Ptolemy’s system offered a technical, cartographic structure with which to record detailed information from newly discovered or foreign lands, including the Americas.14 The Ptolemaic framework became one of the basic intellectual structures for understanding and mapping newly discovered territories both around the globe and specifically in the New World, and in the course of the sixteenth century, Italy produced half of all the printed editions of Ptolemy, comprising many editions that began to include the Americas.15 Though we cannot know with any certainty which documents Columbus saw or remembered, he surely relied on the tradition of Italian and Venetian mapmaking when plotting his voyage to the New World, including the maps of Marino Sanuto and Andrea Bianco.16 Venetian writers later naturally connected the Columbian voyages to their own tradition of travel and exploration. Francesco Sansovino (1521–86), for instance, asserted that it was the example of Alvise Ca’ da Mosto (1432–88) and his explorations along the African coast that compelled Columbus to discover the New World.17 11

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Thomas Goldstein, “Impulses of Italian Renaissance Culture behind the Age of Discoveries,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, 2 vols., ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1:27–35. Giuseppe Mazzotta, “The Emergence of Modernity and the New World,” in New Worlds and the Italian Renaissance: Contributions to the History of European Intellectual Culture, ed. Andrea Moudarres and Christina Purdy Moudarres (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 10. See Patrick Gautier Dalché, La géographie de Ptolémé en occident (IVe–XVIe siècle) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). See Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2013), esp. 15–88. According to the most complete inventory to date, forty-one editions of Ptolemy were printed between 1475 and 1600; nineteen of these were printed in Italy. See Charles E. Armstrong, “Copies of Ptolemy’s Geography in American Libraries,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 66 (1962): 105–13. Valerie Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 18–19. “D’età 22 anni passò fino al porto della scussa nella Ethiopia inferior, al cui essempio mosso il Colombo, ritrovò il mondo nuovo” (“At the age of 22 he passed the port of Scussa in lower Ethiopia [and] his example moved Columbus to find the New World”). Francesco Sansovino,

I TA L Y A ND THE NE W W OR L D

However, perhaps the greatest Italian influence on the development of European ideas about the New World had to do with Columbus’s focus on and fascination with the text of the Venetian traveler Marco Polo. Polo’s Travels (ca. 1300) provided Columbus with one of his primary sources of information about the riches of Asia, and Columbus contributed some 366 annotations to his own personal volume of Polo’s text.18 The fact that Columbus believed he was skirting the coastline of Asia needs little introduction. His Diario is replete with assertions – especially in his entries for October and November 1492 – that he had landed in or near Asia. For Columbus, either Hispaniola or Cuba was Japan, Cuba was an island near “the mainland” or Cathay, the Caribbean Sea was the Sea of China, Veragua was either the Golden Chersonese (the Malay Peninsula) or Ophir – the famous site of King Solomon’s mines – and his emissaries, he believed, would soon deliver letters from the sovereigns of Spain to the Great Khan. Amerindian natives confirmed that he was not far from Marco Polo’s “Cipangu, which they called Cibao”: rich in gold and home of the eldest magus.19 The Spanish Crown officially recognized Columbus as the governor and viceroy of “the islands that have been discovered in the Indies,” and in the bull Inter Caetera of May 3, 1493, Pope Alexander VI declared that Columbus had found “islands and firm land” located “in the western parts of the Ocean Sea, toward the Indies.”20 It is hard to overemphasize Polo’s impact, via Columbus, on the invention of America. Images from the travels of Marco Polo framed not only Columbus’ primordial journey to the New World, but perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, the travels, explorations, and representations of scores of explorers, conquistadors, and missionaries in his wake, who continued to believe that America was Asia, or at the very least, a direct extension from it, for hundreds of years to come.21 As news and information from the New World began to cross the Atlantic, Italy came to represent the European center for the publication and spread of information about the discoveries, including texts, printed images, and maps.22

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Venetia città nobilissima et singolare descritta in XIIII libri da M. Francesco Sansovino (Venice: Domenico Farri, 1581), 249v. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, 46, 64–7. See also John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 151–70. Christopher Columbus, A Synoptic Edition of the Log of Columbus’s First Voyage, ed. Francesca Lardicci, Repertorium Columbianum 6 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999), 101. Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 82. See Eviatar Zerubavel, Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 2003). See Rosario Romeo, Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento (Rome: Laterza, 1989), 15. For a catalog of all the texts about the New World printed in Italy during this time, see European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493–1776, Volume I: 1493–1600, ed. John Alden and Dennis C. Landis (New York: Readex Books, 1980), 300–14. See also “Libri: I viaggi al Nuovo Mondo

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Italian presses produced almost three times as many texts about the Americas as French presses in the period 1493–1560.23 Within Italy, Venice in particular produced both some of the earliest and most significant accounts of Columbus’ voyages, including Fracanzio da Montalboddo’s Paesi novamente retrovati (Vicenza, 1507), which went through fifteen editions in four languages and was “more instrumental than any other work in disseminating knowledge of America.”24 Europeans often first learned about Iberian conquest and colonialism through Italian translations of Spanish sources; for instance, Angelo Trevisan’s Libretto de tutta la navigatione de re di Spagna (Venice, 1504) was the first published text dedicated to the Columbian voyages, and the second edition of Benedetto Bordone’s Isolario (Venice, 1534) contained the earliest printed account of Pizzaro’s conquest of Peru.25 Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi (Venice, 1550–9) later came to represent the most significant and comprehensive collection of travel literature in the sixteenth century. His collection, including his Volume Three on the New World, paved the way for similar publications in Northern Europe later in the century, such as Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages (London, 1582), Samuel del Purchas’s Pilgrimes (London, 1625), and Theodore de Bry’s Grands Voyages (Frankfurt, 1590), all of which followed Ramusio’s model and included or drew on his sources.26 Through these and other texts, Italian literature about the Americas had a lasting impact on European culture at large, as well as its representations of the New World.27 Along similar lines, historians of Western cartography have demonstrated that Italy was the largest producer of printed maps during the first three quarters of the sixteenth century. The cities of Rome, Florence, and Venice

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nell’editoria italiana (1493–1560),” in Spazio e modernità: Libri, carte, isolari nell’età delle scoperte, ed. Massimo Donattini (Bologna: Clueb, 2000), 25–105. Donattini, Spazio e modernità, 35. Henry Harisse, The Discovery of North America: A Critical, Documentary, and Historic Investigation (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1969), 270; John H. Elliott, “Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, vol. 1, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 14. See also the table of early publications of the Columbian voyages in Rudolf Hirsch, “Printed Reports on the Early Discoveries and Their Reception,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, vol. 2, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 553–60. See also Lucia Binotti, “Cultural Identity and the Ideologies of Translation in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Italian Prologues to Spanish Chronicles of the New World,” History of European Ideas 14 (1992): 769–88. See Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Instructions for Travellers: Teaching the Eye to See,” History and Anthropology 9 (1996): 158–9; David Armitage, “The New World and British Historical Thought: From Richard Haklyut to William Robertson,” in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 54; and Antonio del Piero, “Della vita e degli studi di Giovanni Battista Ramusio,” Nuovo archivio veneto 4 (1902), 103. The Enlightenment concept of the “Noble Savage,” for instance, arguably had its roots in sixteenth-century Italian publications. See Romeo, Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento.

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dominated the European trade in printed maps, and more maps were printed in Italy from 1480–1570 – including maps of the New World – than in any other European state.28 This Italian interest in cartography helped to set the stage for the reception of new geographic information.29 In addition, for the encounter with the Americas to produce knowledge, it needed to be textually and cartographically represented, and Italian presses clearly capitalized on this process by commodifying and marketing information from the New World to the rest of Europe. As just one example of this phenomenon, Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1570) – commonly understood as the first modern atlas and one of the most influential cartographic publications in the history of the West – lists a host of Italian cosmographers, mapmakers, printers, and maps as his sources, indicating how developing images of the expanding world and the Americas drew heavily on Italian knowledge and models.30 The Age of Encounters was pivotal in the history of science in Italy, in terms of the collection of new plants and animals – as Part III of this volume considers – as well as in the formulation of new scientific hypotheses. Collectors, naturalists, and scientific academies, such as Ulisse Aldrovandi and Ferdinando Cospi in Bologna, Athanasius Kircher and the Academia dei Lincei in Rome, and Manfredo Settala in Milan all eagerly collected and documented the natural and material culture of the New World.31 Early modern Italian collectors eagerly 28

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See David Woodward, “The Italian Map Trade, 1480–1560,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 3:1, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 773; Denis Cosgrove, “Mapping New Worlds: Culture and Cartography in Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Imago Mundi 44 (1992): 72–5. Samuel Y. Edgerton, “Florentine Interest in Ptolemaic Cartography as Background for Renaissance Painting, Architecture, and the Discovery of America,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 33 (1974): 275–92. These include, for instance, Benedetto Bordone, Giacomo Gastaldi, Matteo Pagano, and others. See Ortelius’s “Catalogus Auctorum,” reprinted in Robert W. Karrow Jr., Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps (Chicago: Speculum Orbis Press, 1993), 28–31. See also Maria Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico. Storia di un’immagine da Temistitan all’Indipendenza (1519–1821) (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2004), 149. See Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), and Giuseppe Olmi, “Science-HonourMetaphor: Italian Cabinets for the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 5–16. On Kircher and the New World, see Ignacio Osorio Romero, La luz imaginario, epistolario de Atanasio Kircher con los novohispanos (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993); Roswitha Kramer, “. . . ex ultimo angulo orbis: Atanasio Kircher y el Nuevo Mundo,” in Pensamiento europeo y cultura colonial, ed. Karl Kohut and Sonia V. Rose (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1997): 320–77; Clara Bargellini, “Athanasius Kircher e la Nuova Spagna,” in Athanasius Kircher: il museo del mondo, ed. Eugenio Lo Sardo, exh. cat., Museo Palazzo Venezia, Rome, February 28–April 22, 2002 (Rome: De Luca, 2001), 86–91; Paula Findlen, “A Jesuit’s Books in the New World: Athanasius Kircher and His American Readers,” in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 329–64. On the Academia dei Lincei’s activities related to New Spain and the Tesoro Messicano, see Giovanni Battista Marini Bettòlo, Una guida alla lettura del Tesoro Messicano, Rerum Medicarum

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acquired Mexican manuscripts, some of which are still located today in libraries in Florence, Bologna, and in the Vatican.32 Some of the first botanical gardens in the West were founded in Italy in this period, and the seeds of New World plants such as sunflower, yucca, passionflower, and acacia quickly sprouted in such orti in Pisa, Padua, and Rome, whose collections were often fed by Jesuits with global contacts.33 In Italy, the New World also profoundly affected scientific method itself. Pietro Pomponazzi, for instance – a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Padua – cited a letter from Antonio Pigafetta in one of his university lectures to challenge the belief of Aristotle and Averroës that no life existed below the Torrid Zone. Juxtaposing Pigafetta and Aristotle, Pomponazzi proclaimed, “where experience and reason are in conflict . . . we should hold to experience and abandon reason.”34 Evidence from the New World undermined traditional authorities on geography and led Pomponazzi and others to question the ancients. In tandem with the new approaches to anatomy, to medical observations, and to astronomy – that is, to studying the microcosm and the macrocosm, as early modern Italians played crucial roles in mapping not only islands and territories in the New World, but also newly discovered parts of the human body and the universe itself – encounters with the New World were one of the factors that helped to promote a scientific culture in Italy and elsewhere that was open to new styles of gathering evidence through experimentation, eye-witnessing, and formulating interpretations.

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Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1992). On Cospi and the Americas, see Laura Laurencich Minelli, “Bologna e il Mondo Nuovo,” in Bologna e il Mondo Nuovo, ed. Laura Laurencich Minelli, exh. cat. Bologna, Museo Civico Medievale, February 15–April 12, 1992 (Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1992), 9–24. On Aldrovandi, see Giuseppe Olmi, L’inventario del mondo: Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992). In Florence, the Florentine Codex in the Biblioteca Laurenziana, and the Codex Magliabechiano in the Biblioteca Nazionale; in Bologna, the Codex Cospi in the Biblioteca Universitaria; in the Vatican, the Codex Vaticanus A (Codex Rios, Codex Vaticanus 3778), and the Codex Vaticanus B (Codex Vaticanus 3773). Several Mexican codices were once in Italy and are now located elsewhere, such as the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I, once owned by Pope Clement VII, now in the Austrian National Library in Vienna; and the Codex Badiano (Codex de la Cruz-Badiano), once owned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini, now in the National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mexico City. On the Codex Vaticanus A, see Eloise Quiñones Keber, “Collecting Cultures: A Mexican Manuscript in the Vatican Library,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 228–42. See Simon Ditchfield, “What Did Natural History Have to Do with Salvation? José de Acosta SJ (1540–1600) in the Americas,” in God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2010), 145. See also Paula Findlen, “The Market and the World: Science, Culture, and Collecting in the Venetian Republic,” in Il collezionismo a Venezia e nel Veneto ai tempi della Serenissima, ed. Bernard Aikema, Rosella Lauber, and Max Seidel (Venice: Marsilio, 2005), 57. See Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 90–1.

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Understanding the relationship between Italy and the New World necessarily entails grappling with Italy’s complicated relationship to Spain, the ascendant Habsburg Empire, and Spanish colonialism in the Americas. The empire of Charles V (r. 1516–56) extended over most of continental Western Europe and included vast territories in the Americas. By the middle of the sixteenth century, following the Peace of Bologna (1529) and the Treaty of CateauCambresis (1559), Spain dominated most of Italy, including the entire southern half of the peninsula, Milan, and Sardinia, as well as Tuscany and Genoa as dependent states, producing complex and sometimes antagonistic relationships between Spain and Italy.35 Literary scholars have regularly pointed to a profound Italian uneasiness regarding the state of Italian culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.36 While it is objectively impossible to measure a regime’s “anxiety,” Italians were certainly conscious of the extent to which Italy had been diminished, territorially and politically. They were aware of their powerlessness and manifested their sense of inferiority in various ways. As Theodore Cachey has suggested, “travel away from Italy points to the embarrassment of the fact that Italy . . . did not exist as a place to depart from and return to.”37 Early modern Italy was, in a great variety of ways, a fragmented polity, and while a notion of Italy most certainly existed, early modern Italians retained little sense of a proto-nationalist identity, especially compared to Spain.38 The symbol of Columbus himself neatly embodies the problem of Italian identity and Italy’s vexed relationship to Spain in the Age of Encounters. Columbus represented the most significant Italian protagonist in the story of the New World discoveries, but also offered a painful reminder of Spanish dominance. To depict Columbus as an Italian hero would have simultaneously entailed exalting Spain and calling attention to Italy’s failure as a colonial power. Amerigo Vespucci and Giovanni da Verrazzano, intrepid explorers of the New World, represented symbols of local, Florentine identity rather than the Italian state. How did Italians consider Spain, Italy, and the New World when they hung maps of the newly charted Americas in the intimate spaces of their homes, as they regularly began to do at this time? Such maps surely 35

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See most recently, Italia non spagnola e monarchia spagnola tra ‘500 e ‘600: Politica, cultura e letteratura, eds. Giuseppe Di Stefano, Elena Fasano Guarini, and Alessandro Martinengo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2009). “The Italian cultural elite felt an urgent need to remind the world of its existence precisely because it was the national elite of a nation which did not exist,” Claudio Donati, L’idea di nobiltà in Italia, secoli XIV–XVIII (Rome: Laterza, 1988), 29. See also Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 25, and Nathalie Hester, Literature and Identity in Italian Baroque Travel Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 3–25. Theodore J. Cachey Jr., “An Italian History of Travel,” Annali d’Italianistica 14 (1996): 62. For a discussion of the meaning of “Italy” in the sixteenth century, see the introduction to this volume.

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reflected a newfound curiosity about the expanding world, but they also depicted the way in which Italians were increasingly hemmed in by the Habsburgs’ growing power around the globe.39 Symbolic of these paradoxes and conflicts, in the late sixteenth century, Torquato Tasso promised to write an epic poem about Columbus but then never actually produced it.40 Italians participated in a colonial and imperial enterprise that was, for the most part, virtual or imaginary, and never directly identified as a national project. Italians tended to be independent or armchair travelers rather than Italian heroes. They identified more with their cities of origin than with the Italian state, in stark contrast to the many voyagers who served the centralized, state-building intentions of Charles V and Philip II in the New World. Since Italian involvement in New World encounters did not revolve around a centralized state or a sense of imperium, understanding the relationship between Italy and the Americas involves acknowledging the discrete regional centers where Italian knowledge of the Americas was produced, each of which maintained a different local character. In Florence, the Medici Grand Dukes collected American objects, such as featherwork and Mixtec masks, and artists regularly represented the New World in drawings, frescoes, and studiolo paintings.41 While Florence’s interaction with the New World was largely material and visual, Venice by contrast was characterized by the immense output of its print culture, and the lagoon city represented perhaps the greatest site of European production of texts and maps about the New World.42 Even Elliott himself, reticent to acknowledge any immediate European interest in the discovery of the New World, noted the “great curiosity” aroused in Venice by news of the discoveries.43 Romans acquired news and information about the Americas both 39

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“Recent research on the possession and display of maps in Italy . . . has brought to light many instances in which aristocrats, churchmen, and middle-class citizens decorated their porticoes, drawing rooms, and studies with globes and world maps in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,” George Tolias, “Maps in Renaissance Libraries and Collections,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 3:1, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 637–60, 649. See also Genevieve Carlton, Worldly Consumers: The Demand for Maps in Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), 143–58; Federica Ambrosini, “‘Descrittioni del mondo’ nelle case venete dei secoli XVI e XVII,” Archivio Veneto 117 (1981): 67–79; Isabella Palumbo-Fossati, “L’interno della casa dell’artigiano e dell’artista nella Venezia del Cinquecento,” Studi Veneziani 8 (1984): 109–53. Hester, Literature and Identity in Italian Baroque Travel Writing, 14. See Detlef Heikamp, Mexico and the Medici (Florence: Editrice Edam, 1972), and Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016). On Florence and the New World, see also Vespucci, Firenze e le Americhe, Atti del convegno di studi, Firenze 22–24 Novembre 2012, eds. Giuliano Pinto, Leonardo Rombai, and Claudia Tripodi (Florence: Olschki, 2014). See Elizabeth Horodowich, The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and Print Culture in the Age of Encounters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 9–11.

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from the papal court and from the Jesuits.44 In Genoa, aristocratic families commemorated Columbus in painted cycles and in silver pieces within their palaces.45 The relationship between the kingdom of Naples and the New World remains, at present, respectively less studied and understood. To date few examples exist of archival documents, texts, or material artifacts about or from the Americas produced or collected by southern Italians in the early modern period, owing perhaps to the state of the Neapolitan archives that were heavily damaged during World War II. In 1503, Spanish general Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba entered Naples and began two centuries of Spanish rule (1503–1707). Spanish monarchs assumed the title of king of Naples and ruled through noble proxies who eventually gained the title of viceroy. On the one hand, a Castilian monopoly on all contact with the Americas would theoretically exclude the Italian realms of the Spanish Empire – as part of the old Aragonese Crown – from official American contacts.46 Southern Italian scholars interested in geography, for instance, such as Niccolò Scillacio, Bernardo Sylvano da Eboli, or Francesco Maurolico, tended to work in the north, though Giovanni Lorenzo d’Anania’s Universale fabbrica del mondo, ovvero Cosmografia, whose fourth part covers the indie orientali, was first published in Naples in 1573. Nevertheless, non-Castilian regions of the Spanish Empire remained deeply implicated in the Spanish imperial system as a whole. Historians have demonstrated that the Habsburg Empire functioned as a network of multiple centers rather than as an empire with one center and a periphery; in this way, its imperial structure allowed for an exchange of information with the New World in all of its regions to one degree or another.47 Neapolitans had a clear presence in Spanish America; many Neapolitans joined the Jesuits working in 44

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See John O’Malley, “The Discovery of America and Reform Thought at the Papal Court in the Early Cinquecento,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiapelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1: 185–200. Raphael studied and depicted the exotic New World animals that had been brought to the papal court. See André Chastel, “Masques mexicains à la Renaissance,” Arte de France I (1961): 299; and Charles Colbert, “‘They Are Our Brothers’: Raphael and the American Indian,” SixteenthCentury Journal 16 (1985): 181–90. See Cristoforo Colombo nella Genova del Seicento: Gli argenti del doge Agostino Pallavicino e la cultura del suo tempo, eds. Farida Simonetti and Gianluca Zanelli, exh. cat. Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola, Genoa, October 13–December 18, 2005 (Genoa: San Giorgio Editrice, 2005); Andaleeb Banta, “A Commission Gone Awry: Bernardo Strozzi’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Lomellino, Genoa,” in Art in Spain and the Hispanic World: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Brown, ed. Sarah Schroth (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2010), 236–65. See John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1963), 67, 113, and John Lynch, Spain 1516–1598: From Nation State to World Empire (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 26. See Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 17–42, esp. 26–7.

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the New World, Neapolitans were often the expert soldiers who managed much of the military strategy of the monarchy in the Americas, and a Neapolitan fleet fought to liberate Bahia (now in Brazil) in 1636.48 Spanish monarchs relied on Italian experts (especially Neapolitan doctors) for news and information about both the New World and the kingdom of Naples, and regular illicit trade permitted extensive contact between the metropolitan centers of southern Italy and the New World. As Mackenzie Cooley describes in this volume, Nardo Antonio Recchi, for example – the Neapolitan physician to King Philip II – was instrumental in compiling and transmitting the Tesoro Messicano, a vast collection of drawings and descriptions of New World nature originally acquired by the Francisco Hernández expedition to Mexico (1570–77). Recchi redacted and developed Hernández’s collection and brought this redaction with him to Naples. The Hernández/Recchi collection was eventually published by Federico Angelo Cesi, an Italian naturalist and founder of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. The links between Hernández, Recchi, and Cesi therefore neatly illustrate the informal flow of knowledge from the New World to Madrid, Naples, and Rome, and, perhaps, the potential for similar such contacts.49 The tomato, for example – eventually a mainstay of Italian cuisine – entered Italian scientific discussions in part through this southern channel, as Cesi’s early seventeenth-century Erbario miniato, based on the Hernández/Recchi manuscripts, was among the first to depict the pomo d’oro.50 A dearth of knowledge about southern Italy’s connections to the New World could therefore be the result of the less-developed state of research in 48

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See Il nuovo mondo tra storia e invenzione: l’Italia e Napoli: Atti del Convegno di Napoli, ed. Giovanni Battista De Cesare (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), and Libri, idee, uomini tra l’America iberica, l’Italia e la Sicilia: Atti del convegno di Messina, ed. Aldo Albònico (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993). See also La route de Naples aux Indes Occidentales: Culture juridique, constitutionnalisme et codification dans le monde hispanique aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, ed. Federica Morelli, Geneviève Verdo, and Elodie Richard (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2009); Federica Morelli, “Tras las huellas perdidas de Filangieri: nuevas perspectivas sobre la cultura política constitucional en el Atlántico hispánico,” Historia Contemporánea 33 (2006): 431–61; Federica Morelli, “De la ciencia del comercio a la ciencia de la legislación: La ruta napolitana hacia la reforma de la monarquia (siglo XVIII), in Las monarquías española y francesa (siglos XVI–XVIII): dos modelos políticos?, ed. Jose Javier Ruiz Ibanes and Anne Dubet (Madrid: Casa de Velazques, 2010). I thank Tamar Herzog for these citations. See David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginning of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), esp. 60–1, 71–6, and 245–74, and José Maria Lopez Piñero and José Pardo-Tomas, “Nardo Antonio Recchi y la inicial recepción europea, a través de Nápoles, de los materiales de la expedición de Francisco Hernández,” in Napoli Viceregno spagnolo: Una capitale della cultura alle origini dell’Europa moderna (secoli XVI–XVII), ed. Monika Bosse and André Stoll, 2 vols. (Naples: Vivarium, 2001), 1: 261–92. The first record of the tomato in Italy occurred in Pisa in 1548, when a house steward presented the court of Cosimo de’Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, with a basket of the unknown fruit. The first publication to describe it was Sienese Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s I discorsi . . . della medicina materiale (1544). See David Gentilcore, Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1–15, as well as David Gentilcore’s essay in this volume.

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this field as much as the result of archival damage. Early modern Italian history has long remained too detached from the history of Spain and its empire, in part, perhaps, due to the particular dynamics of the Italian Risorgimento and historians’ insistent focus on nation-states. With all of these questions in mind, it will be the task of future research to confirm or deny if, why, and how southern Italian states were more closely connected to the New World or not. Early modern Italians also traveled to the Americas and left an impact there.51 Three Venetians numbered among the crews of Columbus’s first two voyages: a Juan Veneziano was on the Pinta during Columbus’s first passage to the Americas, and a Stefano Veneziano Juan Griego (from the Venetian colonies in the Aegean) took part in Columbus’s second voyage.52 In 1535, an obscure artisan named Giovanni Paoli (Juan Pablos), a native of Brescia, established the first printing press in the Americas in Tenochtitlán, followed in 1577 by Antonio Ricardo from Turin, who in 1582 moved from Mexico to Lima, where he opened the first printing press in Peru.53 A sizable number of Italians from Seville settled in America and introduced Italian business methods there; Peru, for instance, counted many Genoese among its inhabitants in the second half of the sixteenth century.54 In the late sixteenth century, several Italian artists, including Bernardo Bitti, Matteo da Lecce, Angelino Medoro, and others, painted in what is modern-day Peru.55 A large-scale painting representing the lives of members of the Franciscan order located in an old monastery in Mexico City and inscribed with Cosimo III de Medici’s name and title provides further evidence for Italian activities in the Americas in the early modern period.56 Italian glassblowers settled in Jamestown in the 1620s, and archaeologists have also found early modern Venetian glass in excavations in San Salvador.57 And of course, Italian missionaries and in particular Italians in the Jesuit order were 51

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This was the subject of the conference “El Renacimiento Italiano Desde América Latina,” April 22–4, 2015, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, Oaxaca. Venetians also went to Mexico with Hernán Cortés, as well as on the expedition of the Rio de la Plata with Cabeza de Vaca. See D’Arienzo, “La presenza dei veneziani in Andalusia all’epoca di Cristoforo Colombo,” 224–5. Giuseppe Bellini, “La scoperta del Nuovo Mondo e la cultura italiana del Cinquecento,” in Atti del Convegno Internazionale su La Scoperta colombiana e la cultura europea contemporanea, Erice, 22–27 aprile 1992 (Palermo: Accademia Nazionale di Scienze Lettere e Arti di Palermo, 1993), 177. Verlinden, “Italian Influence in Iberian Colonization,” 210. See Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, “The Presence of Italian Painting, 1575–1610,” in Painting in Latin America, 1550–1820, ed. Luisa Elena Alcalá and Jonathan Brown (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 256–73. Similarly, on the impact of the ideas of Leon Battista Alberti on Mexican architecture, see Samuel Y. Edgerton, “Leon Battista Alberti vs. Quetzalcoatl: Renaissance Art Theory in the Service of the Christian Mission to Mexico: 1524–1600,” La Prospettiva (1998): 103–19. See Clara Bargellini, “Una historia franciscana: La profecía del Arroyo del Aguila y Cosimo III de Medici,” in Los Colegios Apostólicos de Propaganda Fide, su historia y su legado (Morelia: Gobierno del Estado de Zacatecas y Colegio de Michoacán, 2008), 420–29. Jeb J. Card, “The Ceramics of Colonial Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador: Culture Contact and Social Change in Mesoamerica,” PhD dissertation, Tulane University, 2007, 267–70. In one of his

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active in the conversion of Native Americans in the sixteenth century, especially in the reducciones, or the local, theocratic communities that they developed, typically in isolated areas, in the territories that eventually became Paraguay.58 Italians therefore played a crucial role in the Age of Encounters both before and after 1492, in terms of the exploration of previously unknown lands as well as the reception and transmission of information about them. Perhaps most enduringly, Italians participated in the development of the Black Legend: the demonization of the Spanish Empire. On the one hand, in his influential Relazioni universali (Rome, 1591–6) – whose fourth section was devoted to a discussion of missionary work in the Indies – Italian Jesuit writer Giovanni Botero argued that the spread of Christianity was the most important result of the New World encounters. He posited that God had caused the kings of France and England (which would later become Protestant) to reject Columbus’s proposals; divine providence had placed the New World in the hands of pious, Catholic Iberians, thereby underscoring Spain’s moral position where the discovery of the Americas was concerned.59 On the other hand, Milanese historian Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del Mondo Nuovo (Venice, 1565) presented a biting history of Spanish brutality in Mexico and Peru and directly rehashed and corroborated Bartolomé de las Casas’s description of Spanish cruelty.60 New editions and translations of Benzoni’s work were rapidly published until the end of the sixteenth century, shoring up antiSpanish sentiments around Europe. The widely circulated 1626 Venetian edition of Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552) included translator Giacomo Castellani’s scathing condemnation of Spanish atrocities in the Americas.61 Many Italians – especially Venetians –

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earliest encounters with the Mexicans, Cortés sent Montezuma “a cup of Florentine glass.” See Bernal Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1963), 94. See Romeo, Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento, 141–79; ibid., “The Jesuit Sources and the Italian Political Utopia in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1:165–84, esp. 181, n. 20; Adriano Prosperi, “America e apocalisse: Note sulla ‘conquista spirituale’ del Nuovo Mondo,” Critica Storica 13 (1976): 1–67; Paolo Broggio, Evangelizzare il mondo: Le missioni della Compagnia di Gesù tra Europa e America (secoli XVI–XVII) (Rome: Carocci, 2004). On the Jesuits in Paraguay in particular, see Girolamo Imbruglia, L’invenzione del Paraguay: Studio sull’idea di comunità tra Seicento e Settecento (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1983); Giuseppe Piras, Martín de Funes s.j. (1560–1611) e gli inizi delle riduzioni dei gesuiti nel Paraguay (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1998); Juan Carlos Garavaglia, “I gesuiti del Paraguay: Utopia e realtà,” Rivista Storica Italiana 93 (1981): 269–314. See John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 184. For a lesser known but similarly anti-Spanish account, see Galeotto Cei, Viaggio e relazione alle Indie, ed. Francesco Surdich (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992). Bartolomé de las Casas, Istoria o brevissima relatione della distruttione dell’Indie Occidentali, trans. Giacomo Castellani (Venice: Presso Marco Ginammi, 1626), prologue. See Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico. Storia di un’immagine da Temistitan all’Indipendenza (1519–1821), 160–3.

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were sympathetic to Las Casas, and while the output of Venetian presses had declined considerably by the seventeenth century, one of the last remaining conspicuous strengths of the Venetian editorial world lay in its production of the largest number of editions of the works of Las Casas in the seventeenth century.62 To be clear, both the widespread presence of imperial Spain on the Italian Peninsula as well as the control exercised by Counter Reformation Rome meant that Italians had to be cautious in their anti-Spanish expressions; the most full-blown expressions of the Black Legend were Northern European. Nevertheless, much like Native Americans themselves – and as the essays by Ambrosini, Lloyd, and Chávez Bárcenas in this volume describe – some Italians clearly experienced or perceived a sense of Spanish tyranny and pushed back against it.63 In all these ways, and especially in cross-cultural interactions in the late Middle Ages as well as missionary and editorial activities in the early modern world, the Italian states were deeply connected to and implicated in the Age of Encounters in the Atlantic. The Italian states both influenced the Age of Encounters and were marked and transfigured by it. Indeed, the examples discussed here invite us to reflect on the alternative narratives and interpretations that arise concerning the Italian states and global history when we do not confine ourselves to the nation-state as the primary frame of reference.64 Various individuals and groups up and down the Italian Peninsula actively sought out and distributed news about the Americas, and appropriated and manipulated images and representations from the New World for their own political and cultural ends. Above all, Italians creatively and energetically engaged with information from the New World in ways that demonstrate the deep and lasting curiosity about other cultures that existed even among people who rarely or never traveled to other worlds. 62

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See Angela Nuovo, “L’editoria veneziana del XVII secolo e il problema Americano: La pubblicazione delle opera di Bartolomé de las Casas (Venezia, Marco Ginammi, 1626–43),” in Caracciolo Aricò, L’impatto della scoperta, 175–86, and Federica Ambrosini, Paese et mari ignoti: America e colonialismo europeo nella cultura veneziana (secoli XVI–XVII) (Venice: Deputazione, 1982), 135–50. In this way, Italy was similar to the Low Countries. See Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See Marcocci, “L’Italia nella prima età globale,” 36.

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CHAPTER THREE

DANTE AND THE NEW WORLD Mary Watt

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ometime in the late thirteenth century, dante alighieri wrote a sonnet in which he expressed his desire to slip the bonds of Florence and take to the open seas with his friends Lapo Gianni and Guido Cavalcanti.1 Well aware of the danger of tempests and other impediments that might hinder them, Dante relies on desire and the will of a good enchanter (“il buono incantatore”) to make the journey possible. The poem, “Guido, i’ vorrei,” reveals the bittersweet dream of a young man whose life, like that of so many other Florentines, was confined by a series of regulations, expectations, and order.2 At the same time, the poem subtly associates the sea voyage to an unknown destination with the opportunity to create a new 1

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“Guido, I wish that Lapo, you, and I / were taken by enchantment, / and put aboard a vessel, that by every wind / would sail according to my will and yours; / such that neither fortune nor other bad weather / could impede us, / but rather, living always in one talent, / as our desire to stay together grew. / And lady Vanna, and lady Lagia of course, / with she who is at number thirty / be also placed with us by the good enchanter; / and thus to discuss love always, / and each of them would be happy / just as I know we would be” (translation mine). Michele Barbi identifies the sonnet as number 52, “Dante a Guido Cavalcanti,” in Dante Alighieri, Le opere di Dante: Testo critico della Società dantesca italiana, ed. Michele Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, 1921), 73. Dante’s ironic reference in the Commedia to Florence as the “well-ruled” city underlines the poet’s negative view of such confines: “where over Rubaconte’s bridge there stands / the church that dominates the well-ruled city” (Purg. 12:101–2.) All citations from the poem follow Giorgio Petrocchi’s edition: Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, 4 vols., ed. Giorgio Petrocchi (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994). The translation, except where otherwise indicated, follows that of Allen Mandelbaum: Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. 3 vols., trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam 1982, 1983, 1986).

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world. As Dante suggests that they bring along their female companions, Giovanna, Lagia, and possibly, Beatrice, the little ship begins more and more to resemble a saving ark and the adventure a regenerative project. It bears noting that in Dante’s early poetic project, epitomized by the pseudo-autobiographical Vita Nuova, Beatrice represents not only a new style of writing, but also new life. Her presence on the journey must surely, therefore, signal the advent of something not seen before. Given Dante’s subsequent use of nautical imagery in the Commedia, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to this early sonnet and its relationship to Dante’s poetic evolution.3 Perhaps even more surprising is how little attention has been paid to the broader historical context in which both works might be situated, that is, in the very early stages of the so-called Age of Discovery. Yet if we consider both compositions together – and in this broader context – we gain a whole new perspective on the Commedia. As Dante uses both works to forge a link between maritime exploration and Christian salvation, he provides his readers, his fellow travelers, with both a new itinerario sacro and a new map of the world. As a result, the Commedia emerges as an important catalyst and inspiration for New World exploration. The question of why the young Dante might have cast himself as a sailor is an interesting one. Clearly Dante was familiar with the great sailors of the past, Aeneas, Jason, and Ulysses, for the Commedia is rife with references to all three.4 Critics have speculated as well that Dante may have been familiar with the legend of St. Brendan.5 I would suggest, however, that Dante might equally have been inspired by the great adventurers of his own time, for he was living squarely in the middle of an age of travel and exploration. While generations of travelers before Dante had been fascinated with the journey to the East where, according to the Old Testament, the Garden of Eden was located, by the late thirteenth century, this fascination was reaching a fever pitch.6 Encouraged by 3

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In “Dante’s Prologue Scene,” Dante Studies 118 (2000): 189–216, John Freccero examines the shipwreck imagery of Inferno 1, but makes no reference to the sonnet. In Allegory in Dante’s Commedia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 83–5, Robert Hollander attributes the image to Dante’s absorption of the Virgilian tradition. Peter S. Hawkins interprets it as the pilgrim’s spiritual shipwreck in Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 277. William O’Brien reads the nautical imagery of Paradiso 2:1–15 as part of Dante’s engagement with the classical epic poets in “The Bread of Angels” in Paradiso II: A Liturgical Note,” Dante Studies 97 (1979): 97–106. “But why should I go there? Who sanctions it? / For I am not Aeneas, am not Paul” (Inf. 2: 31–2); “Ulysses’ / mad course” (Par. 27:82–3); “That shade is Jason” (Inf. 18:86–7); “when they saw Jason turn into a ploughman” (Par. 2:18). Barbara Reynolds suggests that Dante may have read the Tuscan version of Navigatio Brendani, the story of an Irish saint who sails to the “Promised Land of the Saints” in Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London: Tauris, 2007), 436. Many medieval mappae mundi located terrestrial paradise in the East in accordance with the Judeo-Christian scriptures: “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed” (Gen. 2:8).

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the almost certainly fictitious Letter of Prester John, a legendary Christian potentate whose kingdom abounded in wonders, clerics such as Ascelin of Lombardy and laymen such as the Polo brothers set out for lands unknown in search of trade, treasure, salvation, and adventure.7 In 1291, this same call prompted two Genoese brothers, Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi, to set out for India by sailing west.8 They sailed across the Mediterranean and out to the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar, but were never heard from again. From a cartographic perspective, these forays sought to penetrate those places on the mappae mundi that lay uncharted, undefined, and, indeed, unwritten. The open sea, in particular, was a blank page and represented the opportunity to make one’s mark on the world. Dante’s identification with seafaring is, therefore, consistent with the authorial stance of “Guido, i’ vorrei.” For an aspiring poet living in a town in a valley surrounded by hills, however, the possibility of such a journey was nonetheless remote and it would take nothing short of incantamento to make it happen. Yet Dante clearly believed that the tools for such enchantment lay in his own hands. If he could not actually sail in space and time, he recognized that he could certainly conjure up and make such a journey with his words. “Guido, i’ vorrei,” in this sense, anticipates Dante’s eventual recognition of his own cosmopoietic potential that sees its culmination in the creation of the Commedia. A number of cataclysmic changes that occurred between when Dante wrote “Guido i’ vorrei” and when he wrote the Commedia, however, forestalled the dream of the young man’s sonnet. We know that by 1300, the date in which the Commedia is set, Beatrice, his hoped-for companion on the magical journey, had died and the disastrous conflict between Blacks and Whites was in full swing. We know as well that by the time Dante was exiled and writing the Commedia, his best friend and fellow traveler, Guido Cavalcanti, was also dead.9 In this context, the imagery of Inferno I is particularly apt. Although the Commedia opens with the figure of the pilgrim lost in a dark wood, the poet soon shifts our focus and directs it toward the figure of a survivor of a maritime disaster.10 Out of breath, the pilgrim likens himself to one who rests “on the 7

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For more on the letter’s dissemination, see Robert Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996), 40–73. For more on Ascelin of Lombardy’s 1245 mission as Innocent IV’s papal envoy to the Mongols, see Jean-Paul Roux, Les Explorateurs au Moyen Age (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 97–8. The journey is noted in the Genoese annals of Jacopo Doria of 1294. For a translation of the relevant entry, see Francis M. Rogers, “The Vivaldi Expedition,” Annual Reports of the Dante Society 73 (1955): 31–45. Natalino Sapegno notes that Guido Cavalcanti was exiled by the priory of Florence in June 1300. In August of the same year, while in exile in Sarzana, Guido contracted malaria and died. See Dante Alighieri. La divina commedia, 3 vols., ed. Natalino Sapegno (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1991), Inf. 11, n. 60. “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, / I found myself within a shadowed forest, / for I had lost the path that does not stray” (Inf. 1:1–3).

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shore” and “looks back at the dangerous waters,” gazing upon “that pass that has never let anyone out alive.”11 While the pilgrim is relieved at having escaped a seemingly certain death, Virgil’s promise that he will eventually reach paradise holds out little hope that he will ever know the freedom he hoped to find on the open seas.12 Dante’s hell, rife with images and infernal perversions of his particular failed voyage, merely remind him of the folly of his youthful dream. If Dante thought to escape the “well-ordered city,” he gets a rude awakening as Charon’s bark takes the souls deeper into Dis, the infernal city that bears a noticeable resemblance to Florence.13 The boiling pitch of the fifth malebolgia is the antithesis of the open sea that captured Dante’s earlier imagination. Although the tar-like swamp reminds him of Venice, then a great maritime power, the image it brings to the poet’s mind is not that of great vessels sailing freely but rather that of the dark Arsenal filled with broken boats.14 The ships in the metaphor are going nowhere; rather, they are in dry dock for the winter, in stasis like the sinners in the frozen lake of Cocytus. While the pilgrim has survived his shipwreck, it is hard to imagine that this infernal descent will lead him where he wants to go. Like the Vivaldi brothers, Dante seems bound for oblivion, and nowhere is this hopelessness embodied more effectively than in the episode of Ulysses. It is almost trite to suggest that Dante identifies with the hero of the Odyssey, but it is important to note that the Ulysses with whom the pilgrim identifies is not Homer’s but Dante’s own creation, a product of his unique poetic genius, his ingegno. Like the young Dante, this Ulysses, also renowned for his craftiness or ingegno, is bored with his hometown and aches to escape the quotidian.15 Dante’s Ulysses, condemned to the circle of fraudulent counselors, uses words to persuade his friends, his “brothers,” he calls them, to venture beyond the Mediterranean and out onto the western sea. Ulysses’s “little oration” is not so far removed from the sentiment of the Guido sonnet, and through it Dante posits again the possibility of a “new world” beyond the Pillars of Hercules.16 11

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“And just as he who, with exhausted breath, / having escaped from sea to shore, turns back / to watch the dangerous waters he has quit, / so did my spirit, still a fugitive, / turn back to look intently at the pass / that never has let any man survive” (Inf. 1:22–7). “If you would then ascend as high as these, / a soul more worthy than I am will guide you; / I’ll leave you in her care when I depart, / because that Emperor who reigns above, / since I have been rebellious to His law, / will not allow me entry to His city” (Inf. 1:121–6). Dante himself urges his readers to compare the two in Inferno 26: “Be joyous, Florence, you are great indeed, / for over sea and land you beat your wings; / through every part of Hell your name extends! (Inf. 26:1–3). “As in the arsenal of the Venetians, / all winter long a stew of sticky pitch / boils up to patch their sick and tattered ships / that cannot sail” (Inf. 21:7–10). Dante uses the canto to address the dangers of unchecked ingegno, while reining in his own: “and more than usual I curb my talent that it not run where virtue does not guide” (Inf. 26:21–2). “la nova terra” (Inf. 26:137). The Pillars of Hercules, according to mythology, marked the Straits of Gibraltar and were inscribed with a prohibition against going any farther.

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Bearing always west, Ulysses’s ship eventually comes in sight of a mountain that turns out to be Mount Purgatory, on top of which, it is later revealed, lies earthly paradise. Ulysses’s voyage, therefore, as Peter Hawkins suggests, is revelatory, for it points the pilgrim toward something neither Dante nor his readers had seen before, perhaps that new world that Dante had sought in his youthful sonnet.17 Moreover, the poetic creation of the earthly paradise, this “new world,” allows Dante to locate Eden in space and time. Ulysses, however, does not make it ashore. A great tempest arises and he is shipwrecked and drowned, reminding readers that Eden had been closed to mankind since Adam’s fall.18 Locating Ulysses’s journey in the context of a treatise on the fate of souls after death urges readers to read the success or failure of sea voyages within this same moral framework. The adventure that Dante sought in “Guido i’ vorrei” was driven by desire and self-will, and, therefore, like Ulysses’s, was destined for disaster. The pilgrim’s eventual entry into earthly paradise, however, reveals that the success of such transgressive ventures depends on the will of God, the unnamed “altrui” of Inferno 26, as the buono incantatore is finally understood by the poet to be much more than a conjurer.19 In contrast to Ulysses’s voyage, and Dante’s earlier escapade, the journey of the Commedia is guided by Mary, known to medieval sailors as the Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea, whose presence pervades the poem from start to finish.20 It is divine intervention that spares Dante from the fate of Ulysses, and it is Dante’s eventual submission to divine will that allows him to sail again. It is logical, then, that the opening cantos of Purgatorio reprise the imagery of Inferno 1 – a shipwreck survivor who has just reached shore. Here a new boat, a winged boat that comes to bring the souls to the new world of earthly paradise, gives the poet a second chance, an opportunity to sail “better 17 18

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Hawkins, Testaments, 275. Although the book of Genesis places Eden somewhere east of Jerusalem, reentry to it had been closed to mankind since his fall: “So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen. 3:23–4). “It lifted up the stern so that our prow plunged deep, as pleased an Other, / until the sea again closed-over us” (Inf. 26:140–2). The title “Stella Maris” has its origins in the Middle Ages, emphasizing Mary’s role as a guiding star for and protector of Christians traveling by sea. In Inferno 2, Virgil explains that “A lady in heaven”(Inf. 2:94) seeing Dante’s distress, called on Lucia to send Beatrice to help him. In her charge to Beatrice, Lucia likens Dante to a sailor struggling for his life: “Do you not see the death he wars against / upon that river ruthless as the sea?” (Inf. 107–8). The Stella Maris is invoked again in Paradiso 33, albeit subtly, as Bernard of Clairvaux prays to Mary. Bernard had in his “Missus Est” used maritime imagery to figure Mary. See Doctor Mellifluus. Encyclical of Pope Pius XII on St. Bernard of Clairvaux (May 24, 1953). http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_24051953_ doctor-mellifluus.html, accessed August 17, 2015.

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waters.”21 Now Dante sees that the earlier shipwreck does not mean his journey has ended, only that the journey he started with Guido will become one that he finishes with Beatrice. Here on the shores of Purgatory, precisely where Ulysses drowned, Dante is reborn, and if the dream of the Guido poem had seemed dead in the water, here it is resurrected: “But here let the dead poetry rise again” (Purg. 1:17, translation mine). As the pilgrim climbs the mountain and reaches the summit, the revelation signaled in Inferno 26 is fulfilled. Dante’s entry into earthly paradise, his arrival at the ends of the earth, also brings him to the end of time. Just as Eden was the beginning, so too is it the end. Here the geographic and the eschatological are fused, as Dante witnesses a spectacular tableau of religious imagery, much of it based on the books of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse. The Beatrice with whom he once dreamed of sailing is transfigured into a figura christi whose second coming is the pinnacle of the pageant. Dante and Beatrice will sail together, but she is no longer simply a passenger; she is his admiral now.22 Here the pilgrim’s earlier protestations that he is neither Aeneas nor Paul are revealed as a youthful lack of vision.23 Dante, like the shipwrecked Aeneas and Paul, has been chosen to reach Rome, the “New Jerusalem” prophesied by John of Patmos.24 At the start of his journey to Paradiso with his new admiral, Dante warns his readers of the perils of this voyage into waters never before explored. Cautioning us against following him, Dante acknowledges, nonetheless, that there may be some who are called to do so (Par. 2:1–15). Thus the pilgrim’s voyage anticipates future journeys by others into the unknown. Significantly, even as Dante was writing the Commedia, Lancellotto Malocello was “discovering” the Canary Islands.25 For those chosen to follow, the narrative of the Commedia serves as a type of ship’s log in which the voyager recounts the marvels he has witnessed, the length of time his journey takes, and a list of the stars that guided him. Most importantly, I would argue, Dante’s chronicle draws a new map of the world in which a new way to paradise is laid out and in which revelation in the geographical sense is also linked to revelation in the eschatological sense. Moreover, the route that this new map proposes, that is, going west to reach the east, follows the natural course of the Roman Empire figured by the journeys of Aeneas and 21

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“To course across better waters now / my talent’s little vessel lifts her sails, / leaving behind herself a sea so cruel” (Purg. 1:1–3, translation mine). “Like an admiral inspecting the personnel whom he oversees in the other boats” (Purg. 30:58). See footnote 4. “You will be with me forever a citizen of that Rome where Christ is a Roman” (Purg. 32: 101–2, translation mine). “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:1–2). In 1312, the Genovese sailor sailed southwest into the Atlantic and rediscovered the islands that Pliny called the “Fortunate Islands,” forgotten by Europeans since the fall of Rome.

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St. Paul.26 The pilgrim’s ultimate destination, “that Rome where Christ is a Roman,” conflates this new route to paradise with the expansion of the Christian empire.27 In the decades following its publication, the reality of Dante’s new world remained the subject of much debate, but the possibility of its actual existence was greatly encouraged in 1481 by the publication of Cristoforo Landino’s illustrated commentary on the Commedia. The commentary and the illustrations, in particular, materialized previously imagined space, depicting Purgatory as a mountain / island antipodal to Jerusalem. It is in this context that we may posit a connection between Dante’s voyage, the dissemination of its imagery throughout Europe including Spain, and the 1492 journey of Christopher Columbus, another Italian exile, who sought to reach the East by sailing west.28 It bears noting that Columbus’s voyage, from a geographical perspective, did not challenge many of his contemporary conventions; most geographers of the fourteenth century believed the world was a sphere.29 His expedition did, however, challenge the general opinion that the other hemispheres were not accessible to humankind.30 Columbus is, therefore, remarkable in believing himself exempt from this prohibition, having been chosen by God to complete such a journey. Parallels in his life and that of Dante quite possibly fostered this belief, and later he would point to his success as proof of his destiny.31 Similarities in his conception of the world and Dante’s suggest very strongly that Columbus was familiar with both the geography and the eschatology of the 26

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East was at the top of most medieval mappae mundi, thus Ulysses’s westward trajectory would have been imagined as a descent, while Dante’s descent from Jerusalem would have been perceived as westward. See footnote 25. For the Commedia’s dissemination in Spain see Rodrigo Cacho, “Dante en el siglo de oro,” Rivista di Filologia e Letterature Ispaniche 6 (2003): 90–4. Columbus was part of the Italian expatriate community in Cordoba and as such would likely have had knowledge of the Commedia. For more on Columbus’s social circle in Spain, see José De la Torre y del Cerro, Beatriz Enríquez de Harana y Cristóbal Colón (Seville: Instituto hispano de America, 1991), 21–31. Martin Behaim (ca. 1436–1507) had constructed a globe of the earth as early as 1469. For an examination of the perceived inhabitability of the antipodes, see John M. Headley, “The Sixteenth-Century Venetian Celebration of the Earth’s Total Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe,” Journal of World History 8 (1997): 1–27. This belief, expressed in many of his letters and writings, was possibly bolstered by events in 1484 when Columbus was seeking support from João II of Portugal. Instead of funding Columbus, João provided Columbus’s charts to Fernão de Ulmo, instructing him to sail west from the Azores. Ulmo ran into storms, declared the trip impossible, and headed back. Later, Columbus’s biographer, Bartolomé de las Casas, would attribute a providential nature to these events. “It is best to believe that divine Providence had reserved for . . . the Castilians the mission of showing the way to the truth to the peoples of the New World.” See James Reston, Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors (New York: Anchor, 2005), 136. See also Elizabeth Horodowich’s essay in this volume for a review of other possible influences on Columbus’s conception of the East, especially that of the figure of Marco Polo.

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Commedia.32 Both Columbus and Dante locate earthly paradise antipodal to Jerusalem, which cartographic conventions placed at the top of the world.33 In Inferno 34, as Dante and Virgil descend through the center of the earth, Virgil explains that on the opposite side of this world, there is a large protuberance caused by Satan’s fall: that land “perhaps to flee from him left here this hollow space and hurried upward” (Inf. 34:121–7). It is on top of this extrusion that Dante eventually finds earthly paradise. Thus Columbus’s journey to the tropics resembles Dante’s inasmuch as he travels downward and returns to tell the tale.34 Moreover, following his third voyage (1498), Columbus writes that after having discovered the mouth of the Orinoco River, he now believes that the earth “has the shape of a pear, which is all very round, except at the stem, where it is very prominent, or that it is as if one had a very round ball, and on part of it was placed something like a ‘woman’s nipple.’”35 A few miles inland Columbus expected to arrive at the bulge of this “pear-shaped” earth on top of which he anticipated there would be a promontory, on which he predicts the legendary earthly paradise is located. Had Columbus failed, his enterprise might have been dismissed as transgressive and destined to fail, but his success not only cured such transgression, distinguishing his journey from that of Dante’s Ulysses, but it also confirmed the cosmology of the Commedia. Significantly, one of Columbus’s closest associates, the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, explicitly links his own voyages of discovery with the journey of the Commedia. In his 1502 letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, Vespucci writes that while using his astrolabe, he “recalled a passage from our poet Dante from the first canto of Purgatorio, when he imagines he is leaving this hemisphere in journeying to the other. Wishing to describe the South Pole, he says: ‘Then I turned to the right, setting my mind upon the other pole, and saw four stars not 32

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The margin notes that Columbus made in his own books, world histories, travel accounts, and geographical treatises reveal his interest, one shared by Dante, in the journeys of Paul and Aeneas and the expansion of the Roman Empire. Although Leonardo Olschki does not assert that Columbus had any knowledge of Dante’s Commedia, in Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche: Studi e ricerche (Florence: Olschki, 1937), 16–17, he argues that Columbus’s perception of the Caribbean as Edenic reflects the pervasive literary motif of an eternal spiritual of which Dante’s earthly paradise was an example. See also Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Wey Gómez argues that the emphasis placed by historians on Columbus’s westward trajectory minimizes another equally important feature of Columbus’s voyages. Specifically, Wey Gómez asserts that Columbus was also “southing” toward the tropics and links this southing to the imperial project of the Catholic monarchs. Such “southing” is not inconsistent with Ulysses’s trajectory that leads to the southern hemisphere. See Christopher Columbus, The Libro de las profecías of Christopher Columbus, trans. Delno C. West and August Kling (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991), 18, and Catherine Keller, “The Breast, the Apocalypse, and the Colonial Journey,” in The Year 2000: Essays on the End, eds. Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 49, n. 26.

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seen before except by the first people.’ ”36 Writing to Piero Soderini in 1504, Vespucci cites Dante’s story of Ulysses as a source of information about this new world: “If I remember rightly, I have read somewhere that this Ocean Sea was without inhabitants. Our poet Dante was of this opinion, in the 26th chapter of the Inferno where he treats of the death of Ulysses.”37 As expansion into the New World escalated, the irony was not lost on Italians that while Italy had no national presence in the New World, it was an Italian who had inspired those journeys and Italians such as Columbus, Vespucci, Caboto, and Verrazzano who had assumed the roles of captains and navigators in the return to paradise.38 Italian writers and artists responded to this irony by presenting Italy as a supra-imperial power that transcended mere nationhood and by emphasizing Columbus’s Italian roots. At the same time, they also frequently presented the Commedia as prophetic, anticipating a providential role for Italy in the entire enterprise. Ludovico Ariosto’s 1532 Orlando Furioso,39 for example, although set in the time of Charlemagne, nonetheless anticipates the Age of Encounters by “predicting” the opening of a way “unknown until present day” and sailors who will pass through the Pillars of Hercules, following a “round course” to discover “new lands and a new world” (15:21:4). Although Ariosto does not explicitly refer to Columbus or cite Dante, the entire epic owes much to the Commedia and its “prediction” calls to mind Dante’s Ulysses who also sought a new world beyond the Straits of Gibraltar.40 In a similar fashion, Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), an epic that takes place during the first crusade, uses “retro-prophecy” to “predict” the eventual discovery of a hidden land by Columbus, a “man from Liguria” (15:32:1–3). Like Ariosto, Tasso evokes the figure of Dante’s Ulysses, not Homer’s, as he contrasts the Ligurian’s success in reaching the new world with Ulysses’s failure to do so (15:25:7–15:26:8). Tasso’s allusion to Dante’s Ulysses forges in the reader’s mind a literary chain that connects Columbus’s voyage to Dante’s and thus back to Paul’s then to Aeneas’s and the 36

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40

See Vespucci, Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of America, ed. Luciano Formisano (New York: Marsilio, 1992), 6. Vespucci’s reference is to Inferno 26:116. See Vespucci, Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents Illustrative of His Career, ed. Clements R. Markham. London: Hakluyt, 1894), 3. For both letters, see also Alberto Magnaghi, Amerigo Vespucci. Studio critico, con speciale riguardo ad una nuova valutazione delle fonti e con documenti inediti tratti dal Codice Vaglienti (Rome: Treves 1924), 2:303, 337. Giovanni Caboto, or John Cabot, sailed for Henry VII of England in 1496. Tuscan Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed for Francis I of France in 1524. See Nathalie Hester’s essay in this volume for more on Ariosto’s and Tasso’s treatment of Columbus’s enterprise. For more on Ariosto’s debt to Dante, see Ita McCarthy, “Alcina’s Island: From Imitation to Innovation in the ‘Orlando furioso,’” Italica 81:3 (2004): 325–50, and Olschki, Storia Letteraria, 41, n. 58.

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establishment of a Roman Empire that has no end in time or space (Aen. 1: 275–80). Concomitantly, the context of Gerusalemme Liberata links Columbus’s enterprise to a holy war while building on Columbus’s perception of himself as divinely elected to facilitate the imminent apocalypse.41 Tasso’s treatment of Columbus’s voyages thus conflates the New World with the gateway to earthly paradise, the portal to the New Jerusalem and imperial aspirations. Almost contemporaneous with the publication of Gerusalemme Liberata, a set of illustrations by Giovanni Stradano for the Nova reperta series attested to and reiterated the prevailing figural connection between Dante and the New World.42 The image of Vespucci demonstrating his astrolabe (Figure 3.1), for example, includes a caption with the passage from Purgatory in which Dante turns to the other pole and sees four stars.43 (Above this, a framed portrait of the poet and an inscription explains that Vespucci had previously cited Dante in his letters.) Recalling the moment in which Dante finds himself on the threshold of earthly paradise, the illustration also effectively links the revelation of the New World with the return to Eden. Several decades later, at the height of the Counter Reformation, Tommaso Stigliani’s Il mondo nuovo (1628) picks up on Columbus’s purported divine election and figures him as a holy warrior fighting on the side of Rome.44 A series of allusions to the Commedia alert the reader to the Dantean foundations of Columbus’s cosmology as Stigliani uses references from the Commedia to evoke the journeys of Aeneas and Paul and to insert Columbus into an apostolic succession of national texts tracing back to the Aeneid.45 Engendering an affinity between Columbus, Dante, Paul, and Aeneas, Stigliani conflates the spiritual and the imperial to assert the Roman church’s sovereignty, in the absence of a territorial claim, over the souls of this new wilderness.46 41

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Columbus insisted that the Lord had chosen him to facilitate the coming apocalypse by spreading Christianity around the world and providing gold to finance the reconquest of Jerusalem. After his 1492 journey, Columbus started signing his name “Christo ferens,” that is, Christ Bearer. See Columbus, Libro, 60–5. See the image by Giovanni Stradano, “The Astrolabe,” in the Nova Reperta series reproduced as Figure 6 in Lia Markey, “Stradano’s Allegorical Invention of the Americas in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 65 (2012): 391. Stradano had earlier been commissioned by Luigi Alamanni to create a series of drawings of Dante’s Divine Comedy and a series illustrating Homer’s Odyssey. See ibid., 394, and Corrado Gizzi, ed., Giovanni Stradano e Dante (Milan: Electa, 1994), 133–82. “Then I turned to the right, setting my mind upon the other pole, and saw four stars” (Purg. 1: 22–3). See Nathalie Hester’s essay in this volume for details of Stigliani’s personal life and poetic development. Stigliani reiterates, for example, the New World’s position antipodal to Jerusalem: “he who by the King Fernando was sent / to find the antipodes below the earth” (1:10:3–4). All citations from the poem follow the 1628 edition. All translations are mine. As Nathalie Hester points out, the Italian texts served as reminders that Italy “was not among European powers colonizing the Americas.” See also Elizabeth Horodowich’s essay in this volume and her discussion on the absence of an Italian colonial project. On May 4, 1493, Pope

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3.1 Giovanni Stradano, “The Astrolabe,” in the Nova Reperta series, late 1580s. [NC 266. St 81 1776 St 81], Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

Indeed it is the figure of Dante that launches this epic journey as Stigliani’s invocation to poetic genius, “Inflate again today with your holy breath, the weak sail of my base genius,” recalls the earliest moments of Purgatorio in which Dante prepares himself for the ascent to paradise (1:3.5–6). The image reminds us as well that Dante’s journey, like the providential journeys of Aeneas and Paul, was interrupted by shipwreck and sets the scene perfectly for Stigliani’s invention of a shipwreck that interrupts Columbus’s 1492 voyage. Significantly, the shipwreck in Stigliani’s epic follows an unjustified attack on Columbus’s ship by French and English corsairs (1:10), creating a backdrop of European discord for Columbus’s mission that reflects the realities of the period in which Il mondo nuovo was written. The clever reader will also recall that Dante’s arrival on the shores of Mount Purgatory was preceded by his descent into hell, which he describes as “war.”47 At the end of the battle, Columbus’s

47

Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) issued a papal bull (Inter caetera) granting to the Crowns of Castile and Aragon all lands to the “west and south” of a pole-to-pole line 100 leagues west of and south of any of the Azores or the Cape Verde islands. Rather than asserting the Church’s proprietary rights to the New World, it actually relinquished them. For more on the Inter caetera, see H. Vander Linden, “Alexander VI and the Demarcation of the Maritime and Colonial Domains of Spain and Portugal, 1493–1494,” American Historical Review 32 (1916): 1–20. “I prepared to undergo the battle” (Inf. 2:4.).

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surviving vessels are tossed about by a storm that destroys his ship and Stigliani’s Columbus, like Dante, finds himself lost in “a wilderness” (1:13:1).48 But all is not lost, for just as Aeneas, Paul, and Dante each received a divine message urging them on despite their setbacks, so too is Stigliani’s Columbus visited by a divine messenger, in this case by an angel whom Columbus at first mistakes for a large bird.49 Lamenting his misfortune, the navigator asks whether he should bother going on or just return to his nest in Genoa.50 The angel’s reply is clear. It is God’s will that Columbus sail on and discover another world.51 When Dante’s pilgrim asked why he was permitted to enter the other world, protesting that he was neither Paul nor Aeneas, he was positioning himself as an inheritor of both traditions. When Stigliani’s Columbus asks, in essence, “why me?” he repeats Dante’s question and reiterates the ultimate revelation: that Stigliani’s Dantesque Columbus is also both. He is the heir to the divinely providential Roman Empire that knows no end in time or space and to the eternal city Christianized by Paul, to that Rome, where according to Dante, Christ is a Roman. Moreover, by transfiguring Columbus into the embodiment of an assimilated Church and Empire, Stigliani proposes a third persona as the logical progeny of such reconciliation as Columbus becomes also a warrior of God in the ultimate crusade. Paying little heed to the historical record, Stigliani has 5,000 soldiers accompany Columbus on his journey! (2:15). Using crusading imagery similar to that which Dante used as his pilgrim approached the pinnacle of paradise, Stigliani’s Columbus becomes a Dantesque avatar of the Roman Church’s battle for the souls of a new empire.52 The effectiveness of Stigliani’s epic in the battle for Catholic dominion in this new world is, of course, debatable. A year after its publication, English Protestant settlers, who, intent on finding their own New Jerusalem, had sailed to America, founded the village of Salem. Within five years, notwithstanding the Roman Church’s efforts to suppress it, Galileo’s theory of a heliocentric universe would turn the world inside out.53 Its most enduring impact, then, 48 49

50 51

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Both Stigliani and Dante use the word “selva.” See footnote 10. In Aeneid 4:265–76, Juno, through Mercury, sends a message to Aeneas, exhorting him to go to Rome. In Acts 27:22–5, Paul’s ship meets a storm and is wrecked on the coast of Malta. During the storm, an angel appears to Paul announcing that he will reach Rome. “Tell me, so that I might return to my nest in Genoa, to a private and quiet life” (1:17:1–2). “The angel answered him, that the Heavenly King [had] chosen him alone . . . so that from the deep Ocean he would find another world” (1:18:1–8). For crusading imagery in the Commedia, see Lawrence Warner, “Dante’s Ulysses and the Erotics of Crusading,” Dante Studies 116 (1998): 65–93, and Brenda Deen Schildgen, “Dante and the Crusades,” Dante Studies, 116 (1998): 95–125. Stradano had also depicted Columbus as a crusader in the Americae Retectio series. See Markey, 387, 412–19 for the image and more on potential textual sources for such representation. In 1587, Galileo had presented two lectures to the Accademia Fiorentina on the “Shape, Site and Size of the Inferno of Dante.” Markey, “Stradano’s Allegorical Invention of the Americas in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence,” 395.

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must surely lie in Stigliani’s propagation of a Dantesque Columbus. This new hero gave Italy yet another pilgrim wanderer in the spirit of Aeneas and Paul, another exile who inspired the emigrant’s search and struggle for a new start in a new land where the streets were paved with gold, guiding countless westward journeys to il mondo nuovo and the paradise it promised. Dante’s sonnet, “Guido i’ vorrei,” and its absorption and refiguring in the Commedia, I would argue, both anticipated the Age of Encounters and inspired the Italians who sailed to and gave name to shores previously unknown to Europeans.54 One does not need to declare Dante a prophet to consider him a visionary. As an exile forced to travel beyond his own familiar routes, Dante was exposed to the curiosity and the nascent sense of enterprise that drove the explorers of his time and afterward. Harmonizing both secular and spiritual conceptions of what lay beyond the known world, Dante creates a prospective itinerary for those who would go beyond their own confines. His conception of the writer as voyager, most assuredly, informed the works of those Renaissance writers and artists engaged in conjuring a new world through ingegno, just as knowledge of its existence, inevitably marked their reading of the Commedia. Dante’s hope, expressed in Paradiso that his poetry might speak to the people of the future, found its fulfillment in the fantastical worlds of Vespucci, Ariosto, Tasso, Stradano, and Stigliani (Par. 33:70–2). As their heroes sailed on the open seas, opening ways never before explored by Europeans, they too constructed a new map of the world, one in which Dante’s imagined world was materialized and into which the poet pilgrim himself was absorbed and reimagined: a fitting testament to the cosmopoietic power of Dante’s earliest imagining. 54

“It is lawful to call it a new world, because none of these countries were known to our ancestors, and to all who hear about them they will be entirely new.” From Vespucci’s letter on his 1501 voyage in Vespucci in The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents, xvi.

CHAPTER FOUR

VENETIAN DIPLOMACY, SPANISH GOLD, AND THE NEW WORLD IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Federica Ambrosini

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hile spain’s empire in the americas grew rapidly in the first decades of the sixteenth century, the Venetian republic witnessed the radical reduction of its political ambitions. Spain played a key role in this downsizing. As one of the European powers that had joined the League of Cambrai in 1508, Spain engaged Venice in a conflict that would result in the (temporary) loss of the Venetian mainland empire in its disastrous defeat at Agnadello in 1509. Venice and Spain again found themselves opposed militarily in the War of the League of Cognac (1526–30). Between 1529 and 1530, peace negotiations among European states – culminating in Bologna with Pope Clement VII’s coronation of Emperor Charles V – eventually forced Venice to submit to the triumph of the Habsburgs. From that point forward, proud but pragmatic Venice renounced its expansionist ambitions, took up a political position of prudent neutrality, and aimed primarily to protect its own territorial integrity and independence on a peninsula that by then stood almost entirely within the Spanish imperial sphere of influence.

Venetian diplomats often used “gold” as an all-inclusive term for “riches,” including gold, silver, pearls, and gems, coming from “the Indies.” In many, perhaps in most cases, this is due to the fact that they were trying to assess generally the incoming American treasures in Venetian or Spanish currency. Furthermore, the word “gold” possessed a symbolic and evocative meaning in the sixteenth century. “Gold” is therefore used throughout this essay to encompass broadly its complex and multiple meanings.

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It is no accident that it was precisely during this period – a period that coincided with the Spanish conquest of Central and South America – that the so-called Myth of Venice achieved its fullest expression, celebrating the Serenissima as a kind of ideal polity that, despite its diminished international political prestige, nevertheless effortlessly maintained the peaceful consensus of its governed subjects. The “myth” was aimed at turning Venice’s pragmatic recognition of the new European balance of powers to its advantage by elevating the republic as a model of wisdom and prudence. Sixteenthcentury literary and artistic representations of Venice regularly depicted the state’s ideal political virtues, perfectly balanced system of government, great appreciation of liberty, and practices of justice.1 The sixteenth century was, in fact, a time of great splendor for the republic, famously witnessed by the city’s magnificent architectural production at this time, as well as in the work of some of the city’s most renowned painters, such as Giorgione, Titian, and Veronese.2 The economic prosperity the city enjoyed, fueled by the industries of glass, silk, wool, leather, shipbuilding, and print, ensured its social tranquility and drew a constant, varied flow of immigrants, making it a populous, cosmopolitan capital and a center of attraction as much for artists and intellectuals as for lovers of luxury and pleasure. If Venice continued to enjoy a sense of international prestige in the sixteenth century, this was due, at least in part, to its diplomacy. In the fifteenth century, the republic had become among the first of the European states to institute a system of permanent diplomatic representatives, placing patrician ambassadors at major foreign courts around Italy and Europe. These representatives communicated local information to the Venetian government through frequent, detailed dispatches, and upon their return home, they also presented a relazione offering a descriptive synthesis of the political, military, economic, social, and religious conditions of the state of their embassy.3 Since ambassadorial expenses could be exceedingly high, these diplomats were usually chosen from among the aristocracy’s most prestigious and wealthy families. 1

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“The new vision of Venice came out of de facto defeat,” notes Elisabeth G. Gleason, “Confronting New Realities. Venice and the Peace of Bologna, 1530,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 179. On the “Myth of Venice,” see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 13–61. See David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Donald E. Queller, “The Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni,” in Renaissance Venice, ed. John R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 174–5, defines this relazione, specifying that it was a document type exclusive to the Venetian tradition, a kind of document sui generis, not only among diplomatic documents, but among literary types.” Far removed from the immediacy, spontaneity, and fragmentary nature of the dispatches, by around the year 1530 the relazione had assumed its definitive configuration. See also Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Cape, 1955), 112–13.

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Ambassadors typically came from a learned cultural background, which was often displayed with a certain satisfaction in their relazioni.4 These reports represent valuable sources for the study of a wide variety of topics in early modern research, such as political institutions, trade, agriculture, armed forces, religion, and society at large, including the reception of the news and information arriving from the New World.5 This essay considers the dispatches and relazioni of Venetian envoys at Spanish courts in the sixteenth century. A subtle but clear sense of disdain for Spain and its population ran through Venetian relazioni during the sixteenth century, even in seemingly more laudatory reports. Venetian ambassadors in Spain purposefully selected information, as well as the means of presenting it, in order to highlight the weakness, vulnerability, corruption, and precariousness of the otherwise seemingly indestructible Spanish monarchy. Even in accounts when Venetian diplomats emphasized the strength, stability, and glory of Spain’s American empire – pointing especially to Spanish wealth – their undertones and underlying intent remained to expose the vacuity and inconsistency of Spanish success. Venetian ambassadors to Spain regularly criticized, denigrated, and demythologized – both subtly and quite openly – Spanish activities in the New World, largely by emphasizing regularly, if not obsessively, the ambiguous nature of New World gold. In turn, as we shall see, such emphasis worked to highlight, indirectly, the praiseworthy merits of the Venetian state. Ambassadors made largely utilitarian decisions when selecting and sending home news that could be of use to the republic, primarily communicating information that either directly concerned the immediate interests of the state or promoted an understanding of the military, economic, and political strengths and intentions of foreign powers. Perhaps as a result of this utilitarian style of reporting, especially in the first several decades of the sixteenth century, Venetian ambassadors to Spain remained largely uninterested in or ambivalent about Spanish activities in the Americas: activities they deemed peripheral to Venetian interests. In June 1519, for instance, patrician chronicler Marin 4

5

Michael Mallett’s assertions regarding the fifteenth century are, in fact, also true for the sixteenth century; see “Ambassadors and Their Audiences in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies 8:3 (1994): 235. See also Peter Burke, “Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication,” in Venice Reconsidered, 388–419; Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance (1350–1520) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On the impact and reception of the New World in Venice, see Federica Ambrosini, Paesi e mari ignoti. America e colonialismo europeo nella cultura veneziana (secoli XVI–XVII) (Venice: Deputazione Editrice, 1982); Angela Caracciolo Aricò, ed., L’impatto della scoperta dell’America nella cultura veneziana (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990); Angela Caracciolo Aricò, ed., Il letterato tra miti e realtà del Nuovo Mondo: Venezia, il mondo iberico e l’Italia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994), and Liz Horodowich, “Armchair Travelers and the Venetian Discovery of the New World,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 1039–62.

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Sanudo transcribed in his Diarii a letter sent by the papal nuncio from Barcelona describing some “islands found” by the Spaniards, complaining that the Venetian ambassador in Spain had not written anything about them.6 Venetian diplomats largely overlooked the New World well into the middle of the sixteenth century. In 1557, Federico Badoer stated in his relazione from the court of Charles V and Philip II that he did not want to devote much time to the Indies, preferring to dedicate more attention to other Spanish possessions closer to Venice and its interests.7 Even as late as 1573, ambassador Leonardo Donà initially expressed regret that his brief time before the Venetian Senate did not permit him to linger over “a few charming and marvelous curiosities” from the other side of the ocean, since he needed to focus instead “on the knowledge necessary for men of state and of government.”8 By that time, however, Spanish incursions into the New World were deep and lasting and news of the Americas had come to represent coveted information for Italian states, such as Tuscany and the Venetian republic. Therefore, despite his initial prefatory refusal to discuss the Indies and limiting himself to “that which must be heard here by Your Most Excellent Lordships, reserving the rest for private conversations,” Donà went on to include a long excursus on the Indie Occidentali.9 Despite the fact that Venetian diplomatic and ambassadorial interest in the New World took off slowly, the Venetian ruling class and its ambassadors were always interested in Spain. Spanish European and global ambitions generated great anxiety for the Venetian republic, and perhaps in an attempt to downplay their apprehensions, Venetian ambassadors to Spain regularly emphasized Spanish weakness and failure in their reports. Many patricians shared the position of the Venetian giovani: a political current in sixteenthcentury Venetian politics that pressed for detachment from the Habsburgs and the Holy See and for strengthening ties instead to rising northern powers such as England and the United Provinces.10 No matter their distrust or dislike of Spain, Venetian envoys also tended to agree that it would be best not to make an enemy of the Spanish. In the course of the sixteenth century, while

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Marino Sanuto, I diarii, vol. 27 (Venice: Visentini, 1890): 385, June 16, 1519. The letter was written on May 3 by the papal nuncio in Spain to his counterpart in Venice. Federico Badoer (ambassador to Charles V and to Philip II, 1555–7), in Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di ambasciatori veneti al Senato, vol. 8, Spagna (1497–1598) (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1981), 179. Leonardo Donà (ambassador to Philip II, 1569–73), in ibid., 8:652. Ibid., 8:652–68. The interest of the Medici court in American gold, silver, and pearls is discussed by Lia Markey in Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) and in Brian Brege’s essay in this volume. On the giovani in late sixteenth-century Venice, see Gaetano Cozzi, Il doge Nicolò Contarini. Ricerche sul patriziato veneziano agli inizi del Seicento (Venice-Rome: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1958), 1–52.

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Venetians showed little if any direct diplomatic interest in the New World, Venetian ambassadorial discussions of Spain often naturally reflected or were tangentially filtered through discussions of Spanish America. Amidst their fluctuating opinions of Spain, balancing fear and distaste, Venetian ambassadors often insinuated that the greatness of the Spanish monarchy – derived in part from the riches of the New World – was more presumed than real, more façade than substance. While the New World did not yet figure among Spanish sources of income listed by ambassador Domenico Trevisan in his 1498 relazione, from the beginning of the subsequent century, American mining came to take pride of place in Venetian diplomatic correspondence.11 Ambassadors focused on Spanish gold fundamentally as a facet – as a cause and a result – of Spain’s growing economic and political potential. Gold used in indigenous artistic production generally received little attention and was mentioned only occasionally during the period of the discovery and conquest of Mexico, when examples of Amerindian work in gold began circulating in the Old World. Although this period of fascination with Native American gold work was brief, these exotic objects in gold did manage to elicit a sense of fascination from even the most disenchanted of diplomats, who left traces of admiration for them in official correspondence. For instance, ambassador Francesco Corner wrote in 1519 of “a sun beautifully worked in a large piece of gold and with a moon in silver” and in 1520 of “an idol that held in hand a scepter sculpted with a large round silver moon.”12 Even correspondence that indicated an admiration for such work, however, tended to recognize American gold primarily for its market value, as Spanish earnings rather than artistic production counted for Venetian statesmen. In the aforementioned examples, Francesco Corner states that the gold work amounts to “30 thousand ducats” and that the idol “could weigh 4000 ducats.”13 Interest in Native American gold work was relatively short lived, and in general, Venetian ambassadors reported about precious metals – often with a measurably negative rhetorical tone – when they arrived in Seville to be weighed, valued, and recorded. In 1506, for instance, Vincenzo Querini communicated that Ferdinand received 50,000 ducats from the Indies annually; in 1518, Francesco Corner, and in 1525, Gasparo Contarini, both reported that the “fifth” due to Habsburg Charles as king of Spain had risen to approximately 11

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Domenico Trevisan (ambassador to Ferdinand and Isabella, 1497–8), in Firpo, Relazioni, 8:15, 19. Francesco Corner from Barcelona, November 15, 1519, and from Valladolid, March 6, 1520. Cited in Sanuto, I diarii, 28:119, 375–6. See also Andrea Navagero from Toledo, September 18, 1525, in Sanuto, I diarii, 40:114; Gasparo Contarini (ambassador to Charles V, 1521–5), in Firpo, Relazioni, vol. 2, Germania (1506–1554) (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1970), 129. Francesco Corner from Barcelona, November 15, 1519, and from Valladolid, March 6, 1520. Cited in Sanuto, I diarii, 28:119, 375.

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100,000 ducats per year.14 In 1528, Andrea Navagero raised this figure to 500,000 ducats, an increase generally confirmed by successive Venetian representatives as mention of the movements of Spanish ships loaded with Mexican and Peruvian riches became routine in their correspondence.15 Venetian ambassadors constantly highlighted Spanish “mining for gold” and “the avarice and appetite for mining for gold” seen in the Indies.16 Particularly in the first half of the century, however, ambassadors often reported this numerical data with distrust, noting that – as Bernardo Navagero observed in his relazione of 1546 – of all of the “great things” that one said about the Indies, “there is not a man in the world who can confirm what is true, and certain.”17 The writings of Venetian diplomats, often obsequious in form while merciless in substance, regularly reduced powerful Spanish sovereigns to seemingly pathetic figures by representing them as arrogant misers and debtors, despite all the gold they had been mining in the New World. Ambassadors, such as Lorenzo Priuli, noted, for instance, that in August 1574, Philip II had no money to pay his soldiers. Despite the fact that a relatively large shipment of gold and silver had just arrived from the Indies, it was not enough, and regardless, these funds had been already committed elsewhere.18 In August 1583, Matteo Zane noted the sovereign’s relief when a ship arrived from Peru laden with gold, silver, and other goods; all of it was earmarked, however, to pay off previous expenditures and it had become impossible to obtain loans otherwise from private parties, “since the market is at the tightest it has been for years.”19 Mirroring their monarch, Sigismondo Cavalli noted in 1570 that Spanish subjects were “all gravely in debt, and it is a miracle to hear of any who 14

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Vincenzo Querini (ambassador to Philip the Handsome, 1505–6), in Firpo, Relazioni, 8:54. Francesco Corner’s dispatch (from Valladolid, February 24, 1518) is published in Sanuto, I diarii, 25:306. For Contarini, see Firpo, Relazioni, 2:118. Andrea Navagero (ambassador to Charles V, 1525–8), in Firpo, Relazioni, 2:154–5. See also Bernardo Navagero (ambassador to Charles V, 1543–6), in ibid., 2:455; Marino Cavalli (ambassador to Charles V, 1548–50), in ibid., 2:810; Michele Surian (ambassador to Philip II, 1557–9), in ibid., 8:256; Paolo Tiepolo (ambassador to Philip II, 1558–62), in ibid., 8:361. Donà in ibid., 8:654. Harsh criticism of the Spanish population is found in almost all of the Venetian relazioni: see Querini in ibid., 8:50–1; Francesco Corner (ambassador to Charles I of Spain, afterward Emperor Charles V, 1517–21), in ibid., 2:74; Contarini in ibid., 2:120; B. Navagero in ibid., 2:474; Alvise Mocenigo (ambassador to Charles V, 1546–8), in ibid., 2:554; Giovanni Soranzo (ambassador to Philip II, 1562–4), in ibid., vol. 9, Spagna (1602–1631) (Turin, Bottega d’Erasmo, 1978), 127:406–7; Sigismondo Cavalli (ambassador to Philip II, 1567–70), in ibid., 8:488. Unlike his colleagues, Francesco Soranzo (ambassador to Philip II and to Philip III, 1598–1602), in ibid., 9:127, even denied high-ranking Spaniards skill in the military profession: in their arrogance, they claimed, in fact, to practice it without even having learned the basics, and yet with a ranking no lower than that of general. B. Navagero, in ibid., 2:455; his uncertainty was partly due to the fact that the production from American mines varied from year to year. See M. Cavalli in ibid., 2:811, and Giovan Francesco Morosini (ambassador to Philip II, 1578–81), in ibid., 8:756. ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 9, no. 67, Lorenzo Priuli from Madrid, August 31, 1574. Ibid., file 16, no. 33, Matteo Zane from Madrid, August 29, 1583.

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have money.”20 In November 1588, awaiting the melancholy return of what remained of the Armada, ambassador Girolamo Lippomano noted that Philip pondered the sale of the very candlesticks on his table in the hope of financing his revenge on Elizabeth. At the same time, a ship had once again just arrived from Peru full of gold and silver, and the king proposed “mining great quantities of gold” in New Spain.21 Uncharitable, often of doubtful Catholic orthodoxy in spite of their boasted devotion, and even unappealing in appearance, the Spanish were, on top of it all, greedy, as confirmed by their avarice and appetite for mining. According to Venetian diplomats, rich or poor, the Spaniards were arrogant and self-important and as unrestrained in their flashy consumption, dictated by a mania for appearances, as they were, in private, miserly and reluctant to honor debts. In 1586, ambassador Girolamo Lippomano praised his predecessor Vincenzo Gradenigo’s behavior, claiming that Gradenigo’s showy, luxurious lifestyle and generosity for anyone who might prove useful was exactly what was required of a shrewd diplomat living in paradoxical Spain: a state that was at once sumptuous and poverty-stricken, “the world capital of pomp and grandeur, where there is an immense scarcity of everything.”22 Similarly, in 1506, Vincenzo Querini wrote of the Spanish: “They are all intelligent by nature but they do not adopt either doctrines or studies, any of them. They live like paupers in their houses because of the great poverty among them, and go to great lengths to save money and all the money they save in one year, they throw away in one day, in order to appear greater [i.e., richer] than they are.”23 Despite its New World wealth, Venetian ambassadors suggested that Spain was not only in debt, but was in fact impoverished. Francesco Vendramin mused in his relazione of 1595: “I cannot keep quiet not to say something worthy of much consideration, and that is that with the great quantity of gold and other riches being mined in the Indies, the Catholic king should be the richest of all princes, and his state the most wealthy and abundant of all the others; but one sees right away that the Great Turk, without mining in his state, is more rich, and also France, which also lacks this resource, is nevertheless as rich and more powerful than Spain.”24 Immediately following Philip’s death, Francesco Soranzo observed that even though he had been “one of the most wealthy princes in the world, he left his kingdoms’ income already overinvested and the crown full of debts totaling around one hundred million of

20 21

22 23 24

S. Cavalli in Firpo, Relazioni, 8:488. ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 21, no. 50, Girolamo Lippomano from Madrid, November 1, 1588. Ibid., file 19, no. 31, Girolamo Lippomano from Madrid, July 14, 1586. Querini in Firpo, Relazioni, 8:50–1. Francesco Vendramin (ambassador to Philip II, 1592–5), in ibid., 8:898–9.

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gold.”25 Soranzo described the dramatic financial shortfalls that paralyzed the government in Madrid. The politicians, he claimed, “do not know where to turn,” the young and bewildered Philip III proclaimed himself willing to sell “all of the jewels and furnishings that he had” to avoid further increasing the already immense debt that he had inherited from his father.26 “Spain is quite poor,” Francesco Vendramin stated flatly, noting poetically that gold from the Indies, as the Spaniards observed themselves, had the same effect on the country as “rain falling on the roofs of houses,” draining away without ever accumulating.27 In short, Venetian ambassadors emphasized in their reports that the dazzling torrent of gold, silver, gems, and pearls that gushed out of the holds of ships returning from the Americas could only have impressed someone who did not know the broken reality of the Spanish state from the inside. Philip II was, in conclusion, a terrible administrator whose inefficiency and lack of discipline had ultimately produced a wasteful, corrupt, and unstable state in the New World. Venetian diplomats did not question what kind of society the Spaniards were building on the other side of the ocean as much as they were interested in how activities in the Americas affected the motherland and wider Europe. For instance, the republic’s envoys meticulously briefed the Senate on the issue of the encomienda, explaining that the insistent, repeated pressure (sometimes bordering on blackmail) exerted on the Spanish crown by the encomenderos in order to obtain concessions resulted in a system that recalled feudalism.28 According to the Venetians, should the encomenderos get what they wanted, no good would come to Spain or Spanish America and the anxiety concerning the independence that the perpetual heredity of the encomienda triggered in the colonies was further demonstration of Spanish ineptitude. It was beyond the interests of the Venetian ambassadors to investigate how private parties used their quotas of the American treasures. Instead, they revealed how the king managed to avail himself, as needed, of their quotas in one way or another, and how his distasteful habit of “putting his hand over 25

26 27

28

ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 30, no. 58, Francesco Soranzo from Madrid, September 13, 1598. Ibid., file 30, no. 75, Francesco Soranzo from Madrid, October 24, 1598. Vendramin in Firpo, Relazioni, 8:899. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Spanish arbitristas (economists) raised serious doubts about the actual usefulness of American colonies to Spain: see María Victoria López Cordón, “Dall’utopia indiana alla maledizione dell’oro: l’America nel pensiero spagnolo del XVI e XVII secolo,” in Scoperta e conquista di un Mondo Nuovo, ed. Francesca Cantù (Rome: Viella, 2007), 258–68. ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 4, no. 8bis, Toledo, January 4, 1560. Federico Badoer had already described the encomenderos as “feudal lords”: file 1, no. 104, Brussels, September 28, 1555, and file 2, no. 54, Ghent, September 5, 1556. On the feudal mentality that the encomienda contributed to generating in Latin America, see Massimo Donattini, Dal Nuovo Mondo all’America. Scoperte geografiche e colonialismo (secoli XV–XVI) (Rome: Carocci, 2004), 97. Also see: ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 6, no. 96, Sigismondo Cavalli from Madrid, September 19, 1568; Badoer in Firpo, Relazioni, 8:179–80, and Tiepolo in ibid., 8:360.

V E NET I A N D IP L OM A CY, SP A NIS H G O LD, A ND THE NEW W OR LD

that of the others,” as Paolo Tiepolo stated in 1560, encouraged smuggling.29 More damningly, however, Venetian ambassadors almost unanimously reported that the Spanish Crown invested this influx of precious metals from the Americas primarily into military buildup for the growth of the state. Describing the Spanish quest for gold and silver as well as their defense and management of colonial dominions, Venetian ambassadors regularly depicted the Habsburgs of Spain as tragically inadequate. In Spanish America, Francesco Soranzo curtly moralized in 1602, “good order has not once been observed, not in the conservation of the colonies themselves and not in the dispensation of land.”30 According to Soranzo, crossbreeding had additionally poisoned Spanish colonial society, resulting in political instability.31 In effect, gold had drawn social outcasts across the ocean; it had stirred up competitiveness and given rise to a greedy, restless, rebellious society in the New World, always on the brink of unraveling. The viceroys and governors of the Indies – argued Francesco Soranzo – would have an easy time of rising up against the motherland and, once in possession of the government and weapons, could make quick work of dominating the unwarlike natives, winning over the colonists, and becoming “the masters of the mines.”32 According to Soranzo, the very climate of the American colonies was subtly corrupt. Lured to the New World by easy riches, colonists’ morals eventually dissolved when “having taken in the air of the place, become craven, they lose their military discipline, and demean themselves, all giving themselves over to the grip of profit and acquisition of means.”33 Gold, in effect, eventually became poison. In addition to Spanish wastefulness and lack of discipline, Venetian diplomats also regularly emphasized that Spanish control over precious resources from the New World was placed at risk by shipwrecks and, more significantly, piracy: yet another component of Spanish mismanagement. Initial accounts reported piracy only sporadically; for instance, in 1523, Gasparo Contarini noted the French capture of two Spanish ships filled with gold worth 60,000 ducats.34 It quickly became clear, however, that European powers had begun to compete seriously for commercial control of Atlantic oceanic routes. For Venetian ambassadors, this meant that the same gold that should have strengthened the Spanish monarchy became instead a point of weakness for Spain and 29

30 34

ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 4, no. 21, Toledo, April 26, 1560. See also Donà in Firpo, Relazioni, 8:664. Various ambassadors also specified how private parties were bound to pay a tithe of their gold and silver, such that the total owed to the king ended up being one-fourth of the total (see, for example, Giovan Francesco Morosini in ibid., 8:756). Venetian diplomats provided scant information on smuggling, a practice that was, for that matter, “fleeting” by its very nature (Donattini, Dal Nuovo Mondo, 106). F. Soranzo in Firpo, Relazioni, 9:92. 31 Ibid., 9:93. 32 Ibid., 9:161. 33 Ibid., 9:93. Dispatch from Valladolid, June 7, 1523 (see Guglielmo Berchet, ed., Fonti italiane per la scoperta del Nuovo Mondo, vol. 1, Carteggi diplomatici (Rome: Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1892): 111).

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even a potential element of Spanish destabilization. The possibility of acquiring gold unleashed European greed and competitiveness, often amidst powers that were young, ambitious, and aggressive, such as England and the United Provinces. By the second half of the sixteenth century, privateering was no longer aimed solely at damaging the income of Philip II. Instead, ambitious European powers hoped to occupy strategic positions that would make it possible to take over Spanish exploitation of the mines and domination of maritime routes, resulting eventually in a direct attack on Iberian settlements in the New World. Madrid became gripped with alarm: a fact that did not escape the Venetian ambassadors. In August 1582, Matteo Zane wrote about the anxiety aroused in Spain by the appearance in the Atlantic of French ships, possibly in pursuit of Spanish fleets en route to and from the Indies, but also feasibly headed to Peru and Philip II’s new acquisition, Portuguese Brazil, “in hopes of taking control of it, there being no forces there to put up any resistance.”35 More fearsome than the French, however, were the British, especially infamous British privateer Francis Drake, known as Draco or el Draque. Venetian ambassador Vincenzo Gradenigo tracked Drake’s movements with great diligence, simultaneously revealing, once again, the Venetian obsession with gold.36 Gradenigo was a particularly able and well-connected ambassador in Madrid with access to some of the Crown’s most secret dealings and able to gather and dispatch often critical information about the contested territory of the Atlantic Ocean. He noted how both Spain and Portugal remained dumbfounded by the privateer and his seemingly uncontested control over South America from Peru to Brazil. “Drake,” Gradenigo wrote, “is master of the sea and faces no obstacles,” since in Spain, “no provisions are made, not because they are heedless, but rather because of the enormous difficulties they are having in every area”; in vain, “Lisbon is making an uproar, and Castille is doing the same.”37 A British conquest of New Spain “would be an extremely important feat,” observed Gradenigo, considering the “many millions of gold that come from those parts every year.”38 What counted in Gradenigo’s correspondence was not so much the colonial balance of power in the New World, but rather access to gold. Gradenigo recorded how Drake sacked, burnt down, and massacred from Santo Domingo, where the “gold and silver plunder” was “immense,” to Cartagena: an unprotected and defenseless city in spite of being where “all of the gold and silver of Peru is amassed.”39 35 36 37

38 39

ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 15, no. 32, Matteo Zane from Madrid, August 6, 1582. Ibid., file 18, no. 18, Vincenzo Gradenigo from Saragozza, May 19, 1585. Ibid., file 18, no. 55, Vincenzo Gradenigo from Madrid, January 10, 1586, and no. 60, Madrid, February 19, 1586; ibid., file 18, no. 60, Vincenzo Gradenigo from Madrid, February 19, 1586. Ibid., file 18, no. 60, Vincenzo Gradenigo from Madrid, February 19, 1586. Ibid., file 19, no. 6, Vincenzo Gradenigo from Madrid, April 5, 1586.

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The Spanish were greatly relieved when Drake moved on, sparing at least Havana, a city where “all of the gold and silver of Peru and New Spain is amassed.”40 For Venetian ambassadors, Drake’s invasion demonstrated the weakness of Spanish settlements in America, while also setting a dangerous precedent, “by showing the way to anyone else who wanted to make the same journeys.”41 Ambassadors noted how during his invasion of the Caribbean, Drake had sacked several colonial cities of strategic importance such as Santo Domingo.42 However, rather than report any description of these cities and of their local life, once again, Venetian diplomats reported almost exclusively on the role of these cities as collection centers for gold and silver.43 It is important to emphasize that in their obsessive focus on New World gold, Venetian diplomats regularly overlooked and ignored a great variety of other information about the New World. For instance, Venetian reports only occasionally listed New World products (some of which were to be found in sixteenth-century Italian botanical gardens) such as sugar, cassia, cotton, crimson, and leather, with some mention of logwood and guaiacum, used for treating syphilis. As one example, Giovan Francesco Morosini wrote in his relazione (1581): “From these parts [the American colonies] the principal good that they mine is gold and silver, about the quantity of which [i.e., gold and silver from America] great things are told, that [i.e., great things] I do not intend to report, in order to avoid telling some lie. . .. Moreover they extract from New Spain cochineal, that are little animals like flies that create kermes, leather, cotton, sugar and other things.”44 They make no mention of maize – even though it was planted with splendid success in Venetian fields from at least the middle of the century, and only passing notes exist about wheat, wine, and livestock introduced by Spain, and “roots and other things” that Native Americans used for food.45 Ultimately, Venetian ambassadors used the great variety of criticisms they levied against Spain and their colonies in Spanish America as a means of 40

41

42 43

44 45

For the quotation, see note 39. The news that Havana had been spared can be found in ibid., file 19, no. 19, Vincenzo Gradenigo from Madrid, May 14, 1586. Ibid., file 19, no. 27, Vincenzo Gradenigo and Girolamo Lippomano from Madrid, July 2, 1586. Ibid., file 19, no. 20, Madrid, May 19, 1586. Ibid., file 19, no. 23, Vincenzo Gradenigo from Madrid, May 31, 1586. Also see Vincenzo Gradenigo’s dispatch quoted earlier, note 39. Ambassadors did mention the violations of religious buildings in Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Cartagena. See ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 6, no. 90, Sigismondo Cavalli from Madrid, July 24, 1568; file 19, no. 25 and no. 27, Vincenzo Gradenigo and Girolamo Lippomano from Madrid, June 25 and July 2, 1586. Spanish construction of monasteries throughout New Spain and Peru was, however, noted by Leonardo Donà in his relazione (Firpo, Relazioni, 8:668). Morosini in Firpo, Relazioni, 8:756. Mocenigo in ibid., 2:562. On corn in Venice, see Michele Fassina, “Il mais nel Veneto nel Cinquecento: testimonianze iconografiche e prime esperienze colturali,” in Caracciolo Aricò, ed., L’impatto della scoperta dell’America, 85–92.

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undergirding the Myth of Venice. Representatives of the Venetian republic had long made internal harmony one of the cornerstones of its civic rhetoric, if not the mainstay of the Myth of Venice, and Venetian envoys were united in demonstrating how the Spanish quest for gold led to dissention in the New World: a dissention that compared unfavorably to Venetian concord. Ambassadors compared, for instance, open, hospitable, cosmopolitan, and well-populated Venice, with its ancient merchant values and fruitful and wellcultivated mainland, to an unwelcoming Spain, closed to foreigners and in turn afflicted by a demographic poverty that, together with its only marginally fertile soils, contributed to its low productivity. Francesco Soranzo observed in 1602: “Spain is less fertile because it is less cultivated, and fewer inhabitants yield less cultivation.”46 At the end of the century, a time when Venetian–Spanish relations had deteriorated, in part as a result of the pro-French positions of the Venetian state, it was no accident that Venetian ambassadors regularly seized upon opportunities to highlight the ineffectual nature of Spanish politics: “these lords minister advice day and night about what one could do, and yet they find no sufficient remedy for the many ills looming over them.”47 Such criticisms naturally implied an intrinsic comparison to more effective Venetian politics. Along these lines, a few months before Puerto Rico fell into British hands in 1598, ambassador Agostino Nani claimed to have heard from a Spanish nobleman that, “one does not provide for things [in Spain] with the maturity and wisdom exercised by the Venetian Senate.”48 Regarding Spain, Giovan Francesco Morosini noted that princes are naturally enemies of republics; they were intrinsically incompatible “since the republics are governed for the most part by reason and law, while the princes govern by sense, republics are the ones who, through their example, reproach the injustice of the princes.”49 As late as 1586 – decades after the destruction of Tenochtitlán and its reconstruction on the model of European cities – Girolamo Lippomano communicated the arrival in Spain of the “archbishop of Mexico . . . a great city that they say resembles Venice.”50 Going back to the beginning of the sixteenth century and stretching to its end, Venetians once again compared themselves to the Aztec 46 47

48

49

50

F. Soranzo in Firpo, Relazioni, 9:40. ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 21, no. 62, Girolamo Lippomano from Madrid, December 24, 1588. ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 30, no. 1, Agostino Nani from Madrid, March 2, 1598. See also ibid., file 30, no. 62, Madrid, September 18, 1598, for the British conquest of Puerto Rico. Morosini in Firpo, Relazioni, 8:777. On this natural incompatibility, see also B. Navagero in ibid., 2:507, and G. Soranzo in ibid., 8:435. ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 19, no. 72, Girolamo Lippomano from Madrid, December 2, 1586. The stubborn persistence, in the Venetian imagination, of the ghost of a Tenochtitlán that survived the conquest unchanged is one of the most significant examples of the “remarkable tendency to depict the Americas as if frozen in an idealized, utopian past” (Horodowich, “Armchair Travelers,” 1055).

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capital, using the story of Spanish America ultimately to tell a local story of Venetian political stability and effectiveness at home in comparison to Spanish wastefulness, corruption, and inefficiency. While comparing Venice to Spain allowed Venetian ambassadors to emphasize the lasting values of the Myth of Venice, Venetian “liberty” had its limits. Ambassadors linked, at least superficially, the cruel Spanish exploitation of Native Americans to the same passions that drove Spanish appetites for gold, making gold the font of both immeasurable material wealth as well as incontestable moral degradation for Spain.51 However, these discussions never resulted in any particularly compassionate appeals for the better treatment of Native Americans. Like many other Europeans, Venetian diplomats understood the indigenous peoples of the New World as subhuman, and Venetian ambassadorial reports always remained more anti-Spanish than pro-Native American, driven by their dislike of Spain more than by any sense of righteousness about the abuse of indigenous peoples. Actively participating in the construction of the Black Legend, as Elizabeth Horodowich’s essay in this volume indicates, the Venetian governing class and its ambassadors employed the fate of the Indians primarily as a polemical weapon in their arsenal of antiHabsburg rhetoric, exploiting Native Americans for their own political purposes in an eerie parallel to the ways in which the Spanish exploited them physically and materially.52 In essence, ironically, the rhetoric of liberty at the core the Myth of Venice – the sense of liberty that at the beginning of the seventeenth century drove the Republic to oppose the Pope and the Habsburgs – was never really presumed to be on offer to indigenous cultures in the communiqués of Venetian diplomats and their audiences. In the end, ambassadors questioned the benefits of Spain’s dominion overseas. Francesco Soranzo, reporting on Spanish opinion, asserted that the king of Spain boasted of being the “Lord of the Ocean and of having direct control over all of that broad, vast navigation.”53 He went on to explain that the Spanish were “deceiving themselves” by thinking that they are really in control of their empire.54 The king, according to many Spaniards, would do better to possess nothing outside Spain other than the Indies, since from them “would arrive gold and there it would stop,” and all of Spain “would be full of gold and silver.”55 But, in Soranzo’s opinion, the Spanish did not understand that the other lands in Spain’s possession, lands so superior to it “in nobility, size, convenience, fertility, abundance of people, quantity of forces, and copiousness 51 52

53

See Contarini in Firpo, Relazioni, 2:50. See Elizabeth Horodwich’s essay in this volume. On the image of the indigenous American in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venetian culture, see Ambrosini, Paesi e mari ignoti, 93–152. See also B. Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). F. Soranzo in Firpo, Relazioni, 9:113. 54 Ibid., 9:77. 55 Ibid., 9:77.

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of riches” were what conferred upon their motherland the “strengths and great reputation” that it enjoyed.56 On the other hand, Alvise Mocenigo indicated in 1548, that the conquest of the New World had caused such severe population hemorrhaging in Spain “that it would have been better for Spain to have never discovered the New World at all.”57 In short, Spain did not shine from its own light, but rather from a reflected light; a light that certainly did not derive from the radiance of American gold – the same gold that, not by chance, shines brightly in so much contemporary painting inspired by the theme of vanitas. 56

Ibid., 9:77.

57

Mocenigo in ibid., 2:562.

PART II

THE NEW WORLD AND ITALIAN RELIGIOUS CULTURE

CHAPTER FIVE

THREE BOLOGNESE FRANCISCAN MISSIONARIES IN THE NEW WORLD IN THE EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY Massimo Donattini

S

tudies of the history of the new world during the first half of the sixteenth century rarely consider the city of Bologna: of the eightynine Italian publications on Americana that appeared between 1493 and 1560, only four of them were printed in the towered city.1 There are histories, however, that numbers alone are incapable of telling. Such is the case for the stories of three Friars Minor Observants from the Province of Bologna, Francesco da Bologna, Francesco da Faenza, and Michele da Bologna, who arrived as missionaries in the recently conquered territory of New Spain between 1529 and 1534. As was customary at the time, their letters to relatives, Franciscan brothers, and friends were passed around, piquing the townspeople’s interest in and imagination about the New World.2 These letters provided the content for three of the four editions just mentioned. Though scholars have known about these friars and their letters for more than a century, the links between their work in the New World and the Italian context from which they

Thank you to Loretta Palmieri, Adriano Prosperi, and Giovanni Ricci for their careful reading of my essay. 1 Massimo Donattini, Spazio e modernità (Bologna: Clueb, 2000), 35–48, with the addition of one publication (see note 56 later in this essay). 2 See Mario Infelise, Prima dei giornali. Alle origini della pubblica informazione (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 2002).

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emerged has been largely forgotten.3 The stories of these Italian friars were unique, since at the time, most missionaries in New Spain were Spanish or Flemish. What drove them to the New World? What were they searching for there? With whom did they share and discuss their aspirations? This essay endeavors to answer these questions by reconstructing for the first time the forgotten histories of these friars in their historical context. These men came of age in a decidedly prophetic-apocalyptic culture that had developed in Europe – and under particular social and religious circumstances in Bologna, during the second quarter of the sixteenth century. This apocalyptic mentality played a role in prompting these three Bolognese friars to go to New Spain. The friars’ biographical information and writings intersect both with each other and with other contemporary texts, producing larger questions and theories about the relationship between Italy and the New World at this time. The histories of these Italian friars reveal the particular perspective with which they viewed the New World and can help us to understand “the selective eye which first viewed America [and] the nature and criteria of Renaissance selectivity,” as well as the ways in which events in the Old and New Worlds influenced and fed off of each other.4 MISSIONARIES AND THE APOCALYPSE

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, many associated religious missions in the Americas with the apocalypse.5 The notion that the discovery of the New World was linked to the coming of the end of the world was nurtured by Columbus himself, who, in his Libro de las Profecías, estimated that just 155 years remained until the end of time. But since doomsday would be set in motion only once the word of Christ had been brought to everyone, it was essential to establish, not just when, but how and to whom to dedicate this remaining time. Europeans were amazed by the conquests of Hernán Cortés that revealed both the riches of Mexico and the astonishing numbers of its inhabitants who – like the populations of the apocalypse – were countless. Cortés believed that the task of caring for the souls of the Mexicans should be entrusted to the regular clergy and in May 1524, the first missionaries arrived 3

4

5

With the exception of José de Jesús Martín Flores, Fray Miguel de Bolonia. El guardián de los indios (Guadalajara: Acento Editores, 2006), who writes both of Francesco da Bologna and Michele da Bologna. John H. Elliott, “Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact?” in First Images of America, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1976), 1, 17. See Adriano Prosperi, “America e Apocalisse. Note sulla ‘conquista spirituale’ del Nuovo Mondo,” in Adriano Prosperi, America e Apocalisse e altri saggi (Pisa and Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1999), 15–63.

BOLOGNESE FR ANCISCAN MISSIONAR IES I N THE NEW W OR LD

in Mexico: twelve Observant friars, led by Martín de Valencia. In the years that followed, America would serve as the backdrop for a new apostolic age, and the Friars Minor Observants, with their infinite enthusiasm, would assume a lead role in this great undertaking. Convinced they were participating in what would be the last days of evangelic preaching, the order’s culture was “profoundly permeated by currents of apocalyptic propheticism.”6 Similar convictions most likely inspired the twenty friars whose departure for America was authorized at the General Chapter meeting held in Assisi (1526), and must have been among the motivations of these three friars from Bologna as well. Indeed, one of the first figures to advocate for a global missionary campaign as the most efficient weapon against the perverse effects of the Protestant Reformation was another Bolognese Observant, Francesco da Castrocaro, who expressed such thoughts in his oration at the general chapter meeting of the order, held in Carpi in 1521: “What is there left for us to do, but to embrace the many populations, the islands, and the many and almost infinite number of previously unknown people that we have now discovered around the world?”7 BOLOGNA AS THE “WORLD’S THEATER”

Contemporary events in Bologna influenced these friars’ decision to go to the New World, and understanding the Bolognese context from which they emerged helps us to grasp their perceptions of the Americas, as well as their evangelical motivations. In particular, Bologna hosted two meetings between Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V in 1529–30 and 1532–3. According to Pietro Bembo, the city at this time became the “World’s theater”: the center of an Italy and Europe otherwise disoriented by war and religious discord and in need of restoring both religious faith and faith in the future.8 The first meeting reached a spectacular climax on February 24, 1530, when Charles was crowned emperor in the Basilica of San Petronio.9 The meeting also established the foundation for a new European order based on universal peace – so proclaimed on December 31, 1529 – and was meant to

6 7

8

9

Ibid., 33. Franciscus de Castrocaro, Oratio . . . habita in comitiis Carpensibus, praesertim adversus Martinum Luterum (Bononiae: Hieronymus de Benedictis, 1521), c. Biii r. The oration was published with a preface by Giovanni Antonio Flaminio (to whom I will return in the pages that follow). On this text, see Prosperi, “America e Apocalisse,” 29–30. Pietro Bembo, Lettere, vol. 3, ed. Ernesto Travi (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1992), 124–5, letter n. 1076 to Clement VII (April 7, 1530). Roberto Righi, ed., Carlo V a Bologna. Cronache e documenti dell’incoronazione (1530) (Bologna: Costa, 2000); Giovanni Sassu, Il ferro e l’oro. Carlo V a Bologna (Bologna: Editrice Compositori, 2007).

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stabilize Italian politics and restore peace between the Church and the Empire. The second meeting in 1532–3 confirmed these goals and objectives.10 A record of the meetings left by Bolognese Dominican Leandro Alberti gives us some idea of the charged cultural and emotional atmosphere in Bologna at the time.11 Alberti noted the curiosity and excitement of the city, as well as a widespread sense of uneasiness tied to the enormous political and religious hopes generated by the encounter. In Bologna, a common desire existed for peace and concord in the secular world, and above all in the Church. Alberti describes an arch that was erected for the occasion “whose frieze was decorated with scenes of the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of the order of priests, as described in the Book of Ezra: intended to affirm the mission of the Pope and the Emperor to reform the Church and restore it to its primitive form.”12 The pope and the emperor would move to remake the church in the image of its apostolic origins in a way that reflected the apocalyptic prophecy of John (10:16): “and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.”13 In these ways, in Bologna in the early 1530s, hope of a new golden age began to spread following the disastrous events of the preceding decades: the Italian Wars, the Turks’ threatening victories, the Protestant Reformation, and last but not least, the discoveries in the Americas and their potentially unsettling ramifications.14 With thousands of foreigners and the leaders of Christianity entering the city gates to attend and observe these meetings, Bologna became, in that moment, a node for the exchange of information about the wider world, including new territories and their populations.15 Alberti writes that on January 29, 1533, Clement VII received Portuguese cleric Francisco Álvares, who had been commissioned by the king of Ethiopia, Lebna Dengel (who reigned under the name Da¯wit II), to carry various gifts and letters from Da¯wit to the pope. Above all, Álvares communicated the Christian church of Ethiopia’s pledge of obedience to the bishop of Rome.16 There was something extraordinary about this 10

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Paolo Prodi, “Carlo V e Clemente VII: L’incontro di Bologna nella storia italiana ed europea,” in Bologna nell’età di Carlo V e Guicciardini, ed. Emilio Pasquini and Paolo Prodi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 329–82. Leandro Alberti, Historie di Bologna. 1479–1543, ed. Armando Antonelli and Maria R. Musti (Bologna: Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, 2006), 2: 541–51. Ibid., 542. See Ottavia Niccoli, “Astrologi e profeti a Bologna per Carlo V,” in Bologna nell’età di Carlo V e Guicciardini, 469–71. The “unus pastor” passage was interpreted by many in an apocalyptic sense, to mean that at the end of time, all of mankind would be conquered by the Christian faith, after which time there would be no more separate folds or shepherds. This passage gave impulse to missionary activity and forged an important link between apocalyptic culture and missionary work. Ibid., 474. According to Luigi Gonzaga, in 1530 around 40,000 people came to Bologna: Righi, Carlo V a Bologna, 127. Alberti, Historie, 2, 627. Álvares, having reached Ethiopia in 1520 with the legation of Rodrigo de Lima, resided there until 1526. This embassy took place under the skillful

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communique of allegiance from an ancient and distant branch of Christianity seeking to reconnect to Rome at the very moment when the European religious crisis seemed to threaten the very existence of Catholicism.17 Bolognese presses immediately seized the opportunity to publish texts related to this embassy. By February 1533, Da¯wit’s letters were already printed in a Latin translation by Paolo Giovio, followed a month later by a vernacular edition.18 That same year, the Latin text was published in Basel, Antwerp, and Paris, followed by two German translations. Years later, Giovanni Battista Ramusio included the vernacular translation in the first volume of his Navigazioni e viaggi. However, the Ethiopian embassy to Bologna had its biggest impact in the work of the Portuguese Erasmian, Damião de Gois, and his Fides, religio moresque Æthiopum (Louvain, 1540) which encouraged Rome’s acceptance of the Ethiopian church. Gois employed millenarian-apocalyptical tones, such as the prophecy of John, the “unus pastor.”19 The Ethiopian embassy demonstrates Bologna’s significance as a site of contact between Europe and new worlds at this time. In addition, it demonstrates the widespread hopes that the Church would adopt an inclusive and welcoming attitude toward the infinite new worlds being discovered beyond the borders of Europe. Ethiopians were not the only ones who traveled to Bologna to meet with the pope. On March 3, 1533, yet another emissary from afar was granted an audience with the bishop of Rome: a “Spanish Dominican friar from the order of preachers,” from the “New Indies,” bearing many precious and unusual gifts. Alberti, who reported the event with his usual attention to detail, was particularly captured by the two bed covers made and woven from different colored parrot feathers, blue, green, black, yellow . . . that seemed like velvet, and that made it possible to understand what is meant in the Scripture when the furnishings of the tabernacle are described, and it states that it must have been adorned with opere plumario . . . As well as stone knives that cut like razors, with which (those people) shaved. And thanks to those knives, one

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leadership of the Portuguese ambassador in Rome, Martinho de Portugal, who was interested in gaining the pope’s favor for his king. Giuseppe Marcocci, “Prism of Empire: The Shifting Image of Ethiopia in Renaissance Portugal (1500–1570),” in Portuguese Humanism and the Republic of Letters, ed. Maria Berbara and Karl A. E. Enenkel (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 447–65. Two letters were to Clement VII, and the others were to Kings Manuel and João III of Portugal, in 1521 and 1524. The Latin edition is Legatio David Æthiopiae regis ad . . . Clementem papam VII una cum obedientia, eidem . . . praestita (Bononiae: Iacobum Kemolen Alostensem, 1533); the edition in vernacular, i.e., Lambasciaria di David re dell’Etiopia al Santissimo S. N. Clemente papa VII, insieme con la obbedienza . . . (Bologna: Giacobo Keymolen Alostese, 1533), was reprinted by Keymolen in 1535. Giuseppe Marcocci, “Gli umanisti italiani e l’impero portoghese: una interpretazione della Fides, Religio, Moresque Æthiopum,” Rinascimento, s. 2, 45 (2006), 330; 318, note 35 (for the series of editions); 338–49 (for the motif of the “unus pastor”).

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understood what type of knives the Bible intended when God says: ‘Make flint knives for yourself, and circumcise . . . ’20

The close relationship Alberti established between the biblical passages (Exodus 26:1 on the feather covers; Joshua 5:2 on the stone knives) and the handcrafted Mexican objects – two worlds otherwise distant in both time and space – is founded on an unstated logic.21 Alberti was not interested in the objects for their exotic unfamiliarity, but for their heuristic function. That is to say, these New World objects illuminated and informed biblical texts in a new way. For Alberti, the expression “opere plumario” does not refer to “embroidery” (which was and is the traditional meaning of the expression), but rather to a “work made out of feathers,” like the covers he had seen. He believed the American objects were closely linked to and allowed for a greater understanding of biblical tradition. Indeed, Alberti was convinced that the inhabitants of the New World descended from the lost tribes of Israel.22 How exactly Alberti developed this theory remains unclear; perhaps the “Spanish Dominican friar” who brought New World gifts to the pope, recently identified as Domingo de Betanzos, suggested it to him.23 It is not surprising that Fra Leandro gave ear to ideas that provided a reassuring interpretation of the novelties of the American world, tying its inhabitants to Christian concepts and Old Testament ancestry and dismissing dangerous theories like those discussed in Bologna by philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi, who just a few years earlier, between 1511 and 1518, had discussed the ex putredine theories of spontaneous generation in two courses at the university.24 Alberti’s passage reveals an early discussion about the inhabitants of America in Bologna: a discussion also imbued with apocalyptic implications. According to the narrative of the book of Ezra, the journey of the lost tribes toward the 20

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Alberti, Historie, 629–30: “ . . . due coperte da letto fatte et tessute di pene di papagalli di diversi colori, cioè azuri, verdo, negro, giale . . . che pareano di veluto. Onde parvi di conoscere quel che abbia[m]o nella Scrittura descrivendo l’apparato del tabernacolo de Iddio, ove comandava che opere plumario se dovesse ornare . . . Poi alquanti coltelli di pietra che tagliavano come rasori, per li quali si radevano. Et per tali coltelli, si conobbe di che sorte fussero quelli coltelli deli quali parla la Bibbia quando dice il signore ‘Fami li coltelli di pietra da circoncidere.’” Ex. 26:1: “Tabernaculum vero ita fiet decem cortinas de bysso retorta . . . variatas opere plumario facies . . .”; Jo., 5:2: “Fac tibi cultros lapideos et circumcide . . . ” Based on 4 Esdras, 13:39–47. See Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il Nuovo Mondo. La nascita dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale: Dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali, 1500–1700 (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1977), 49–110. The theory appears after 1540, in support of the encomenderos. Lee E. Huddleston in Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1967), holds that “the opinion that the Indians were descendants of the Hebrews was current and discussed, even if no author did accept it,” well before 1540 (33). Laura Laurencich Minelli and Davide Domenici, “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts to Pope Clement VII in 1532–1533,” Estudios de cultura náhuatl 47 (2014): 169–209. See also Davide Domenici’s essay in this volume. Bruno Nardi, Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1965), 305–19.

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east takes them to the faraway land of Arzareth: “And they have dwelt there until the last time.”25 Alberti’s concise account brings us back to the propheticapocalyptical themes already identified in contemporary Bologna. An even more explicit example of this was Giustiniano da Rubiera’s widely read booklet containing three missionary letters from America.26 Published in Bologna in the late spring of 1532, the pamphlet’s long title, Passio gloriosi martyris beati patris Andreae de Spoleto (Figure 5.1) drew particular attention to Antonio de Olave’s narrative about the recent miraculous martyrdom of his Franciscan brother Andrea da Spoleto in Fez in 1532. The other two letters came “from the extreme ends of the world, from the Indies in great Asia,” or in other words, from the Americas.27 These two letters were from “Temixtitán” (Tenochtitlán): one from friar Martín de Valencia (June 12, 1531), and the other from the first bishop of Mexico, friar Juan de Zumárraga, both prominent in the evangelization of Latin America.28 Both letters focus on the conversion of the Mexican people and read as a series of military engagements and victories. For example, in the relentless battle against the devil’s work, 500 temples and 20,000 images of false gods had been destroyed. More than 1 million people had been baptized, and twenty new convents, chapels, and oratories had been built. Zumárraga includes important details about missionary strategies: the friars quickly learned local languages, for instance, and concentrated their efforts on the children of noble Aztec families in the hopes of making their work as effective as possible. Hundreds of Mexican children, he described, were living in the habitations constructed around the convents, where they learned Christian doctrine “better than the children of the Spanish.”29 Zumárraga’s description became well known: years later, an image from Diego Valadés’s Rhetorica Christiana (Perusiae: Petrutium, 1579) (Figure 5.2) almost directly 25 26

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4 Esdras 13, 46. My italics. Antonio de Olave, Passio gloriosi martyris beati patris fratris Andreae de Spoleto . . . pro Catholice fidei veritate passi in Affrica civitate Fez . . . De fratrum minorum regularis observantie profectu et animarum lucro in HUKETAN sive nova Hispania . . . (Bononiae: Justinianum Ruberiensis, 1532). The Bolognese edition is not available in Italian libraries; I have consulted instead the edition in the Biblioteca Marciana, Venezia (Misc. 1104, op. 11), not catalogued in John Alden, ed., European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493–1776, 1: 1493–1600 (New York: The J. C. Brown Library, 1980). On the conflation of Asia and America during the sixteenth century, see Eviatar Zerubavel, Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1992). On Martín de Valencia, see Marcel Bataillon, “Évangélisme et millénarisme au Nouveau Monde,” in Courants religieux et humanisme à la fin du XVe et au debut du XVIe siécle. Colloque de Strasbourg, 9–11 mai 1957 (Paris: P.U.F., 1959), 25–36; and Georges Baudot, Utopie et histoire au Mexique. Les premiers chroniqueurs de la civilisation mexicaine (Toulouse: E. Privat, 1976). Zumárraga’s letter (datable to the same days as the other) has been studied by Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Don fray Juan de Zumárraga (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1947), 2, 141–8; 300–8. Olave, Passio, c. Ar.

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5.1 Passio gloriosi martyris beati patris Andreae de Spoleto ordinis Minorum regularis observantie pro Catholice fidei veritate passi in Affrica civitate Fez. Anno Domini. MD.xxxij. De fratrum minorum regularis observantie profectu et animarum lucro in HUKETAN sive nova Hispania, Biblioteca Marciana, Venezia (Misc. 1104, op. 11), 1532. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e Attività Culturali e del Turismo-Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.

reproduced its fundamental elements. Zumárraga’s narrative is pervasively confident about the success of Christianity: even the details that depict difficulties or even violence, such as the appeal to young Aztecs to convert their own families or to find and destroy idols hidden by their parents, and at times

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5.2 “Typus eorum que frates faciunt in novo Indiarum orbe,” in Diego Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana, Perugia, 1579. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna.

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losing their lives in the process, are understood as the fulfillment of ancient prophecies. Could the people who so ardently sought baptism be identified with those described in the Bible (“Let them be converted at evening, and suffer hunger as dogs”)?30 Did this mean that the end of time was nearing? For these reasons, among others, Europeans and especially the Minor Observants, found news arriving from Mexico at this time especially compelling. This fascination explains the editorial success and wide circulation of this collection of texts. The first three editions of the Passio appeared in Toulouse in 1532 to mark the general chapter meeting of the Franciscans convened for Pentecost.31 That same year, the booklet was published in Bologna and Leipzig; and later, in Cracow and Medina del Campo.32 Subsequently, the two American letters were included in more ambitious publications. In his De insulis nuper inventis, the commissioner general elected in Toulouse, Nikolaus Herborn, published them together with Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s fourth decade and Cortés’ reports, as well as his instructions for converting Native Americans (Epitome convertendi gentes indiarum ad fidem Christi), which contains the prophecy “et fiet unum ovile et unus pastor.”33 Another Minor Observant, Amandus of Zierikzee, published Fray Martín and Zumárraga’s letters together with other texts, including two of Prester John’s letters. He concluded his book with a selection of biblical passages, the last of which (Matthew 24:14) clearly expresses the sense of the entire operation: “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.”34 These publications disseminated news from the New World around Europe and the wider world. For the Passio and its subsequent reissues, the mass conversion of the indigenous Americans was a symbolic event that carried a double message: Europeans should have faith in the full realization of the divine plan, while enthusiastically collaborating with the holy work being carried out in the missionary lands. Faith in this very message led Francesco da Bologna, Francesco da Faenza, and Michele da Bologna to America. Where exactly did these friars work in the 30

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Ps., 58, 15: “Convertentur ad vesperam, et famem patientur ut canes.” See Bataillon, “Évangélisme,” 30, on the importance of this Bible verse for the formation of Martín de Valencia. See Geoffroy Atkinson, La littérature géographique française de la Renaissance (New York: B. Franklin, 1968), nn. 43, 44; for the third edition, see Alden, European Americana, 1, n° 532/4. Friar Martín’s dedication of his text to Commissioner General Mathias Weynssen suggests that the decision to publish the letters came from within the Order. Olave, Passio (Leipzig: M. Blum, 1532). (http://ustc.ac.uk/index.php/record/683077, accessed December 1, 2015); Olave, Passio (Kraków: F. Unger, between 1533 and 1537) (http://ustc.ac.uk/index.php/record/240975, accessed December 1, 2015); Alonso de la Isla, Libro llamado thesoro de virtudes util et copioso (Medina del Campo: Pedro de Castro, 1543). De insulis nuper inventis (Cologne: M. Novesiani, impensis Arnoldi Birckman, 1532), c. M [4] v. See Prosperi, “America e Apocalisse,” 35–8. Amandus von Zierikzee, Chronica compendiosissima . . . (Antwerp: apud S. Cocum, 1534), c. 128r.

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Americas, and what did they accomplish? While information about their lives remains scarce and often uncertain, it is primarily derived from their letters and the recently discovered records of two Inquisition trials involving Michele da Bologna.35 These sources allow us to attempt a reconstruction of their missionary experiences. These three friars arrived in western Mexico (most likely in what would later become Mexico City, Tenochtitlán, the political and religious center of the entire area) during a moment of tension, characterized by harsh clashes between Bishop Zumárraga, “protector de los indios,” and the first Audiencia of Messico (operational from December 1528); clashes that continued until at least December 1529, when the president of the Audiencia Nuño de Guzmán set off to conquer what would become New Galicia.36 Collaboration between political and religious powers in western Mexico finally resulted from the appointment of the second Audiencia; the establishment of the first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, and the appointment of Vasco de Quiroga as the bishop of Michoacán (1536) reinforced the institutional structure of the new diocese.37 Therefore, the three Observants took part in what could be called the “heroic” phase of the evangelization of Michoacán and its surrounding territories (Jalisco, Zacatecas), a phase that lasted until the indigenous rebellion of Mixtón (1541) questioned its progress.38 FRANCESCO DA BOLOGNA: “UNDER THE SWORD OF THESE INFIDELS”

Friar Francesco da Bologna, known before his ordination as Antonio di Gerolamo degli Allè, was from a Bolognese family of jewelers, also known as the Borghesani.39 Born in 1489 or 1490, as he himself informs us, he would have already been in the order for some years when he was eventually appointed preacher at the order’s chapter meeting in Cotignola (1522). The earliest documentation we have of his presence in America comes from the Relación de Michoacán. Together with fellow friar Jacobo de Tastera, the Relación relates that 35

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Martín Flores, Fray Miguel de Bolonia. Other information comes from historians and chroniclers of the Order, beginning with Gerónimo de Mendieta, sources that must be used with caution, as they are riddled with errors and imprecisions and are characterized by a substantial disinterest in accurately reconstructing the chronology of events. See Robert Ricard, La “conquête spirituelle” du Mexique. Essai sur l’apostolat et les méthodes missionnaires des Ordres Mendiants en Nouvelle-Espagne de 1523 à 1572 (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1933), 9. J. Benedict Warren, The Conquest of Michoacán: The Spanish Domination of the Tarascan Kingdom in Western Mexico, 1521–1530 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 215. Bernardino Verástique, Michoacán and Eden: Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 92–103. The evangelization then recommenced with renewed energy after the rebellion was repressed. See note 65. Alberto Merola, “Allè, Francesco,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 2 (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960), 472–3; Martín Flores, Fray Miguel de Bolonia, 15–32.

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Francesco da Bologna procured the liberation of a group of influential people from Michoacán imprisoned by Nuño de Guzmán following the murder of Cazonci Tzintzincha, the sovereign of the region.40 Since the event took place between the end of March and the beginning of April 1530, Francesco da Bologna most likely reached New Spain by the second half of 1529 at the latest; and it is likely, as I hypothesize, that he traveled there together with Francesco da Faenza.41 A few documents give us a clear idea of his activities. A letter attributable to 1537 tells us he had already been residing in the convent of Santa Ana de Tzintzuntzan for two years and that in 1536 he had gone to Zinapécuaro for the funeral services of a fellow Franciscan.42 In addition, the records of the residencia obtained through the work of Vasco de Quiroga as oidor of the Audiencia Real in Michoacán include a declaration signed by Francesco as guardian of Santa Ana in February 1536.43 Of greater interest for the present essay, however, are the two letters he sent to Bologna: the first to his relatives on July 23, 1534, sent from “this land called Mexico.”44 Here, Francesco notes that he is in great health: “everyone imagines that I am thirty years old, even though I have just turned 44 and a half.” This is the only frivolous note in an otherwise very serious text that almost reads like a valediction, written by a man who lives under the threat (or the hope) of martyrdom: “We are constantly under the swords and knives of these infidels, and shall it please Him, for the love of whom I am here, that I soon carry out that which I have so desired and searched for with avidity.”45 In his prose, 40

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José Tudela, ed., Relación de las ceremonias y ritos y población y gobierno de los indios de la provincia de Michoacán (1541) (Madrid: Aguilar, 1956), 277. Warren, The Conquest, does not mention the event. For the date, see James Krippner-Martínez, Rereading the Conquest: Power, Politics and the History of Early Colonial Michoacán, México, 1521–1565 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 35. Relación appears to be reliable: it was written when Allè and Tastera were still alive. On the expedition of 1530, see José Castro Seoane, “Aviamiento y catálogo de las misiones que en el siglo XVI pasaron de España a Indias y Filipinas según los libros de la Contratación. Expediciones Franciscanas 1526 a 1545,” Missionalia Hispanica 14 (1957): 107–14; Pedro Borges Morán, El envio de misioneros a America durante la epoca española (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia, 1977), 481–2: Friar Francesco would have traveled together with Tastera; see Fidel Chauvet, “Fray Jacobo de Tastera, misionero y civilizador del siglo XVI,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana, 3 (1970): 7–33. Martín Flores, Fray Miguel de Bolonia, 29–30, proposes the expedition that followed: that would be in conflict with the Relación . . . de Michoacán. Discovered by Martín Flores, Fray Miguel de Bolonia, 31–2. Tzintzuntzan was the “ville sainte du Michoacán” (Ricard, La “conquête spirituelle,” 51). Pablo Beaumont, Cronica de Michoacán, 2 (Mexico: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1932), 166–8. Here Francesco writes that he has “quarenta y siete años.” The letter was published in [Valerio Zani], Il genio vagante. Biblioteca curiosa di cento, e più relazioni di viaggi stranieri, raccolta dal sig. conte Aurelio degli Anzi, 4 (Parma: Ippolito e Francesco M. Rosati, 1693), 87–93; the editor claims to have reproduced the text without any alterations. For the citation, see ibid., 90. Here, Francesco mentions his brothers Filippo, Nicola, and Francesco, his “beloved sisters,” and a cousin (“Sister Lodoviga”). Ibid., 89.

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written in an excited state of mind, and focused on his own destiny, no sense of concern for the subjects of his mission comes across, the infidels armed with knives, for whom he limits himself to offering up a prayer: “poor people, that God may convert them soon.”46 The second and better-known letter from Francesco da Bologna (Figure 5.3), survives in two undated editions.47 Here, Francesco da Bologna has become a missionary with ten years of experience behind him, who writes to “all of the venerable fathers” of the province of Bologna, not only to reassure them of his good health and that of “our Brother Michael, who says hello,” but also to encourage them to “come and help these souls.”48 The text aims to recruit new missionaries: the vineyard of the Lord has too few (200 in all, he tells us) workers. And, moreover, the indigenous chiefs do not want “either secular priests, or religious men of other orders, but rather only Minor Observants,” preferably Italian.49 In line with this objective, the letter primarily deals with socio-religious themes and is quite similar, on a thematic level, to those of Martín de Valencia and Zumárraga from a few years before: the turn-out of people at the religious ceremonies; life in the colleges, male and female; the devotion and intelligence of young boarders and their high social extraction, their role in the continuation of the mission and in the edification of a Christian society free from the scourge of polygamy.50 Francesco da Bologna’s second letter also emphasizes several themes seen before. The fleeting mention of the “ancient stone knife, like those used for circumcision” signals that Francesco, like Leandro Alberti, believed the 46 47

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Ibid., 92. Francesco da Bologna, La lettera mandata . . ., da Lindia ouer nova Spagna, & dalla Città di Mexico al R.P. frate Clemente da Monelia, Ministro della Provincia di Bologna, & a tutti li Venerandi padri di essa provincia (Bologna: per Bartholomeo Bonardo, et Marco Antonio Groscio, s.a.), the source for the citations that follow. The other edition, which I have not seen, was published in Venice “per Paulo Danza,” in all probability after the Bolognese edition. This letter was originally erroneously attributed to 1534, stemming from an error on the part of Henry Harrisse, who while cataloguing the Venetian edition (the only edition he knew of), dated it to 1534 “on the authority of . . . Orlandi,” but Orlandi, in the passage cited by Harrisse, was describing Allé’s other letter, published at the end of the 1600s. See Henry Harrisse, Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima (New York: G. P. Philes, 1866), 308, who cites Pellegrino A. Orlandi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi e dell’opere loro (Bologna: C. Pisarri, 1714), 117. The Bolognese edition was most certainly printed between 1540 and 1541. This can be established in relation to two details: first, that Clemente da Moneglia was the “Ministro della Provincia di Bologna” from May 1538 until May 1541. And second, because the printing house of Bartolomeo Bonardo and Marcantonio Grossi was only active from 1540. However, that year it only printed three titles: (http://edit16.iccu.sbn.it, accessed December 1, 2015). Francesco da Bologna, La lettera, c. [4]r. Similar invitations can be found in cc. Ai v e [4]v. “Frate Michael” certainly refers to Michele da Bologna. Francesco da Bologna, La lettera, cc. [3]v–[4]r. Francesco da Bologna, La lettera, c. [3]v; for the marriages, c. [4]r. Francesco’s opinion is too optimistic: “Now they all live like good Christians, content with their legitimate wife” (Francesco da Bologna, La lettera, c. Aii v). On the letter, Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 563–4.

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5.3 Frontispiece of La lettera mandata dal R. Padre frate Francesco da Bologna da Lindia ouer noua Spagna, & dalla Città di Mexico, Triv. G 758, Archivio Storico Civico Biblioteca Trivulziana, Castello Sforzesco, 1531. Copyright @ Comune di Milano. All rights reserved.

Americans to be descendants of the Jews.51 Also, Francesco compared the ancient tradition of apostolic preaching with that of his day, which had “renewed the blessed faith . . . almost extinct”: an argument frequently used 51

Francesco da Bologna, La lettera, c. [3]r.

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by those reading history in an apocalyptical interpretation.52 He also included in this letter an anecdote about the artifice indigenous priests used to maintain their ancestral beliefs, almost in an echo of the anxiety caused by the Inquisition trials of 1536–40.53 The letter is the last trace left to us of Francesco da Bologna. THE GOOD WAR OF FRANCESCO DAL BUSCO DA FAENZA

The writings of humanist Giovanni Antonio Flaminio reveal the work of a second friar from the province of Bologna, also active in the same years and territories of the New World: that of Francesco da Faenza. Flaminio reminds Cardinal Antonio Pucci that he had sent Pucci a letter, “a few years ago,” from “Francesco da Faenza, friar of the same order . . . a man truly renowned for the integrity with which he leads his life . . . one of the first who dared to adventure toward those lands.” This letter had been “distributed in Bologna by the printers, but only after I had translated it into Latin and sent it to you [Pucci].”54 The letter in question, signed by “Francesco dal Busco da Faenza dell’ordine di San Francesco dell’Osservanza,” is located in an Estense codex compiled by Gaspare Sardi, an erudite Ferrarese friend of Leandro Alberti’s. It was published in 1893.55 In my research, I was able to identify the particular edition of the text mentioned by Flaminio, a booklet, the only known, extant copy of which is conserved in the Biblioteca Trivulziana (Figure 5.4).56 The letter, dated June 1, 1531, was sent from “Olchaton nella provintia di Melchiotan” (in the manuscript: “il Canton in la provincia de Mechiocati”), making it easy to identify its point of origin as Michoacán. In the text, Francesco da Faenza reassures the addressee of the letter (in the printed version, “Nicolao Barbavera,” and in the manuscript, “Nicolò 52 53

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Ibid., c. Ai v. On these themes, see Prosperi, “America e Apocalisse,” 35–6. Francesco da Bologna, La lettera, c. [3]r-v. Francesco recounted how Mexican priests buried the idol of Tezcatlipoca under a cross in order to be able to continue worshipping it “even now” (“per insino al presente”), later confessing their deceit to the friars. On the trials, see Patricia Lopes Don, Bonfires of Culture: Franciscans, Indigenous Leaders, and the Inquisition in Early Mexico, 1524–1540 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). See note 68. Biblioteca Estense, Modena, ms. DXXII (= alfa.J.4.20), cc. 128v-31r, “Exenplare de una l(ette)ra scripta de India novamente trovata chiamata il Cotto in provincia Mechiotam,” published in Raccolta di documenti e studi pubblicati dalla R. Commissione Colombiana, Part 3, 2: Guglielmo Berchet, Narrazioni sincrone (Rome: Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1893), 390–2. See also Pier Luigi Crovetto, “Francesco del Busco,” in Nuovo Mondo. Gli Italiani, ed. Paolo Collo and Pier Luigi Crovetto (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 409–15. “Busco” (for “bosco”), is a common toponym in the area stretching from Romagna to the Veneto; there was an ancient parish church named Santa Maria in Busco in the hills south of Faenza. Francesco dal Busco, Copia di una lettera portata da gli Antipodi paese novamente ritrovato nella quale si narra del vivere et costumi di quelle genti cosa nuova et bella da leggere (Bologna: Giustiniano da Rubiera, 1532), cc. 2, in 4°, the source for the citations found here, unless otherwise stated. The text contains some interesting deviations with respect to the manuscript.

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5.4 Frontispiece of Francesco dal Busco, Copia di una Lettera portata da gli Antipodi paese novamente ritrovato nella quale si narra del vivere et costumi di quelle genti cosa nuova et bella da leggere Rari Triv. G 767, Archivio Storico Civico Biblioteca Trivulziana, Castello Sforzesco, 1532. Copyright @ Comune di Milano. All rights reserved.

Barbauto”) of his good health as well as that of an unnamed “companion.” From what follows, we understand that the companion is also a man of religion, with whom he has shared the voyage to America and his first missionary experiences: “we crossed water and fire . . . twice we were in mortal danger,

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and twice the storm knocked us back three hundred miles . . . we have already begun preaching in their language and have baptized a multitude of people.”57 Memory of the transatlantic journey is still fresh in his mind, though sufficient time has passed to have learned the indigenous language, to have begun preaching, and to have harvested the first fruits of his work. All these facts suggest that the travel companion of Francesco da Faenza was, in fact, Francesco da Bologna. Francesco da Faenza’s letter emphasizes the social and religious conditions these Italian friars encountered in the New World, conditions Francesco observes with disinterest, and with no trace of the apocalyptic motifs often encountered so far. Francesco da Faenza may have come from an apocalyptic background, but clearly, this did not influence all friars and their missionary ideas equally. For instance, he does not describe a reality in which the explosive force of miracles brings about thousands of conversions each day; on the contrary, “we experience great difficulty in convincing them to abandon their savage way of living.” The only hope, for Francesco da Faenza, is to trust in God and the passage of time, so that: “with the help of God, we will persuade them to adopt, little by little, the Christian way of life.”58 As a missionary facing staunch indigenous resistance to the changes in lifestyle that conversion to Christianity demanded, Francesco’s language was in stark contrast to the enthusiastic tones of the letters of Martín de Valencia and Zumárraga. “This was their lifestyle, and there were still many who continued to live so: though in secret.”59 Missionaries like Francesco da Faenza witnessed on the ground that paganism was far from dead and that faith did not triumph easily. No other writings by Francesco da Faenza exist, making it difficult to say whether his tone reflects a momentary reaction to the harsh realities of missionary work or a more entrenched way of thinking. Despite his pessimism, dal Busco did not abandon his rural missionary work for the more comfortable convents of bigger cities. On the contrary, not long thereafter, he devoted himself to the conversion of people in even more remote areas.60 Bishop Zumárraga provides us with the most authoritative account of his work in “Parecer al Virey sobre esclavos de rescate y guerra” (ca. 1536), in which he criticizes the enslavement of the indios of New Spain to Viceroy Mendoza. The text, written with inspired and enlightened rhetoric, contrasts 57

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Dal Busco, Copia di una Lettera, c. [1]r. In the Estense ms., the plural returns at the end of the letter, c. 130v: “pray to god for us as we also pray for you.” Ibid., c. [2]r. My italics. See Prosperi, Tribunali, 562–3, and Rosario Romeo, Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1989), 31–2. Dal Busco, Copia di una Lettera, c. [2]r. Beaumont, Crónica, 2:219–20, hypothesizes he was present at “Colima y Zacatula.” For Diego Muñoz, “Descripción de la Provincia de los Apóstoles San Pedro y San Pablo en las Indias de la Nueva España,” Archivo Ibero-Americano, 9 (1922), 398, the text refers to lands of “increíble aspereza.”

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the brutality of the conquest with the only “good war,” that for the souls of the people. Zumárraga points to Francesco da Faenza as a concrete example of this principle: Your lordship also knows, through the account of Friar Jacobo de Tastera . . ., how the Italian friar Francesco da Faenza penetrated into the territory of the chichimecas, and they surrendered their very own children, whom he took into Michoacán to his convent in Zinapécuaro, and many of them came to him there, to ask questions about the faith, and he told me many times that he believed they might all come to him one day [to convert]; but this turnout of indios has now ceased, since after having constructed the monastery with his own hands, and having hiked those lands like a mountain man, Francesco’s life came to an end in the most laudable of manners, in austerity and harshness.61

This passage could have functioned as a eulogy for Francesco da Faenza since, according to his bishop, he would have already been dead. MICHELE DA BOLOGNA’S MISSIONARY CONQUESTS

In comparison with his fellow friars, Michele da Bologna receives a good deal more attention in the Franciscan chronicles of Michoacán, perhaps because he was a protagonist not only in Michoacán, but also in the more remote territories of Jalisco and Zacatecas.62 His extraordinary linguistic abilities would have been well suited to the missionary task, which brought him into contact with various indigenous ethnic groups.63 Despite their incongruities, these chronicles help form a reliable biography, distinguishable in three phases. After his arrival in Mexico in 1534 until the late 1530s, he worked in Michoacán, in the convents of Zinapécuaro, Tzintzuntzan, Pátzcuaro, and Uruapán. He then moved on to Jalisco, where from the second half of 1539 he was the Guardian Father in Zapotlán, extending the apostolate over the larger surrounding area of Sayula, Tuxpán, Tamazula, and Zapotitlán, often working together in this period with friar Juan Padilla.64 Soon thereafter, the Mixtón rebellion would mark the beginning of the most intense period of his life. After Viceroy Mendoza’s military suppression of the 61 62

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García Icazbalceta, Zumárraga, 3, 91–2. Alonso de la Rea, Crónica de la . . . Provincia de S. Pedro y S. Pablo de Mechoacán en la Nueva España, ed. Patricia Escandón (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1996); Antonio Tello, Crónica miscelanea de Xalisco. Libro II, 2 vols. (Guadalajara: Gobierno del Estado de JaliscoUniversidad de Guadalajara, 1968); Beaumont, Crónica, 3 vols.; Isidro Felix de Espinosa, Crónica de la Provincia Franciscana de los Apostoles San Pedro y San Pablo de Michoacán, 2nd edition, ed. José Ignacio Davila Garibi (Mexico: M. L. Sánchez, 1945); Gerónimo de Mendieta, Historia Eclesiástica Indiana, 4th edition (Mexico: Porrua, 1993), 378. Tello, Cronica, 2:333. For a reconstruction of Fra Michele’s movements from one convent to the next, see Martín Flores, Fray Miguel de Bolonia, 36–7, 39, 47–8.

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uprising in December 1542, Michele moved north together with friar Antonio de Segovia in order to work toward the “reducción” of the indios: convincing them to come down from the mountains, return to their communities, and accept Christianity and colonial domination.65 The shared work of the two friars would lead to the foundation of the convents of Juchipila and Zacatecas, and the discovery of mines in nearby Zacatecas would later, together with those at Potosí, transform the global economy.66 We do not know how long Michele da Bologna remained in Juchipila: he was guardian there either at the end of 1567 or at the beginning of 1568, but by 1560, he had already held the same position much further south, in Tlajomulco. In any case, the most important events of the later years of Michele da Bologna’s life were the two Inquisition trials in which he was involved, as we will see. He spent his later years in the convents of Sayula, Poncitlán, and Mezcala near Lake Chapala. He died in Chapala on July 4, 1580 at the age of eighty.67 Once again, humanist Giovanni Antonio Flaminio provides an important contribution to our knowledge of the activities of Friar Michele of Bologna in the form of a Latin translation of a letter “recently sent to [him]” by “Michele, a man of great worth, born in Porretta, member of the Franciscan order,” that he dedicated to Cardinal Pucci.68 In this letter, friar Michele describes his trip to America and his first experiences in that world. The text can be deceptive, since at times it is impossible to discern when Flaminio’s lofty style as a translator gives way to more substantial interventions. However, there is no reason to doubt the details of the letter’s description of Michele da Bologna’s voyage from Seville to America.69 The ship that transported Michele and twenty other friars (twenty-four, according to Flaminio), in addition to the Comisario general de las Indias, Juan de Granada, left Seville on October 11, 1533 and landed at Hispaniola on December 21. From there, five 65

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Tello, Cronica, 2:334; Beaumont, Crónica, 3:58–60. See also Ricard, La “conquête spirituelle,” 311–13; Ida Altman, The War for Mexico West: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010); José Ignacio Dávila Garibi, Fray Antonio de Segovia y fray Miguel de Bolonia (Mexico: n.p., 1943). Kieran R. McCarty, “Los Franciscanos en la frontera Chichimeca,” Historia Mexicana 11 (1962): 332. Martín Flores, Fray Miguel de Bolonia, 36–7, 47–8. For the date of birth (between 1499 and the beginning of 1500), see 17; on the trials, see note 81 of this essay. Giovanni Antonio Flaminio, Epistola ad Paulum III Pont. Max. initio Pontificatus . . . de quibusdam memorabilibus novi Orbis nuper ad nos transmissis . . . Bononiae, apud Vincentium Bonardum parmen[sem] et Marcum Antonium carpen[sem] socios, 1536, c. Dii v. This is confirmed in the proceedings of the trial in Guadalajara (1570): Martín Flores, Fray Miguel de Bolonia, 121. This part of the text is confirmed by the account of another member of the expedition, Jodocus Rijcke. See P. Agustín Moreno, Fray Jodoco Rique y fray Pedro Gocial, apóstoles y Maestros Franciscanos de Quito (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1998), 126–34. Chronological references in Flaminio’s text indicate that Michele had departed in 1533, under the name “Miguel de Parma”: Castro Seoane, “Aviamento y catalogo,” 117–21. Martín Flores, Fray Miguel de Bolonia, was not familiar with Flaminio’s text.

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of the friars headed toward Peru; six others, together with Michele and Juan de Granada, made their way toward New Spain: the letter was sent from the big city of “Mosichum,” after June 29.70 Here, Michele of Bologna paints a picture of a land permeated by the presence of God. For example, a long anecdote describes the vain attempts of the indios of Hispaniola to destroy a cross, followed by their consequent conversion.71 Michele relies on the topos, dating back to Columbus, of the cowardice of the natives, noting that their mild-mannered character (“they are mild-mannered and docile, more than one could imagine”) could easily be used to the advantage of missionaries.72 Another passage describes the coronation of an indigenous king. The address given by one of Michele’s fellow friars to the already converted crowd discusses the acquisition and handling of power in an almost theocratic manner: it is by the will of God (“divino nutu”) that they have a king whose powers originate from the only immortal Lord, and as such must be obeyed. Likewise, the new sovereign will have to lead according to the highest principles of justice, or explain his actions to the infallible and highest of judges. In this letter, Michele da Bologna never mentions the Spanish or their government, as if they had never existed. For him, the way of the cross follows its own path, distinct from that of the sword, in a vision in which Mexico becomes one endless mission, in which the Native Americans interact with missionaries alone, who as their guardians and mentors remain attentive to every aspect of their existence.73 The letter speaks at length about conversion, pointing to the “amazing number of baptisms” and the “incredible winning of souls” as did the other letters discussed here: themes that both author and translator knew would have traction with their audiences.74 Michele da Bologna’s letter also expresses, in a characteristically apocalyptic perspective, amazement at the sheer numbers of inhabitants in America: the number of souls that could be won for God. “What could be more delightful,” he writes, “than seeing a new world, with countless, new people converted to the true faith?”75 Here, it is as if Michele suggests that conversions made by the church in America could make up for the losses incurred by the Protestant Reformation in Europe.76 While the evangelization work of Christ’s apostles 70

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Flaminio, Epistola, c. Dii v–Diii v. “Mosichum” is Mexico; June 29 is the last date provided by the text. Ibid., c. Diii r. Ibid., c. D[4]r: “Sunt praeterea supra quam credi possit mites, ac mansueti.” Ibid., Epistola, cc. D[4]v-Ei r. “The Indians should be completely segregated from all contact with the other races.” John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956), 58–60. Flaminio, Epistola, c. D[4]v, Ei v: “Mirus est illarum ad sacrum baptisma concursus”; “vix credi posset, quantus sequatur credentium fructus, et animarum lucrum.” Ibid., c. Eii r: “quid . . . iucundius, quam videre novum orbem, novas, et innumerabiles gentes ad veram fidem conversas?” This recalls Is. 65:17. Just before (c. Ei v) echoes Ap. 7, 9: “tot gentes, ac tantam populorum multitudinem, quantam vix numerare aut credere quisquam possit.” Ibid., D4 v.

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had been devastatingly difficult, and success was achieved only after centuries of bloodshed and martyrdom, in the Americas, just a few preachers had converted a countless multitude in just a short time, making it the greatest miracle since the apostolic age.77 These friars read the relatively quick and easy conversion of thousands of Native Americans as a sign that the apocalypse was near, harkening back once again to the theme of the “unum ovile et unus pastor,” which returns here at a moment when time is accelerating toward the end. In this way, Michele da Bologna located biblical prophecies in the New World, using a sense of urgency to draw readers’ attention. Cardinal Pucci, to whom Flaminio dedicated this translation, was certainly aware of this.78 These letters would have passed also through the hands of Leandro Alberti, the future Inquisitor of Bologna, who must have read them closely. Alberti was surely interested in these apocalyptic themes, as his “prudent savonarolism” and his work as editor of the Vaticinia pontificum attest.79 These men – and certainly others whose names we do not know – attentively followed the work of these three Franciscans, situating them against the backdrop of events and cultural and spiritual currents in Bologna at the time. They read texts such as the Passio and the Legatio David, and possibly even played a role in the actual publication of these missionary letters.80 The documentation available is not sufficient enough to make a general assessment of the selfless missionary work carried out by the three Bolognese friars. Only one case, that of Michele da Bologna, offers a few answers.81 Michele was reported for “heretical and scandalous phrases [of a Lutheran 77 78

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Ibid., Ei v–Eii r. Flaminio was a tutor at the Puccis’. See Roberto Rusconi, “Circolazione di testi profetici a Roma agli inizi del Cinquecento. La figura di Pietro Galatino,” in Il profetismo gioachimita tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento. Atti del III Congresso di Studi Gioachimiti, ed. Gian Luca Podestà (Genoa: Marietti, 1991), 390. On Flaminio’s sensitivity to prophetic themes, see Ottavia Niccoli, Profeti e popolo nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1987), 111–13. Tamar Herzig, “Leandro Alberti and the Savonarolan Movement in Northern Italy,” in L’Italia dell’Inquisitore. Storia e geografia dell’Italia del Cinquecento nella Descrittione di Leandro Alberti. Atti del Convegno, ed. Massimo Donattini (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2007), 92–4. On the relationship between Alberti and Pucci, see Alfredo Damanti, “Bononia docet: Leandro Alberti e l’ambiente umanistico a Bologna,” in Donattini, L’Italia dell’Inquisitore, 106. On Vaticinia, see Adriano Prosperi, “Vaticinia Pontificum. Peregrinazioni cinquecentesche di un testo celebre,” in Tra Rinascimento e Controriforma. Continuità di una ricerca. Atti della giornata di studi per Albano Biondi, ed. Massimo Donattini (Verona: QuiEdit, 2012), 77–111. The printing house of Bartolomeo Bonardo and Marcantonio Grossi (who printed the work of Flaminio and Allè’s letter) published various texts by Alberti. We know more about Michele da Bologna thanks to the work of José de Jesús Martín Flores, who published the proceedings of the Inquisition trials in which Michele was involved. The first trial took place at the episcopal seat in Guadalajara (the Sant’Uffizio was not yet established in Mexico) between August 1, 1570 and August 7, 1571; the sentence prohibited friar Michele from administering the Sacrament for six months. The second, from January to December 1572, was held in front of the Inquisitor Moya de Contreras, and absolved Michele of all charges against him.

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tone] against our holy faith.” The reality behind this severe accusation, however, was much more mundane. Michele questioned – with actions more than with words – the hierarchies and relationships of colonial society, and his defense of the indios incited the ire of the local ruling class. Not surprisingly, the denunciation against Michele came from Diego Flores, the encomendero of Juchipila, backed by the alcalde. Flores’s dispute with Michele involved an indigenous woman, the marriage of whom Michele had celebrated despite Flores’s objections. Unsurprisingly, the fathers of San Francesco “were always the object of the hostility of the encomenderos . . . because they defended the indios.”82 However, this dispute between an old friar and a provincial encomendero was part of a more general change of atmosphere brought about by various factors after 1565: a heightened fear of idolatry and heresy, discontentment with indigenous history and culture, and last, the passing of time, which saw the death and marginalization of many of the old protagonists of the evangelization, and their substitution by a new generation of missionaries.83 Times had changed: while Michele was on trial, José de Acosta was publishing De procuranda indorum salute (1571), which radically modified European perspectives of the missionaries, shifting the focus of missionary activity from baptism in numbers to a slow process of “civilization.” We do not know how Michele experienced the changes he lived through. He probably reconsidered his efforts after 1542 to bring the rebel indios back to the settlements from which they had escaped, and perhaps he was less than enthusiastic about the results of those efforts, made “both to serve God and for the good of the kingdom.”84 What remained then of the naïve gaze with which the newly arrived friar had described the New World and his missionary work to Flaminio? Perhaps we can glean some idea from his resentful words to a group of Spaniards in 1574: “citizens and priests, you should leave this valley and return to Spain, and leave it and the entire province to the Franciscans: because it is they who have evangelized the region.”85 Consistent with what he had written to Flaminio more than thirty years earlier, Michele here described a circumscribed world of indios and missionaries intent on reconstructing the kingdom of God during the last days of the world. Such a view of the world was no doubt fueled by a limitless sense of hope, tied to his European cultural background; and perhaps, for the aging Michele, such hopes had given way to a helpless resentment in the face of defeat. But perhaps such a view was also fueled by an understanding of his own mission as a defender of the indios: souls to be won for God, of course, but also people to protect in the here and now. 82 83 84

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Beaumont, Crónica, 2:261. Ricard, La “conquête spirituelle,” 75–7, who argues that “la mission tend à s’embourgeoiser.” Tello, Crónica, 2:334: “esto era tan del serviçio de Dios y bien del Reyno.” Beaumont, Crónica, 3:58–60, reproduces and elaborates on the passage. Martín Flores, Fray Miguel de Bolonia, 47.

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CONCLUSION

The stories of the friars offer many points on which to reflect, not the least being their city of origin. Though of lesser importance than cities like Rome and Venice, Bologna exhibited a heightened interest in the New World, giving the information exchanged between it and Mexico greater value.86 But what sort of answers did this exchange give to the many questions posed by the New World? In Venice, for example, Giovanni Battista Ramusio excluded texts such as missionary letters from his Navigazioni e viaggi (Venice, 1550–9): being of an “unscientific” nature, they fell outside of the scope of a project like his, meant to “substitute Ptolemy.”87 Indeed, Ramusio’s modern project did not find an audience in Bologna, where men like Alberti and Flaminio were applying an old logic (that of the apocalypse) to America by seeking the confirmation of ancient prophecies in news from the New World (global conversion, the end of the world, the coming of God’s eternal kingdom) rather than information about the nature or the people of America. To paraphrase the well-known passage from Mark, they poured the new wine of America into the old wineskins of Europe, made of an outdated cultural framework, inadequate for understanding the new realities presented by America.88 But new forces tend to overcome the old, and the new wine of America would eventually burst the old wineskins of Europe, leading to a rethinking of apocalyptic ideas, along with many other theories proposed in the canonical texts of the classical and Christian traditions.89 This long and difficult process was only possible due to experiences like this, in which the circulation and exchange of information between the “old” and “new” worlds slowly and with some contradictions led toward “the hybrid and composite world . . . of which we are all heirs.”90 86

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See Giovanni Ricci, “L’ordre des villes dans l’Italie de la Renaissance et le cas de Bologne, capitale manquée,” in Les capitales de la Renaissance, ed. Jean-Marie Le Gall (Rennes: Presses Universitaires, 2011), 33–40. Marica Milanesi, Tolomeo sostituito. Studi di storia delle conoscenze geografiche nel secolo XVI (Milano: Unicopli, 1984). The inclusion of texts in the first volume of Ramusio’s Navigazioni which are irrelevant from a geographical perspective, like those in Legatio David (see note 18 of this essay), is not incompatible with this affirmation. In my opinion, such selections reflect Ramusio’s religious positions, a topic I will not be able to discuss here. Mark 2:22: “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins.” Anthony Grafton (with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi), New World, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 13–58. Giuseppe Marcocci, “L’Italia nella prima età globale (ca. 1300–1700),” Storica, 20 (2014): 50.

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CHAPTER SIX

MISSIONARY GIFT RECORDS OF MEXICAN OBJECTS IN EARLY MODERN ITALY Davide Domenici

I

n the wake of the columbian voyages, goods, ideas, and people began to cross the oceans around the world; nascent globalization started to weave the fabric of the continents together and link them in ways never experienced before in human history. Knowledge of the newly discovered lands arrived in Europe in the form of narratives, maps, images, human beings, and objects. Their circulation made the New World imaginable, visible, and tangible, fostering the European discovery and invention of the Americas. While excluded from the colonial enterprise, Italy nevertheless played a key role in the European reception of news and information from America. Italian publishers were crucial in the dissemination of maps and chronicles about the New World: a topic that has long been the subject of scholarly attention.1 The presence of Amerindian artefacts in Italian collections, such as the Medici, Aldrovandi, Cospi, Giustiniani, Borgia, and Settala

I would like to thank Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey for their invitation to contribute to the present volume, as well as for their careful editing and suggestions that greatly improved the quality of the text. Carlo Poggi provided me with useful information on sixteenth-century Italian currencies and typographic habits. Karin Pallaver and Cristiana Natali commented on an earlier draft, providing useful suggestions. However, the responsibility of its contents and of any error or misinterpretation is solely mine. 1 Maria Matilde Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico. Storia di un’immagine da Temistitan all’Indipendenza (1519–1821) (Milan: Unicopli, 2004); Elizabeth Horodowich, “Armchair Travelers and the Venetian Discovery of the New World,” The Sixteenth-Century Journal 36 (2005): 1039–62.

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collections has also generated scholarly interest.2 In fact, many of the most prominent sixteenth-century Mexican artefacts known today are still located in Italian collections, or have passed through Italy at one time or another. The myriad of ways in which they arrived in Italy, however, remains largely unexplored, especially compared to New World artefacts in Spain, where the almost complete loss of the actual objects is counterbalanced by a rich documentary record of their shipments. Recent studies have begun to fill this historiographical void, suggesting that Dominican missionaries played an important role in the arrival of Mexican artefacts in sixteenth-century Italy.3 Following this line of research, I will discuss here two Italian sources that record missionary gifts of Indian objects: Leandro Alberti’s Historie di Bologna (1548) and the anonymous and undated Descrittione dell’India occidentale. Both offer insights into missionary gifts sent to Italy from Mexico in the early decades of Spanish rule in the Americas. Textual analysis reveals the motivations and ideological agendas behind the transatlantic voyages of these Indian artefacts, as well as the ideas about cultural and religious otherness they produced after they arrived in Europe. The reading of these records, combined with an analysis of contemporary Dominican texts on Indian material culture, demonstrates that the motivations and perceptions of missionary gifts were quite different from non-missionary ones, such as those recorded in the inventories of Hernan Cortés’ famous shipments to the Spanish court. Understanding these differences presents a more nuanced view of the variety of meanings attached to Amerindian artefacts in the diverse cultural and political milieus of early modern Europe. Alessandra Russo has argued that the inventories of Cortesian objects materialized the promise of building a global Spanish political space.4 In this 2

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See Detlef Heikamp, Mexico and the Medici (Florence: Edam, 1972); Detlef Heikamp, “American Objects in Italian Collections of the Renaissance and Baroque: A Survey,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, vol. 1, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 455–82; Christian Feest, “Mexico and South America in the European Wunderkammer,” in The Origins of Museums, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 237–44; Laura Laurencich Minelli, “Museography and Ethnographical Collections in Bologna during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Origins of Museums, 17–23; Antonio Aimi, “Towards a History of Collecting in Milan in the Late Renaissance and Baroque Periods,” in The Origins of Museums, 24–8; Davide Domenici and Laura Laurencich Minelli, “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts to Pope Clement VII in 1532–1533: Tracking the Early History of Some Mexican Objects and Codices in Italy,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 47 (2014): 169–209; Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016). Domenici and Laurencich Minelli, “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts”; Davide Domenici, “Cose dell’altro mondo: Nuovi dati sul collezionismo italiano di oggetti messicani tra XVI e XVII secolo,” in L’Impero e le Hispaniae. Da Traiano a Carlo V. Classicismo e potere nell’arte spagnola, ed. Sandro de Maria and Manuel Parada López de Corselas (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2014), 471–83. Alessandra Russo, “Cortés’s Objects and the Idea of New Spain: Inventories as Spatial Narratives,” Journal of the History of Collections 23 (2011): 229–52.

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essay, I suggest that sixteenth-century missionary gifts of Mexican artefacts brought to Italy were perceived as materializations of the intellectual skills of the newly conquered Indians, and tangible proof of the feasibility of Catholic evangelization. In my analysis, I will use the discursive category of ingenium as a tool to grasp the religious discourses underlying missionary descriptions of indigenous artefacts.5 Through a polysemous understanding of the term ingenium, Dominican writers transformed the material properties of Native American objects into the intellectual qualities of their producers. In this way, missionaries saw indigenous artefacts as testimony of Native Americans’ rationality, and evidence, ultimately, of the possibility of building a new, Christian humanity. DOMINGO DE BETANZOS’S GIFTS

Leandro Alberti (1479–1552), Bolognese Dominican and author of several important historical works, published in 1548 his second volume of the Historie di Bologna.6 Describing the second meeting between Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici) and Emperor Charles V in 1532–3, Alberti recorded that on March 3, 1533, a Dominican friar called “Domingo,” coming from the “New Indies,” gave the pope a group of Indian artefacts including featherworks, masks, knives, and codices. The anonymous friar has been identified with Domingo de Betanzos, the founder of the Dominican province of Santiago de Mexico, who had been sent to Italy to ask for the independence of the Mexican Dominican province.7 Betanzos offered two different gifts to Giulio de’ Medici: one in Rome in 1532 and one in Bologna in 1533. Leandro Aberti’s text is the best description of the second gift, while the first one was described in detail by Agustín Dávila Padilla in his Historia de la fundación y discurso de la Provincia de Santiago de México (1596).

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The Italian ingegno and the Spanish ingenio are recurring terms in the sources discussed in this essay; in sixteenth-century neo-Latin languages, the term referred both to an ingeniously built object (as in modern Italian marchingegno) and to the intellectual quality of ingenuity. Lacking an English term that could cover this wide semantical domain, I use herein the Latin term ingenium (plur. ingenia); on the problematic English translation of the Latin ingenium, see Rhodri Lewis, “Francis Bacon and Ingenuity,” Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 113–17. Leandro Alberti, O.P., Historie di Bologna, 1479–1543 (Bologna: Costa Editore, 2006). The relevance of this work for Mesoamerican studies was first noted by Massimo Donattini, “Il mondo portato a Bologna: Viaggiatori, collezionisti, missionari,” in Storia di Bologna, vol. 3, Bologna nell’età moderna (secoli XVI–XVIII), tome 2, Cultura, istituzioni culturali, Chiesa e vita religiosa, ed. Adriano Prosperi (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2008), 537–682. For a more recent and detailed discussion of Alberti’s passage on the gift of Mesoamerican objects, including my identification of Domingo de Betanzos as the donor, see Domenici and Laurencich Minelli, “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts.” Domenici and Laurencich Minelli, “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts,” 172–6.

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According to Agustín Dávila Padilla, when Betanzos first met Clement VII in Rome in 1532, he said: [I]n order to show Your Sanctity some of the many things of that land, my poor Province sends this little sample, more for proof of filial obedience than for its value or richness. He then pulled out some featherwork images very well worked, that not only delighted with their appearance, but also caused admiration for their composition, because all these little feathers had been arranged one by one, creating a marvelous and well made work. What delighted the Pontiff and the Cardinals more was a marvelously worked feather mitre, that belonged to a priest of idols, and another one made of stones, turquoises and emeralds. He also pulled out some tools that the idolaters used to sacrifice men to the devil; and especially some double-edged blades, very shiny and showy, much more sharp and penetrating with a strange subtlety. There were also some other featherworks for an Indian priest’s clothes that matched the mitre.8

While downplaying the value of the objects, the text stresses an admiration for the craftsmanship of the featherworks and stonework. Special attention is devoted to obsidian prismatic blades, defined as “shiny,” “showy,” “sharp,” and “acute with a strange subtlety.” The second meeting between Betanzos and the pope, in Bologna on March 3, 1533, is described by Leandro Alberti: We arrive then in the month of March, on the 3rd day [1533], when the Spanish Brother Domingo of the Order of Preachers, who was coming from the New Indies, that is from the New World, as it was called, paid a visit to the Pontiff and offered him many things from there. Among them, there were two coverlets made and weaved out of blue, green, black, and yellow parrot-feathers, which looked like velvet. Hence, it seems to recall what is said in the Scriptures about God’s shrine, where He commanded it be embellished with featherworks. Afterwards he gave him stoles, maniples and granité textiles for chemises made in a similar way and worthily worked with the said feathers, as well as other ornaments for priests. He also presented him with some nicely painted books, which looked like hieroglyphs, by which they understand each other as we do through letters. Afterwards he gave him some very thick masks furnished with turquoises, through which he said the demons were speaking to those peoples. Then a two fingers-wide and two onze-long knife, made of yellow stone with the handle entirely encrusted with turquoises. Then some stone knives that cut like razors, which they used for shaving. By these knives, we knew the kind of those knives of which the Bible speaks when the Lord says: “Make me the stone knives to circumcise.” He also presented him with a piece of extremely fine alabaster worked in the 8

Agustín Dávila Padilla, Historia de la fundación y discurso de la Provincia de Santiago de México (Madrid: Pedro Madrigal, 1596), 73–4.

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likeness of a small hill above which was a half foot-high cross made of one single piece of chalcedony very nicely worked, with many pieces of chalcedony as ornaments on it. He presented many other similar objects to the Pontiff, which very much pleased him and his retainers. Among these things, I [Alberti] received some books, knives, and the big knife used to kill men and sacrifice them to their idols, which I gave to Mr. Giovanni Achillino to decorate his museum together with a book and a stone knife similar to a razor.9

Here Mexican objects illuminate biblical passages, as featherworks remind him of the decoration of God’s altar and obsidian knives shed light on Jews’ circumcision. The technical skill testified by “worthily worked” featherworks and knives “that cut like razors” establishes an analogy between Jews and Indians, a not uncommon association that, in addition to explaining their origins, also located Indians in a specific place along the path to salvation. Like the Jews, Indians lived in error, but once baptized, would be saved. The tangible proof of their potential for salvation is the “very nicely worked” chalcedony cross surmounting a hill of fine alabaster, the only Indian-manufactured Christian object among the bestowed items. Alberti’s description stressed the technical quality of the artefacts as evidence of the technical expertise and skills of the Indians, as a proof of their rationality, and, therefore, as a proof of their suitability to conversion. The objects donated to the pope thus functioned as tangible signs of the potential for evangelization, the focus of Betanzos’ voyage. Additional ethnographic descriptions of demons speaking through masks, human sacrifices, and “nicely painted books” with hieroglyphs “by which they understand each other as we do by letters,” worked to praise the natives’ intellectual skills while condemning their pre-Christian religious practices. THE DESCRITTIONE DELL’INDIA OCCIDENTALE

The Descrittione dell’India occidentale is an understudied printed booklet of eight pages.10 In a sequence of brief paragraphs devoted to ethnographic subjects, the 9

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Alberti, Historie, 629–30. The “onza” was an Italian length measure. A Bolognese ounce corresponded to the twelfth part of a foot (38 cm), making an onza approximately 3.16 centimeters. The only extant copy of the Descrittione was once owned by Marcel Chatillon who, in 2003, bestowed it to the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. The transcription of the text was published in Pierleone Massajoli and Piero Mattioni, “Gli Zapotechi secondo un anonimo religioso italiano del XVI secolo,” L’Universo 64 (1983): 489–520. Despite some interesting observations, their article is plagued by problematic cultural and linguistic interpretations, as well as by the fact that they oddly confuse the author of the text with the priest mentioned in it; their dating of the document around 1535 is also based on wrong assumptions. In 2006, Jean-Paul Duviols published a useful photo-static reproduction of the document with a brief commentary where he wrongly states that the document was previously unknown and repeats the

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anonymous and undated Italian text offers a descriptive list of Mesoamerican objects brought to Italy by an anonymous priest who had preached among the Zapotec and Mixtec Indians and who took the objects from the king of the Mixtec community of Tututepec, Oaxaca. The Descrittione closely resembles the mysterious “Anonymous Conqueror” text first published in Italian in the third volume of Giovan Battista Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi (Venice, 1556). Both texts consider similar topics. Recording the uses of agave, for example, the text of the Anonymous Conqueror states that “This tree is most useful, for they get from it wine, vinegar, honey, and arrope. They make of it cloth for men and women, shoes, cordage, beams for houses, and shingles for covering them.”11 On the same subject, the Descrittione states that “[the plant] is really useful, for they get from it wine, & vinegar, honey, preserve, clothes, shoes, threads, & with it they also cover their houses, and it makes good fire, it is planted orderly in the fields, as grapes are planted.”12 The same sequence of wine, vinegar, honey, and arrope/preserve points to a direct relationship between the two texts. Other details in the Descrittione, such as the comparison of agave with grapes or its use as firewood, seem to derive from the work of López de Gómara, whose Italian Historia had been published in Rome in 1555: [S]omeone calls [it] maguei and others cardon . . . there are many such trees that are like grapes here, they plant it . . ., the trunk serves as firewood, & the leave as shingle . . . & that liquor is like cooked must, if they cook it a little, it becomes honey, if they purify it, it is sugar, if they dilute it, it is vinegar, & if they put ocpactli in it, it is wine.13

Gómara’s passage comes from the last part of his work, where the historical narrative gives way to a timeless, encyclopedic description of Mexican culture, similar in both form and content to ethnographic sources as the Anonymous Conqueror and the Descrittione. The Descrittione was written after 1556, most likely in Venice, by someone who was well aware of the recent Italian publications on the conquest of Mexico.14

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erroneous overlapping between the author and the priest whose activities are described in the text. See Jean Paul Duviols, Le miroir du Nouveau Monde. Images primitives de l’Amérique (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2006), 149–53. Anonymous, “Relazione d’alcune cose della Nuova Spagna e della gran città di Temistitan Messico fatta per un gentiluomo del signor Fernando Cortese,” in Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, vol. 6, ed. Marica Milanesi (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 343–69. English translation from Marshall Saville, Narrative of Some Things of New Spain and the Great City of Temestitan Mexico (New York: The Cortes Society, 1917), 43–4. Descrittione, 2v. Francesco Lopes de Gómara, Historia del illustriss. et valorosiss. capitano Don Ferdinando Cortes . . . (Rome: Valerio & Luigi Dorici, 1555), 237. Where not otherwise stated, English translations are mine. A Venetian origin is suggested by some linguistic hues of the text, as well as by the mention of the bagattino, a coin then common in northern Italy and particularly in Venice. Furthermore, the style of the initial of the text is very similar to that of the initials of the Somma della natural

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As for the Descrittione’s priest, I would tentatively identify him with the Dominican friar Juan de Córdova (1503–95). After a long military career that led him to take part in Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s 1540–2 expedition to New Mexico, he entered the Dominican order in 1543. Starting in 1548, he preached among indigenous communities in Oaxaca, where he learned the Zapotec language and wrote the Vocabulário de la lengua zapoteca (1571) and the Arte en lengua zapoteca (1578). In 1568, he was named governor (provincial) of Santiago de Mexico. Most interestingly for our purposes, between 1561 and 1564 he traveled twice from New Spain to Rome as auxiliary governor (definidor provincial) of the Dominican province of Santiago de Mexico. One of these voyages to Italy could be the one narrated in the Descrittione, and was possibly also related to the arrival of Codex Vaticanus A in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.15 No doubt, Córdova’s long experience in Oaxacan indigenous communities would have made him an excellent transmitter of native artefacts and ethnographic information. The text of the Descrittione represents, in its entirety, a gift record. Beginning with the text’s long title and its introductory paragraph, the author praises both the subtlety of Native American craftsmanship and the missionary achievement of the conversion of the Indians: Description of West India called the new world, where you will succinctly understand the way of their idols & of working the land, beautiful and rare things, Gathered by a priest that came from there & brought with him some pagan things made by the hand of said Indians, all very subtly worked. Brief declaration of the Idols, antiquities, and other sacrificial tools that the Indians of West India (called the New World) used to sacrifice to the

15

filosofia, by Alonso de Fuentes, translated into Italian by Alfonso Ulloa and published (1559) in Venice, where the most dynamic Italian publishers of the time were publishing several works on the Americas. Alfonso Ulloa, a Venice-based Spanish intellectual, and translator of Spanish texts on America and Mexico, could in fact be the author of the Descrittione or, at least, a good representative of the type of intellectual who would write such a text. Federico Gómez de Orozco suggested that Ulloa could have been the author, or Italian translator, of the Anonymous Conqueror; see Federico Gómez de Orozco, “El Conquistador Anónimo,” Historia Mexicana 2 (1953): 401–11. On Ulloa see also Rosario Romeo, Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento (Milan-Naples : Riccardo Ricciardi, 1971), 54. On Juan de Córdova, see Alphonse Bandelier, “Juan de Cordova,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 4 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908), 360. On Codex Vaticanus A and its arrival in Italy, see Eloise Quiñones Keber, “Collecting Cultures: A Mexican Manuscript in the Vatican Library,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 229–42; Ferdinand Anders and Maarten Jansen, Religión, costumbres e historia de los antiguos mexicanos. Libro explicativo del llamado Códice Vaticano A (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996); Davide Domenici, “Nuovi dati per una storia dei codici messicani della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,” Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae XXII (2016): 341–62.

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Gods during their feasts in their Temples. These were the things that the Indians had when they still were infidels, and when they were baptized and accepted Jesus Christ’s Holy Gospel, these things reached the hands of a Religious priest who had preached and taught them the Christian Doctrine, and he brought them here, together with many other and diverse and ancient things, worthy of being seen, since seeing them one can trust what others wrote, and this we learned by means of relazioni.16

The text praises the quality of these artefacts and stresses the subtlety of indigenous craftsmanship (“very subtly worked”), emphasizing the same quality that Davila Padilla’s text attributed to the obsidian blades. It also refers to the religious threshold crossed by the Indians; they used to worship their idols before receiving the Gospel, but had given away their idols and sacrificial tools to the Christian priest who had converted them. The Italian author notes that the firsthand observation of the objects will confirm what was stated in written relazioni. Objects were thus perceived as tangible proof of historical and ethnographical information that was circulating in the form of textual records. The text then goes on to list the items brought to Italy by the priest: a skull cup and a femur-rattle, a turquoise mosaic-encrusted idol, chalcedony idols, sacrificial knives, obsidian blades, weapons, clothes and shoes, a gourd, native currency objects, and working tools. The Indians are “pagans” and the obsidian blades are “black porphyry razors which they used to circumcise as the Jews used to do,” repeating the analogy between pagan Indians and Jews in Alberti.17 The list ends with “some images of God, & the Apostles, made of very fine feathers, of different kinds of birds, marvellously and delicately worked by the same Indians, by means of which we can recognize their very lively & sharp genius [vivissimo e acuto ingegno] for arts and human crafts.”18 Again, the technical quality of the featherworks becomes the proxy for the “very lively & sharp” ingenium of the artists. A longer descriptive paragraph is then devoted to each object. It starts with the mosaic-encrusted skull and the omichicahuaztli, with a description of the sacrificial and anthropophagic ceremonies in which they were used.19 It then describes the five different native “idols” and the ceremonies held in their honor, including human sacrifice. The text then shifts to focus on ethnographic descriptions of Native American life and culture, and in doing so, simultaneously establishes an extra-textual dialog with the actual idols brought to Italy by the friar, as demonstrated in the regular and repetitive use of phrases in the texts such as “as one could see.” 16

17 19

In my English translation, I retained the Italian term relazioni due to the lack of a proper English term to indicate this genre of written texts summarizing the status of a place or people or, as often was the case in Colonial America, an individual’s military deeds. Descrittione, 1v. 18 Descrittione, 1v. On this omichicahuaztli, see Davide Domenici, “The Wandering ‘Leg of an Indian King,’” Journal de la Société des Américanistes (2016): 43–67.

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When describing knives and obsidian prismatic blades or “razors,” the Descrittione records the use of blades for self-sacrificial bloodletting from ears, tongue, and genitals, providing a rare description of the Mesoamerican wooden implement used to detach the blades from an obsidian core held with the feet.20 Then follows the description of “a certain ingenium,” that is a wooden tablet with an obsidian blade, said to have been used for circumcision “as the Jews used to do.”21 Additional paragraphs describe agave-fiber shoes, weapons, native currencies (copper axes, cacao beans, and cotton clothes), a gourd-cup, working tools, and clothes. It is noteworthy that from the paragraph on clothes, the Descrittione starts using Arawak (maquei, nequem, macana, nagua) and Nahuatl (cacahuate, sicara, tilmate, sicol, guaipil) terms that were absent from the first part, rich in firsthand ethnographic details on the Mixtec world. These terms and parts of the related contents were likely inserted by the author, thanks to his knowledge of printed texts on the Americas. This trend is even clearer in the description of native painted books that were not listed in the opening paragraphs. The description of actual artefacts has seamlessly given way to purely bookish, ethnographic knowledge, drawn by those relazioni whose veracity is – according to the author – testified by the objects themselves. The lengthy description of the painted codices clearly stresses their importance, stating that “these characters were useful to them as the letters in our books are useful to us,” a statement that resembles Alberti’s Historie.22 The conclusion of the Descrittione stresses that these idols and antiquities were taken from the natives, and the text then praises the successes of missionary activities and the eradication of idolatry. In harmony with the materialityfocused nature of the whole text, it ends stating that the converted Indians now attend Christian schools where they learn to sing, read, write, draw, paint, and practice “all the other crafts, & virtuous arts.”23 The Indians’ technical skills demonstrated their full potential for salvation in relation to Western practices. Ironically, Indian ingenia were first recognized in those very same idolatrous objects that were destroyed (or, at least, taken away) so that Indians could fully embrace the civilized, Christian world. 20

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Significantly, the same association between obsidian blades and razors exists in the Anonymous Conqueror’s Italian text (“rasoio di pietra viva, che taglia come un rasoio di Tolosa”) and the wooden flaking tool is also described with admiration by López de Gómara. Anonymous, “Relazione . . .,” in Ramusio, Navigazioni . . ., vol. 6, 343–69; Francisco López de Gómara, Historia de la conquista de México (Mexico: Porrúa, 1988), chap. CCXXIV, 307. Interestingly enough, a similar pairing between Indian self-sacrifice and Jews’ ritual practices is also established in the Italian text of Codex Vaticanus A. Codex Vat. Lat. 3738, fol. 55r; see also fols. 15r and 21r; see Ferdinand Anders and Maarten Jansen, Religión, costumbres e historia de los antiguos mexicanos. Libro explicativo del llamado Códice Vaticano A (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), 31–3. Descrittione, 4r. 23 Ibid., 4v.

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The Descrittione deals with themes already noted in the other missionary gift records, such as the analogy between pagan Indians and Jews (and between self-sacrifice and circumcision), the appreciation of Indian artefacts as tangible witnesses of Indians’ technical skills, and the opposition between the preconversion and post-conversion state of the natives. However, the Descrittione uniquely generated a dialog with objects and contemporary printed texts outside of the text itself. In this way, it builds an ethnographic discourse centered on praising the “civilized” habits of the Indians, such as their monetary economies, their proper ways of dressing, and their systems of writing. These ethnographic data then worked to emphasize the potential for evangelization, whose nascent possibility was suggested by the objects described in the text. “THE ARTWORK PRAISES THE ARTISAN”: PRAISING NATIVE INGENIA

As we have seen, Italian missionary gift records reveal that the relationship between technically superior artefacts and intellectual skills is deployed by means of the discursive category of ingenium: a term whose semantic sphere includes both the intellectual and the material realms. The early modern notion of ingenium was elaborated primarily in the fields of European philosophy, rhetoric, and aesthetics. In brief, it usually referred to a natural intellectual ability related to sensible knowledge and artistic creation. Working by synthesis, that is, establishing connections among things as in the creation of metaphors, ingenium existed in opposition to the analytical and abstract thinking of philosophy; its most common attributes were subtlety, acuteness, and sharpness. In most cases, ingenium was perceived as a typically human quality but, due to its natural (that is, not acquired) origin, could also be attributed to animals. Even when perceived as a human intellectual ability, the natural origin of ingenium meant that it needed to be tempered or perfected by other acquired abilities.24 24

Interestingly here, it was in large part the “linguistic turn,” caused by new geographic realities, newly discovered peoples, and the relocation of human knowledge in a “decentered” global world, that led to a new focus on the idea of ingenium in early modern European philosophical and scientific lexicons. The literature on ingenium is vast. As an introduction, see Jürgen Klein, “Genius, ingenium, imagination: aesthetic theories of production from the Renaissance to Romanticism,” in The Romantic Imagination, ed. Frederick Burwick (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 19–162; Stefano Gensini and Arturo Martone, eds., Ingenium propria hominis natura (Naples: Liguori Editore, 2002); Lewis, “Francis Bacon and Ingenuity,” 117–24. On the relationship between ingenium and the notion of “linguistic turn,” first proposed by Eugenio Garin, see Stefano Gensini, “Ingenium/ingegno fra Huarte, Persio e Vico: le basi naturali dell’inventività umana,” in Ingenium propria, 31–2. On European art theory and the universality of art as a relevant notion for European perception of the New World’s arts, see Pamela M. Jones, “Art Theory as Ideology: Gabriele Paleotti’s Hierarchical Notion of Painting’s Universality and Reception,” in Reframing the Renaissance, 127–39. When the present text was going through the final editing process, Alessandra Russo published an important article where, among other issues, she discusses how the category of ingenium was

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Dominican texts focusing on Mesoamerican material culture highlight the importance of the discursive category of ingenium in the missionary gift records. In his Apologética Historia Sumaria, for instance, Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas devoted various passages to the description of native artefacts and Indians’ technical skills. Native artisans were so skilled that “if they wanted to represent a natural thing, it seemed natural, by means of which they demonstrated the subtlety of their genius [sotileza de sus ingenios] as well as the greatness and peculiarity of their skill.”25 “Subtlety of ingenium” represented a distinguishing characteristic of native artisans. Not surprisingly, for Las Casas, such subtlety is best materialized by obsidian blades and featherworks. “There were stoneworkers and it is admirable to see how they make [the blades] and I do not know if I can explain how they do this.”26 After describing in detail the use of the same wooden flaking tool mentioned both in the Descrittione and by López de Gómara, Las Casas states that “to see how they flake them is surely worthy of admiration, and the fact that they devised such an art is no small argument in favor of the liveliness of the genius [viveza de los ingenios] of the men that devised such a working method.”27 Las Casas praises works with Christian imagery, and featherworks, as already noted in the Descrittione, are especially praised as the best proof of the improvement of Indians’ ingenia, whose full potential is properly deployed when they are included within the Christian community. “What surely exceeds every human genius [ingenio], and what would be more new than rare to every nation of the world – and should be admired and esteemed so much – is the craft and art that those Mexican people know how to work well and perfectly: that is, arranging natural feathers with their natural colors in every way, as any excellent and very good painter could paint with brushes.”28 For Las Casas, the technical qualities of Indian artefacts proved the existence of native ingenia: that is, it proved the existence in American culture of one of the central categories in European philosophical thinking.29 Consequently, the artefacts demonstrated the indigenous intellectual qualities and, therefore, their

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applied to indigenous arts during the early modern Iberian expansion; even if discussing different themes and using different sources, our articles complement one another and also reach similar conclusions; see Alessandra Russo, “An Artistic Humanity: New Positions on Art and Freedom in the Context of Iberian Expansion, 1500–1600,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65/66 (2014/2015): 352–63. On the use of the category of ingenium applied to early modern cabinets of curiosities, see Patricia Falguières, “Les inventeurs des choses. Enquêtes sur les arts et naissance d’une science de l’homme dans les cabinets du XVIe siècle” Histoire de l’art et anthropologie, Paris, coédition INHA / musée du quai Branly “Les actes” (2009) http://actes branly.revues.org/94. Bartolomé de las Casas, “Apologética Historia Sumaria,” in Obras Completas, vol. 7 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992), 592. Similar statements often mentioning ingenium and subtlety occur various times in chapters 62 and 63 of the Apologética. Las Casas, Apologética, 590–1. 27 Ibid., 590–1. 28 Ibid., 592. On subtlety and sharpness as key attributes of ingenium, see Lewis, “Francis Bacon and Ingenuity,” 118; Emilio Hidalgo-Serna, “Funzioni dell’ingegno nell’Umanesimo e nel Barocco spagnoli,” in Ingenium propria, 72, 75, 83–4; Stefano Gensini, “Ingenium/ingegno,” 57.

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humanity. Indeed, Las Casas plainly stressed the relationship between artefacts and artisans: All the admirable works that we referred to above that these Indians did and do every day, cannot be done or even imagined without a great and admirable genius [ingenio] and judgment. So that nobody who has a brain could dare think, or even suppose, that all these people are not very ingenious [ingeniosísimas] and of great and notable understanding, because it is known that we used to say that in these matters the artwork praises the artisan or craftsman. . . . And . . . the good handmade works offer clear proof of good genius [buenos ingenios] and understanding, as one can see in all the mechanical arts.30

Native craftsmanship as evidence of what I would call the Indians’ “practical rationality” in turn becomes a central theme in heated discussions about slavery. While Francisco de Vitoria mentioned opificia or artisans’ workshops as proof of Indian rationality,31 Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Las Casas’s opponent in the famous Valladolid debate (1550–1), used the evidence of Native American artisanship to argue the opposite. Although some of them show a certain ingenuity [ingeniosi esse videntur] in various works of artisanship, this offers no proof of human cleverness, for we can observe animals, birds, and spiders making certain structures which no human accomplishment could competently imitate.32

In order to oppose Las Casas’s ideas about Indians’ rationality, Sepúlveda creatively sought to overturn the Dominican’s argument by focusing on another facet of the term ingenium: that of ingenium as natural disposition. For Sepúlveda, if ingenium was also present in animals, it offered no evidence of the rationality of Native Americans.33 DISCUSSION

Like other sixteenth-century inventories, the Italian textual records of missionary gifts reveal specific ideological agendas. Analyzing Cortés’s shipments to Spain, Peru, and the Moluccas, Alessandra Russo has read the inventories 30 31 32

33

Las Casas, Apologética, 602. Francisco de Vitoria, Relectio de Indis (Bari: Levante, 1996), 28–9. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Democrate secondo, ovvero sulle giuste cause di guerra/Democrates secundus sive de iustis belli causis (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2009), 56; anonymous English trans. from Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 523. On the attribution of ingenium to quasi-rational animals in European philosophical thinking, see Maria Teresa Marcialis, ed., Filosofia e psicologia animale. Da Rorario a Leroy (Cagliari: S.T.E.F., 1982); Gensini, “Ingenium/ingegno,” 32–3, 55; Eugenio Canone, “Il concetto di ingenium in Giordano Bruno,” in Ingenium propria, 103, 108; Lewis, “Francis Bacon and Ingenuity,” 119, 125, n. 41.

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of Cortesian gifts as “spatial narratives,” listing items that “were able to materialize the essence of his project of conquest and colonization” and “to craft what can be called the very ‘idea’ of New Spain” as a political space.34 If Cortesian inventories are characterized by a “language of motion” that stresses the mobility of objects, Italian missionary gift records are instead characterized by a language of transformation. In missionary gift lists, the diffusion of the Gospel and the taking away of the idolatrous artefacts created a clear-cut rupture between a non-Christian, pagan, or Old Testament before and a New Testament after. Such a discourse is consistent with the nonlinear, universalist, and inclusive Judeo-Christian vision of time, centered on the idea of salvation.35 If Cortesian shipments materialized a project of conquest and colonization centered on the building of a political space, missionary gifts instead materialized a project of salvation centered on the building of a saved, Christian humanity. Rather than spatial narratives, the gift records are, quite literally, anthropological narratives. According to Russo, Cortesian inventories “create narratives that can be read independently from the observation of the items themselves.”36 By contrast, missionary gift records employ tangible artefacts in order to establish an extra-textual dialog centered on the multivalent discursive category of ingenium. Material ingenia offered testimony of the existence of intellectual ingenia. Within this discursive framework, the material properties of Indian objects underwent a metonymical and semantic shift that transformed them into materializations of the intellectual qualities of the Indians. This explains why obsidian blades came to occupy such a prominent role in gift records and in Las Casas’s texts. Their subtlety and sharpness materialized the subtlety and sharpness of the Indians’ ingenia. The European fascination with obsidian blades – and with sharpness as an intellectual quality – runs so deep that an “obsidian razor” in the Aldrovandi collection, probably deriving from Betanzos’ gift, even deserved to be illustrated in Aldrovandi’s Musaeum Metallicum (Figure 6.1). The only other objects that had a similar effect on Europeans were featherworks. If obsidian blades embodied the intellectual potential of pagan minds, featherworks with Christian imagery testified to their full blossoming as an outcome of evangelization, that is, featherworks represented the ultimate perfection of their ingenia.37

34

35

36 37

Russo, “Cortés’s Objects,” 231. On sixteenth-century inventories as a specific literary genre, see Jessica Keating and Lia Markey, “Introduction: Captured Objects. Inventories of Early Modern Collections,” Journal of the History of Collections 2 (2011), 209–13. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 26. Russo, “Cortés’s Objects,” 229. On Mexican featherworks, see Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fanes, eds. Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe (Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2015).

MISSIONAR Y G IFT RECORDS OF MEXICAN OBJECTS

6.1 “A Mexican Knife with Obsidian Prismatic Blade and Wooden Handle,” in Ulisse Aldrovandi, Musaeum Metallicum, Bologna, 1648. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna.

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Some descriptions of Cortesian objects also included comments about the aesthetic and technical qualities of native craftsmanship as proofs of Indians’ ingenia. As noted by Romeo, authors such as Cortés and López de Gómara “already started to glimpse . . . something deeper, that directly draws attention to the human value of those people and of those civilizations.”38 In his second letter, for example, Hernán Cortés wrote about objects that “in addition to their intrinsic worth, are so marvelous that considering their novelty and strangeness they are priceless.”39 In 1520, Juan Díaz wrote that the Indians “are very ingenious people [muy ingeniosa], and one can perceive their genius [ingenio] in some golden vases and exquisite cotton mantles . . . commonly considered works of great genius [ingenio].”40 Similar appreciations of the technical and aesthetic value of Indian artefacts can be found in passages by authors such as Peter Martyr, Tommaso Contarini, and Benedetto Bordone.41 Some authors even use the term ingenium, such as Francesco Corner, a Venetian ambassador in Spain, who in a letter dated March 6, 1520, wrote of having seen in Valladolid “many other various things encrusted with small stones, that actually show that in those parts there are persons of ingenium [d’ingegno].”42 The most famous example is Albrecht Dürer’s description of Cortesian objects, whose aesthetic qualities made him wonder “at the subtle ingenia of men in foreign lands.”43 However, if an appreciation of native aesthetics and ingenia was a trait common to different kinds of texts, what is unique in missionary gift records is their shaping of a theological discourse based on the causal relationship between ingenia, rationality, and humanity. In this light, such records reveal religious notions of “otherness” that recall those of nineteenth-century British missionaries in the Pacific. Oceanic objects and their recontextualization in European museums fostered Christian debates about salvation that assumed the existence of a “shared humanity”: an idea that, according to this line of thinking, could only have been deployed in the framework of nineteenth-century European evolutionism as the scientific 38 39 40

41

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Romeo, Le scoperte, 58. Hernan Cortés, Letters from Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 101. Juan Díaz, “Itinerario de la armada del Rey Católico,” in La conquista de Tenochtitlan, ed. Germán Vázquez (Madrid: Historia 16, 1988), 57. See, for example, Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, De Orbe Novo Decades I–VIII (Genoa: Dipartimento di Archeologia, Filologia classica e loro tradizioni, 2005), Deca V, 553, 559, 694–5, 873; Tommaso Contarini, “Lettera da Valladolid, 10 luglio 1523,” in Fonti italiane per la storia della scoperta del Nuovo Mondo, ed. Guglielmo Berchet (Rome: Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1892–3), III, t. 1, 325; Benedetto Bordone, Libro di Benedetto Bordone (Venice, Nicolò d’Aristotile, 1528), VIII–IX. Francesco Corner, “Exemplum. Capitolo di letere di sier Francesco Corner el cavalier, orator, date a Valladolid al dì 6 de marzo 1520,” in Marino Sanudo, Diarii (Venice: Stabilimento Visentini cav. Federico, 1879–1902), XXVIII, 375–6. Charles Heaton, The Life of Albrecht Dürer of Nürnberg (London: Seeley, Jackson, and Hallyday, 1881), 297–8.

MISSIONAR Y G IFT RECORDS OF MEXICAN OBJECTS

and ideological base of European colonialism.44 However, sixteenth-century missionary gift records suggest that similar ideas were precociously deployed in an earlier, non-evolutionistic framework. What links these two different discourses on “otherness” – that of the sixteenth century and that of the nineteenth – is the relationship between physical objects and ethnographic knowledge, as witnessed by ethnographic texts such as the Descrittione, the Anonymous Conqueror, López de Gómara, and Codex Vaticanus A. Such “ethnographic need” shown by Renaissance Europe when coming to terms with the discovery of multicultural antiquities seems to be only partially explained by the much-discussed discursive category of the “marvelous.”45 The category of ingenium deployed in Italian missionary gift records and in contemporary Dominican texts allows us to better grasp the intermediary role Native American material culture played in the discovery of cultural otherness. Indigenous artefacts brought to Europe, thanks to their physical presence and tangible material properties, became proxies to imagine, and ultimately invent, their distant, culturally diverse but still human producers. Scholars have argued that Indian artefacts evoked little ethnographic interest in sixteenth-century Europe.46 Missionary gift records, however, tell a different story, especially when read in light of the epistemological role that Indian material culture played in the works of Bartolomé de las Casas, Francisco de Vitoria, and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, all prominent characters in contemporary debates on Indians’ humanity, rationality, and freedom. Thanks to the theological and juridical sensitiveness of Dominican friars, the discovery of material otherness, together with the recording of ethnographic knowledge, led to a “more universally human conception, more capable of embracing within Christian fraternity peoples from the new lands and from the whole world,” according to Romeo.47 Most of the objects that Cortés had shipped to Spain were soon lost, whereas many of those missionaries sent to Italy circulated in wunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities, and scientific collections. Many of them eventually arrived in the 44

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47

See Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 125–84. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Anthony Alan Shelton, “Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the Incorporation of the New World,” in Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 177–203; Martin Kemp, “Wrought by No Artist’s Hand: The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic, and the Scientific in Some Artifacts from the Renaissance,” in Reframing the Renaissance, 177–96. Aldo Albonico, “Tre immagini dell’interesse italiano per l’America nel secolo XVI: le fantasie degli umanisti, il Messico mediceo, i selvaggi del Brasile,” in La scoperta colombiana e la cultura contemporanea (Palermo: Centro di Cultura Scientifica E. Majorana, 1993), 73. For a different view, see Christian Feest, “The Collecting of American Indian Artifacts in Europe, 1493–1750,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 324–60. Romeo, Le scoperte, 37.

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collections of modern European museums, where they can still be admired.48 Thanks to their enduring coevalness, that is, their ability to be always contemporary for different viewers in different times, these objects produced and continue to produce diverse reflections on the relationship between materiality and cultural otherness.49 The historical journey of these material ingenia will continue to foster new discoveries of other ingenia and of a shared, global humanity. 48

49

Among the still extant objects mentioned in missionary gift records we can mention at least a mosaic-encrusted mask of a long-nosed god, today at the Pigorini Museum in Rome, and Codex Cospi, at the Biblioteca Universitaria in Bologna, both arguably deriving from Betanzos’s gift. The omichicahuaztli recorded in the Descrittione is also at the Pigorini Museum. For further details, see Domenici and Laurencich Minelli, “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts,” and Domenici, “The ‘Wandering Leg.’” Domenici, “The ‘Wandering Leg.’”

CHAPTER SEVEN

FEDERICO BORROMEO AND THE NEW WORLD IN EARLY MODERN MILAN Maria Matilde Benzoni

T

he counter reformation prelate federico borromeo (1564–1631) was fascinated by the Americas, and by global networks of exchange that were emerging in the early modern world more generally. A scholar of vast interests, Borromeo, for instance, famously founded Biblioteca Ambrosiana (the Ambrosiana Library) in Milan in the early seventeenth century. He had his agents scour Europe and the Mediterranean world for books and manuscripts to form a vast collection to be used explicitly for global purposes: that is, to promote a humanism that could meet the doctrinal, cultural, and linguistic challenges of a religiously divided Europe, combat the spread of Islam, encourage the formation of new multiethnic Catholic societies around the world, and assist in the spread of Christianity in Africa and Asia.1 In Il cardinal Federico “americanista” (1990), the most thorough study of the

I offer a heartfelt thanks to Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey for inviting me to contribute to this volume, and for assisting me with their editorial insights during its production. This essay was translated by Irina Oryshkevich. 1 On Federico Borromeo, see the entry by Paolo Prodi in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (1971), www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/federico-borromeo_(Dizionario-Biografico), the seventeenth-century biographies by Francesco Rivola and Biagio Guenzati, and the volumes listed in the general bibliography. The international conference “Milano, l’Ambrosiana e la conoscenza dei Nuovi Mondi (secoli XVII–XVIII),” held in Milan in 2014, perhaps first brought scholarly attention to Borromeo’s interest in early globalization. On Borromeo’s reflections on Iberian America, see especially Maria Matilde Benzoni, “‘Il mondo più picciolo.’ America spagnola e mondializzazione iberica all’Ambrosiana,” and Marina Massimi, “Nessi tra America latina e Milano: Un ‘nuovo mondo’ tra realtà e immaginazione,” in Milano, l’Ambrosiana e la conoscenza

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Milanese cleric’s interest in the Americas to date, Aldo Albònico (1947–99), a leading scholar on early modern Italy’s relationship to the New World, claimed that Borromeo’s interest in the Americas was “remarkable for its Christian zeal, but was nearly ineffectual in terms of culture.”2 According to Albònico, Borromeo’s largely unoriginal reflections on the New World derived from “the backwardness of Milanese culture in the late sixteenth through the initial third of the seventeenth century.”3 Regardless of his opinions about Borromeo and early modern Milan, Albònico’s study was among the first to isolate and identify a body of texts among Borromeo’s otherwise prolific output that revealed his curiosity about the Americas. Since the publication of Albònico’s work, issued on the 500th anniversary of 1492, a variety of studies have considerably revised his understanding of early modern Italy as culturally stagnant and isolated.4 Setting aside the anti-Spanish bias that permeated nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings of early modern Italian history, scholars have more recently begun to examine the various ways in which Milan and other Italian cities and states became integrated into the Spanish imperial system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.5 Tempering anti-clerical prejudice, which had likewise influenced nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical interpretations of early modern Italy, recent research has also begun to regard Counter Reformation Rome as a pivotal actor in early globalization.6 This shift in perspective now places early modern Italy at the center of a dense network of global interaction and allows us

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3 4

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dei nuovi mondi (secoli XVII–XVIII), ed. Michela Catto and Gianvittorio Signorotto (Milan and Rome: Biblioteca Ambrosiana-Bulzoni, 2015), 177–207, and 209–25. Aldo Albònico, Il cardinal Federico “americanista” (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 121. On Aldo Albònico (1947–99), see Maria Matilde Benzoni, “Un ricordo di Aldo Albònico, studioso dei rapporti fra l’Italia e il mondo ispanoamericano,” in Maria Matilde Benzoni, Americhe e modernità. Un itinerario tra storia e storiografia dal 1492 a oggi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012), 282–305. Albònico, Il cardinal Federico “americanista,” 121. Alessandro Manzoni recalled this dismal picture in his I promessi sposi (1827, 1840) – obligatory reading for generations of future historians. Manzoni dedicated chapter 22 to Borromeo. See Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), 414–24. On this issue, see A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Milan: The Distinctive Features of an Italian State, ed. Andrea Gamberini (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015); and Stefano D’Amico, Spanish Milan: A City within the Empire, 1535–1706 (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2012). See Court and Politics in Papal Rome 1492–1700, ed. Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Papato e politica internazionale nella prima età moderna, ed. Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Rome: Viella, 2013). See also Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2004). For a general overview, see Storia d’Italia. Annali 16. Roma, la città del papa. Vita civile e religiosa dal giubileo di Bonifacio VIII al giubileo di papa Wojtyla, ed. Luigi Fiorani and Adriano Prosperi (Turin: Einaudi, 2000). See also Giovanni Pizzorusso and Matteo Sanfilippo, Dagli indiani agli emigranti. L’attenzione della Chiesa romana al Nuovo Mondo, 1492–1908 (Viterbo: Editore Sette Città, 2005).

B ORROMEO AND T HE NEW WORLD IN EARLY MODERN MILAN

to examine more closely the multiple dimensions of the “Christian zeal” – to cite Albònico – that directed Federico Borromeo’s attention toward the Americas. As a scholar, cardinal, and patron, Federico Borromeo was deeply invested in the global diffusion of Counter Reformation doctrine, politics, and culture. He was appointed archbishop of Milan in the late sixteenth century by Clement VIII: a pope who actively promoted the conversion of the New World and the Philippines. From the very first plan for a congregation “super negotiis Sanctae Fidei et Religionis Catholicae” outlined by Clement VIII in 1599, Federico Borromeo was an active supporter of the project to exert Roman rule over missionary activity around the world.7 While the Spanish monarchy contested this idea, it nonetheless became a reality in 1622 with the establishment of the Propaganda Fide: the department of the Roman Curia that aimed at coordinating the global diffusion of Catholicism. This study will offer a general reassessment of Borromeo’s vision of the New World, with the goal of demonstrating his interests in the Americas as they formed, in large part, through his consultation of Italian and European literature about the Americas, as well as through the global networks of information located in late sixteenth-century Rome and early seventeenth-century Milan. This overview demonstrates how, on the one hand, Borromeo’s representations of the New World and Native Americas were often negative and disparaging; on the other hand, however, Borromeo at times believed the Americas offered new intellectual horizons for the study of history, geography, and natural science, as well as new frontiers for Roman Catholic expansion and Counter Reformation civilization. Borromeo’s thoughts on the New World, in effect, are more nuanced and complex than have previously been understood and deserve to be reconsidered both in light of more recent historiography, as well as in light of Borromeo’s diversified intellectual, religious, and institutional experiences. Borromeo engaged churchmen, political figures, and scholars interested in questions about discovery, conquest, colonization, and evangelization in the Americas, and his textual production reveals him to be both a citizen of the world and a savvy consumer of New World information who deployed New World knowledge to promote Counter Reformation politics and culture on a global scale. Lombard aristocrat, cardinal at age twenty three, member of the Congregazione dei Riti (the office of the Roman Curia responsible for overseeing liturgical practices), the Congregation of German Affairs, and archbishop of Milan from 1595 to 1631, Borromeo’s life – like that of many Italian intellectuals – spanned a variety of cities. Between 1586 and 1595, Federico Borromeo resided in Rome, the principal city of a budding global Catholicism. Given his institutional prominence, the high-ranking prelate’s bond with the 7

Agostino Borromeo, Clemente VIII, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (1982), www.treccani .it/enciclopedia/papa-clemente-viii_(Dizionario_Biografico)/.

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papal capital was to remain deep even after he was appointed head of the archdiocese of Milan. Indeed it was in Rome that he dealt with the delicate controversy over relations between civil power and ecclesiastical authority in Milan that had been initiated in the late sixteenth century. Furthermore, it was between Milan and Rome that the process of Carlo Borromeo’s canonization – decreed in 1610 – unfolded. Before turning to Borromeo’s specific reflections on the Americas, a word about the sources for his thoughts on the New World is in order. Borromeo’s ideas about the Americas are located in a variety of texts, including an assortment of miscellaneous notes, summaries, treatises, and letters concerning the Americas: a body of eclectic writing, often lacking in chronological notation, preserved primarily in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. These assorted and wide-ranging sources demonstrate the rich variety of oral and written sources about the Americas available to Borromeo, as well as the complexity of Borromeo’s ideas about the New World as they developed, revealing how Borromeo’s interest in the Americas combined sheer intellectual curiosity with a desire for edification. As we shall see, these writings document wide reading in literature on the New World, including chronicles, travelogues, books on natural history, missionary reports, and historical-geographic treatises. His notes, statements, and summaries reflect his various engagements and interactions with ideas about the Americas, demonstrate his amassing of an archive of scientific knowledge and topoi regarding the nature and peoples of the New World that he would use later in life to compose longer treatises on demonology, which also occasionally invoked ideas about the Americas. Borromeo’s varied notes regularly evoke the cosmopolitan culture of late sixteenth-century Rome, where it was possible to observe American ethnographic objects and naturalia firsthand, hear missionaries accounts from the New World, and discuss religious and material culture of Native Americans and the New World with members of pontifical congregations, the heads of missionary orders, and learned men.8 As we shall see, Borromeo’s writings reflect an encyclopedic approach to American materials considered in all their dimensions, including geography, history, natural science, geopolitics, economics, and religion.9 8

9

See Matteo Sanfilippo and Giovanni Pizzorusso, “L’America iberica a Roma fra Cinque e Seicento: Notizie, documenti, informatori,” in Gli archivi della Santa Sede e il mondo asburgico nella prima età moderna, ed. Matteo Sanfilippo, Alexander Koller, and Giovanni Pizzorusso (Viterbo: Sette Città, 2004), 73–118, and Giovanni Pizzorusso, “Milano, Roma e il mondo di Propaganda Fide,” in Milano, l’Ambrosiana e la conoscenza dei nuovi mondi, ed. Catto and Signorotto, 75–107. His friendship with Jesuit Giovanni Pietro Maffei, historian of the evangelization of the Portuguese Indies, and interest in his Historiarum Indicarum libri 16 (Florence: Apud Philippum Iunctam, 1588), offers just one example of such exchange. For a suggestive example, see the notebook begun in 1594: Federico Borromeo, Miscellanea adnotationum variarum, ed. Gruppo Editoriale Zaccaria (Milan: Palazzo Sormani, 1985).

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In addition to these varied textual remnants, Borromeo’s relationship to Italian writer and diplomat Giovanni Botero also reveals the development of Borromeo’s ideas about the New World. During his first stay in Rome, Borromeo retained Botero as his advisor and secretary, just as Botero had previously worked with Carlo Borromeo in Milan.10 It was in Federico Borromeo’s “house” that Botero composed his well-known and influential Relationi universali (1591–6): an encyclopedic treatise on the “four parts of the world” that would later serve as the cardinal’s most essential reference on the Americas.11 In his dedication to Borromeo in his Terza parte delle Relationi universali, Botero clearly recognized the influence Borromeo had had on his work, noting how the presentation of the “Christian religion in our times” had been transformed into a veritable atlas of sacred geography. “[I]n order to shed greater light on the matter,” Botero emphasizes, “I have also included in it . . . Judaism, paganism, Islam, and the many various impious sects of the universe.”12 [W]ho does not take greater pleasure; or, who does not hear about the growth, and the advances of this religion with more satisfaction, and consolation? Or of the travails and conflicts, with greater ardor and zeal to correct and overcome them than Cardinal Borromeo?13

Borromeo summarized the first section of Botero’s Relationi universali in a manuscript compendium entitled Haec moles universa (ca. 1595). In this text, Borromeo offered a geographic profile of the Americas, describing the administrative organization of the New World and its economy based on slavery, taxes, and the exploitation of natural resources, as well as the current state of religious conversion in that distant part of the world.14 In this way, in particular through his consideration and reworking of Botero’s text, Borromeo’s global interests were especially influenced by his relationship with Botero. Contrary to Albònico’s characterization of the city, even early seventeenthcentury Milan represented a crossroads of global contact, and in particular, contact with Iberian America.15 Borromeo’s knowledge of the Americas and other new worlds stemmed from a wide range of authors and urban interactions, and his understanding of the New World was particularly influenced by missionaries passing through Rome and Milan. As Aliocha Maldawski notes, prominent clerics operating in the Americas such as Spanish Jesuit Diego de Torres Bollo (1603), 10

11 12

13 14

15

See Maria Matilde Benzoni, “‘Pensare il mondo nella prima età moderna.’ Un itinerario fra umanesimo, diplomazia e pedagogia edificante,” in Benzoni, Americhe e modernità, 97–166. The first complete edition of Botero’s Relationi universali was published in Bergamo in 1596. Giovanni Botero, Delle relationi universali . . . terza parte nella quale si tratta de’ popoli d’ogni credenza, Cattolici, Giudei, Gentili & Scismatici (Venice: Alessandro Vecchi, 1618), 3. Ibid., 4. See Biblioteca Ambrosiana (hereafter BAMi), Federico Borromeo, Haec moles universa (BAMi – G24 Inf., vol. 6). For the section on the New World, excluding the islands, see 66v–76v. See Gianvittorio Signorotto, “Le aperture sul mondo dalla Milano del Cardinal Federico,” in Milano, l’Ambrosiana e la conoscenza dei nuovi mondi, ed. Catto and Signorotto, 43–73.

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Alonso Messia (1608), and Martín de Funes passed through the city, and during these same years, representatives from the Philippines, China, and Japan also came to Milan.16 In this way, Borromeo encountered the wider world long distance, so to speak, through his interactions with cosmopolitan visitors to the city. Among the remains of Borromeo’s various texts in the Ambrosiana Library, the surviving correspondence with missionaries reveals Borromeo’s understanding of the Americas. Father Torres in particular cultivated a long-standing correspondence with Borromeo, often requesting support for evangelization in South America while sending exotica and missionary books back to Lombardy. Missives preserved in the Ambrosiana reveal their shared interests.17 In a 1603 letter for instance, Torres confirmed that he would represent Borromeo’s ideas and interests to Spanish authorities in Valladolid.18 In a 1612 letter from Milan, Borromeo congratulated Torres on the progress he had made during his missionary trips and guaranteed that he would continue to press for the continued support of Italian missionaries in South America.19 Borromeo counted on Torres to diffuse the cult of St. Charles and the devotional traditions of Milan in South America; a note dated April 10, 1616, for example, records Borromeo sending Torres some of the relics of St. Charles, including an intestinal fragment, some blood, a piece of clothing, and a wooden statue of the saint.20 In a letter to Borromeo from Córdoba in early 1617, Torres rejoiced at the arrival of missionaries he had requested, and “far more at the unique relic of the holy uncle [sic], whose image was received in the port of what is here called Buenos Aires.”21 In his letters to Borromeo, Torres regularly made requests for alms.22 Such requests, combined with our knowledge of the presence of missionaries from the Americas in early seventeenth-century Milan, suggest the mobilization of missionary activities in South America on the part of the Ambrosian community.23 This would not be surprising, knowing Torres’s ability to influence the young Jesuits to undertake missionary work; for 16

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Aliocha Maldawski. “Société urbaine et désir de mission: Les ressorts de la mobilité missionnaire jésuite à Milan au début du XVIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 3 (2009): 7–32. See also, Aliocha Maldawski. “Les familles du missionnaire. Une histoire sociale des horizons missionnaires milanais au début du XVIIe siècle,” in Milano, l’Ambrosiana e la conoscenza dei nuovi mondi, ed. Catto and Signorotto, 125–60. See Massimi, “Nessi tra l’America latina e Milano”; Albònico, Il cardinal Federico “americanista,” 93–111. See Torres to Borromeo, October 29, 1603 (BAMi – G191, Inf., 75). On Borromeo and Torres, see also Biagio Guenzati, Vita di Federigo Borromeo, ed. Marina Bonomelli (Milan and Rome: Biblioteca Ambrosiana – Bulzoni, 2010), 399–401. Federico Borromeo congratulated Torres on the progress “delle visite e delle missioni di coteste parti” (BAMi – G211 Inf. 55 bis). BAMi – G258 Inf. 66. Torres to Borromeo, March 16, 1617 (BAMi – G253 Inf. 102, 204v). For instance, in early 1608, Torres wrote from Córdoba, “V.S.Illustrissima ci favorisca con le sue ferventi orationi, et santi sacrificij appresso el signore,” see BAMi – G199 Inf. 626. Gianvittorio Signorotto, “La scena pubblica milanese al tempo del cardinal Federico e del conte di Fuentes,” in Carlo Borromeo e il cattolicesimo dell’età moderna. Nascita e fortuna di un modello di santità, ed. Maria Luisa Frosio and Danilo Zardin (Rome: Bulzoni, 2011), 25–71.

B ORROMEO AND T HE NEW WORLD IN EARLY MODERN MILAN

instance, he brought Jesuit Giovanni Battista Ferrufino (1580–1655) with him to Peru, who later went on to work in Santiago de Chile and Paraguay.24 In his letters from South America, Torres in turn regularly referred to the American objects he sent Borromeo; for instance, a miraculous stone, some balsam wood, and a box full of bezoar.25 In effect, Torres counted on Borromeo to recruit Italian missionaries, help fund new churches and missionary work in South America, and receive relics, statues, and furnishings from Italy, pointing to a dynamic seventeenth-century exchange of objects, ideas, and people between Milan and the New World. As a Catholic humanist and scholar of antiquity – indeed, a member of the committee that authorized the definitive edition of the vulgate in 1592 – Borromeo always confronted the Americas with a particular historicism. For instance, he altered the order of the “four parts of the world” in his compendium of the Prima parte delle relationi universali. Whereas Botero had opened his treatise with a eulogy on sixteenth-century Europe, according to the theological conception of the history of the old Ptolemaic world, Borromeo introduced the “four parts of the world,” placing Asia and Africa before Europe.26 According to the cardinal, the superiority of Europe over a certainly venerable Asia lay, in fact, in the relative youth of European civilization, which had inherited – through the mediation of the Greco-Roman world – knowledge and skills that had taken shape in the East. More specifically, according to Borromeo, it was in Europe that Christ’s message, which the Apostles had spread from Asia, had been carried out to perfection. “It is the smallest part, if you consider size,” he noted, “but if you look at the capacity and intelligence of its people, it does not concede either to Asia or Africa.”27 In this way, while recognizing the antiquity and greatness of Asian world, Borromeo nevertheless adhered to the sense of European superiority as formulated by Botero. [This] is proven by the Empire of the Romans and the voyages and acquisitions of the Spanish and Portuguese, as well as the sciences and arts that are here in perfection. And the printing press, and artillery, and the use of the magnet discovered by its peoples. And above all, the Chair of St. Peter, and the residence of the vicar of Christ, there is no part [of the world] better suitable for commerce.28

The Milanese prelate reintroduced this concept of the growing hierarchical rapport between Europe and other parts of the world in his treatise on demonology, Parallela cosmographica (1624): a global census of the “superstitions” of people 24

25

26

See Massimi, “Nessi tra l’America latina e Milano,” 225. See also Maldawski, “Les familles du missionnaire.” See BAMi – G199 Inf. 310; G201 Inf. 84 and G196 Inf. 53. Bezoar was a calcium secretion found in the intestines of certain animals, once thought to be an antidote to certain poisons. Borromeo, Haec moles universa (BAMi – G24 Inf., vol. 6). 27 Ibid., 45r. 28 Ibid., 45r.

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“ancient as well as modern, civil and political, as well as barbarian and inhumane.”29 Personally involved in the project to discipline the rural and urban plebs of the large Catholic community, the archbishop likewise reiterated the primacy of Milanese Europe when dealing with the long-standing question of the devil’s influence on earth. According to Borromeo, the devil would have been and would be more active in Europe since that part of the world was “more inhabited, and by people who were less savage, and inhumane.” After Europe, the devil was most active in Asia, which “had been more populated, and had had a greater abundance of empires and greater doctrines,” while Africa seemed more “superstitious than the New World because it has greater recognition of some kind of God and some kind of providence, of which many [American] Indians have lived in the most profound ignorance.”30 In general, Borromeo expressed either indifference to or criticism of the native societies of the New World, all deemed inadequate when compared to Greco-Roman and Christian Europe. Representations of pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru had generated considerable interest in Italy starting in the early sixteenth century, and Borromeo would have had various descriptions of these cultures at his disposal, including Botero’s Relationi universali.31 Nevertheless, Borromeo exhibited no interest in this world and rarely deviated from his belief in the superiority of Europe.32 For example, in a passage from his Parallela cosmographica, while condemning both Native Americans and ancient Greeks for their shared paganism, Borromeo emphasized that an unbridgeable difference nevertheless existed between the “miserable Indians” of the New World and the “most astute and learned Greeks.”33 However, Borromeo’s various notes on the Americas as well as his compendium of Botero’s Prima parte delle relationi universali occasionally exhibit a degree of ethnographic curiosity regarding Amerindian customs. For instance, he demonstrates interest in the art of feathers in a marginal note in the aforementioned compendium. American featherwork was well known in Milan, where it had arrived through diplomatic and missionary channels in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, beginning with a miter, today still preserved in the Museo del Duomo, sent by Mexican neophytes to Pius IV and given by him to his nephew Carlo Borromeo during his Ambrosian archbishopric.34 29

30 31

32 33 34

Federico Borromeo, Parallela cosmographica de sede et apparitionibus daemonum, liber unus (BAMi – G5-Inf. 6, 6). Ibid., 21–2. See Maria Matilde Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico. Storia di un’immagine da Temistitan all’Indipendenza (1519–1821) (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2004), and Benzoni, “‘Pensare il mondo nella prima età moderna,’” 141–5, 156–7. See Federico Borromeo, Excerpta (BAMi – G 309 Inf. 6); Borromeo, Haec moles universa. Borromeo, Parallela cosmographica, 202–3. Borromeo, Haec moles universa, 70. It is possible that the chronicler Urbano Monti was likewise referring to this precious liturgical object in a passage in his Trattato universale when praising the ability of the Indians in Mexico. See Urbano Monti, Trattato universale. Descrittione

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Besides his passing interest in featherwork, however, Federico Borromeo maintained a generally negative assessment of Native Americas, and one that routinely emphasized diabolical American consumption. “The demons induce more Americans than Europeans to eat meat,” he remarked, mixing ethnography and moral judgment; “the peoples of the America are extremely brawny and big eaters; and malign spirits, as everyone knows, are in the habit of indulging and favoring evil natural inclinations because they use these as instruments of temptation.”35 Where consumption was concerned, Borromeo focused on the drinking of mate, attributing pernicious and devilish properties to the American plant, as missionaries had also noted.36 In fact, according to his alarmed missionary informants, as with tobacco, consumption of the American plant in the form of an infusion was incredibly popular and was causing a decline in attendance at mass, illness, death, and the general ruin of the inhabitants. Borromeo criticized the syncretism of the devotional forms, cultural practices, and eating habits in the Americas and attributed the fragile discipline of the multiethnic colonial world to the work of the devil.37 A summary of a missionary letter regarding conditions in multiethnic South American society notes that the consumption of mate was the result of demonic pacts that resulted unchanged both for “the natives as well as those who come from Spain, neither with sermons nor with warnings from His Majesty, nor with other orders attempting to fix this problem.”38 Knowing of his place in both Milanese and Roman society, missionaries surely consulted Borromeo about the nature of this plant. At his request, Milanese physician Giacomo Clerici formally attested to the plant’s evil power in his Iudicium de symptomatibus consequentibus ad assumptionem herbae cuiusdam, qua Indi Tucumani, et Paraguaienses utuntur.39 Clerici’s official declaration was sent overseas, as a 1621 letter to Borromeo from Diego de Torres Bollo confirmed. Nevertheless, the missionary Torres emphasized the persistent and

35 38 39

et sito de tutta la terra sin qui conosciuta (1590) (BAMi – A 260 Inf., 172r). See http://museo .duomomilano.it/it/month_opera/mitra-di-colibri/36d5c49e-1fe3-4c61-9693-3a0a2c0 b0854/. In the seventeenth century, voyager and scholar Manfredo Settala collected native and colonial ceremonial feather objects from Spanish America and Brazil in his museum in Milan. The printed catalogs of the Museo Settala describe these pieces as ingenious inventions, emphasizing their great aesthetic value. See Museo o Galeria adunata dal sapere e dallo studio del sig. Canonico M. Settala nobile Milanese (Tortona: Viola, 1666), 183). The manuscript catalog with images of the Museo Settala objects preserved at the Estense Library includes short, but pertinent explanations. Settala left the museum’s collection to the Ambrosiana Library. See http://bibliotecaestense.beniculturali.it/info/img/mss/i-mo-beu-gamma.h.1.2 1.html, 9–12. The Libro di Piume (1618) of Dionisio Minaggio, chief gardener of the Spanish governor of Milan, is an outstanding example of the importation of American feather art techniques to Europe. For an overview of Native American featherwork in the early modern period, see Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, ed. Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fanes (Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2015). Borromeo, Parallela cosmographica, 195. 36 Ibid., 177. 37 Ibid., 195. BAMi – 106, 334. Giacomo Clerici, Iudicium de symptomatibus consequentibus ad assumptionem herbae cuiusdam, qua Indi Tucumani, et Paraguaienses utuntur (BAMi – 106, 336 r – 337 v).

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depressing diffusion of vice in estos mundos de acá.40 In the Italian draft of De insanis quibusdam tentationibus, Borromeo dwelled once again on the consumption of mate, noting that “in this way, both Indians and foreigners order the collection of a certain herb, which generates in them a cruel and unhealthy appetite, with they can do nothing but eat and drink all night.”41 In his Haec moles universa, he described Brazilians as “fraudulent, vicious, devoted to laziness, drink, witchcraft, magic charms, consumers of human flesh.”42 His treatises on demonology regularly refer to Native Americans as “miserable” and “stolid” beings, incapable of restraining their baser instincts and desires. Here, crucially, we see how Borromeo employed references to and examples of the natural environment, peoples, and societies of the New World in order to enlighten his flock about virtue and vice. Little inclined to show an interest in or sympathy for Native American culture or customs, Borromeo instead focused on the New World as a function of European and global politics during a period when the forces of the European Reformation were actively at play. For Borromeo, events in the Americas potentially worked to shore up Catholic power in Europe. For instance, Borromeo regularly emphasized the attempts of French and English “heretics” to penetrate the New World and blamed the devil for any attempts to question the bull Inter caetera and the treatises of Tordesillas and Zaragoza. He evoked encounters between French Calvinists, Elizabethan privateers, and Spanish authorities in the New World as a means of reinforcing allegiance to a Catholic “front” and Roman orthodoxy.43 Borromeo never doubted the significance of Columbus’s undertaking. From the beginning of his career, he endowed the “discovery” of the New World with providential meaning, since the Americas opened up new possibilities for Catholic expansion in precisely the same moment that the forces of the Reformation were on the rise. “The immense scale of the mysterious and unusual sea voyages of Columbus, Cortés [and] Magellan . . . have made the world appear smaller,” he noted in one annotation at the end of the sixteenth century.44 In a particular excerpt, Borromeo focused on Columbus’s ability to predict a lunar eclipse during his fourth voyage and explained this to the Indians as evidence of “dio dei Cristiani.”45 Yet while he recognized the greatness of 40

41 42 43

44

See Torres to Borromeo, March 19, 1621, Córdoba (BAMi – G254 Inf. 158, 289). See also Clerici, Iudicium de symptomatibus. Closer inspection reveals that this judgment was bound to the actual historical circumstances of the missions of Paraguay, which Father Torres had founded. As noted, however, mate was to become a key product in the economy of the reducciones in the course of the seventeenth century. Federico Borromeo, De insanis quibusdam tentationibus (BAMi – F30, Inf. 96) Borromeo, Haec moles universa, 74r. For instance, Borromeo refers to Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the earth (1577–80) and his near discovery of California; see Borromeo, Miscellanea adnotationum variorum, 49. See also Federico Borromeo, De cognitionibus quas habent daemones liber unus, ed. Francesco di Ciaccia (Rome: Bulzoni, 2009), 260. Borromeo, Miscellanea adnotationum variarum, 39. 45 Borromeo, Excerpta, 10r.

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Columbus, Borromeo never adopted the view of Paolo Giovio, who in a famous elogium represented the Genoese navigator as the prototypical Italian Renaissance man whose ascent had been foiled by Spanish envy and lack of generosity.46 In keeping with his own humanist Eurocentric profile and his functions as an eminent exponent of a universalist institution such as the Church of Rome, Borromeo agreed with the encomiastic portrait of the admiral painted in Ferdinand Colombus’s Historie, a work destined to enjoy a long success and one that contributed to the European codification of the image of the admiral as a man of science chosen by Providence.47 Aware as a prelate of the fundamental role the Spanish Crown had played in spreading Christianity to the New World, Borromeo sometimes criticized Spanish politics and culture, but never with a hyperbolic tone. As archbishop of Milan, Borromeo found himself in conflict with Spanish representatives in the city, and his notes accuse the Spanish of stinginess, excessive formality, exasperating slowness, and vanity.48 He observed, “In the Spanish court one makes a profession of remaining silent, but I do not know if they know how to be silent. In the Roman court, one makes a profession of speaking and one knows how to speak,” vindicating the superiority of the pontifical state over the monarquía católica when it came to the art of governing.49 He criticized the eclipse of the Portuguese crown and the resulting union of the Iberian kingdoms under Philip II. Rather than dwelling on the vastness of the Spanish Empire however, as was common in Italy at the time, Borromeo instead attributed this development to a deadly imbalance in the interests of the Kingdom of Portugal.50 Borromeo’s musings on Native Americans and Spanish violence in the New World always walked a fine line. For instance, he commented on the catastrophic decline in the native populations of the New World caused by European expansion, but without adopting the passionate tones of Bartolomé de las Casas. Indeed, Las Casas’s Brevísima relación – translated for the first time in Venice only in 1626 – was read with extreme caution in early modern Italy, and Borromeo’s advisor Giovanni Botero had always remained averse to Las Casas’s defense of the American Indians.51 Nevertheless, Borromeo still noted that 46

47 48 50

51

See Paolo Giovio, Gli Elogi. Vite brevemente scritte d’huomini illustri di guerra, antichi et moderni . . ., trans. Lodovico Domenichi (Venice: Appresso Francesco Lorenzini da Turino, 1559), 151 r–154 r. See also Borromeo, Excerpta, 10r. Historie del signor D. Fernando Colombo (Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi, 1571). Borromeo, Miscellanea adnotationum variarum, 36, 92, 109, 128. 49 Ibid., 86–7. For a Milanese example that praised the global growth of the Spanish Empire, see Monti, Trattato universale (BAMi – A 260 Inf.). On Portugal and its empire, see Borromeo, Miscellanea adnotationum variarum, 3–4. See Maria Matilde Benzoni, “La Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias di Bartolomé de las Casas e il dibattito sulla Conquista,” in Benzoni, Americhe e modernità, 41–64. See also Maria Matilde Benzoni, “Las trayectorias de la ‘Disputa del Nuevo Mundo’,” in Entre Mediterráneo y Atlántico. Circulaciones, conexiones y miradas, 1756–1867, ed. Antonino De Francesco, Luigi

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Hispaniola “was deserted by the Indians because they were so oppressed by the Spanish.”52 Borromeo pointed out that on first contact, Hispaniola “had a million and two hundred thousand souls, but the Spanish had left behind barely five hundred and had later brought in an infinite number of negroes to cultivate [the island].”53 While always maintaining a tone of European aristocratic superiority in the face of the “miserable” Native Americans who had lived “in the darkest of shadows” until 1492, Borromeo condemned the use of violence against them: a violence often otherwise deemed legitimate by the sources from which he derived his information, such as Spanish chronicles and missionary letters. Among his miscellaneous notes, Borromeo quoted a missionary report claiming that Indians are willing to do “what others want [them to do] only through force. Pleasantness is of no use. They are boorish by nature.”54 “Falsum est,” countered Borromeo, referring to church doctrine and Paul III’s 1537 bull Veritas Ipsa, which sanctioned freedom for the Indi by declaring “that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it.”55 In his Haec moles universa Borromeo shared Botero’s appreciation for the conversion to Christianity of the territories around Mexico City, a region Borromeo regarded as the “most pleasant and civil of the entire New World” due to its abundant urban centers. “It is the part of the New World where our faith, practices, and arts have been best introduced. There is no country either with a greater abundance of provisions or in which people live on less.”56 Here, Borromeo’s rhetoric went so far as to imply that Mexico represented a model for Milan and Europe, if not a mirror in which these societies were reflected. However, despite his lofty praise of the heart of the viceroyalty of New Spain, Borromeo remained determined to revive ecclesiastical authority in Milan and protect Catholic civilization elsewhere from Milan and Rome. His seventeenth-century biographer, Biagio Guenzati, underscored Borromeo’s desire to transform Milan “into Athens, where the Ambrosian Church shines above all the rest as much through the virtue of its priests as by its doctrine. And it was the public school of all the sciences in the world and a living oracle of Catholicism.”57

52 53 54 55

56 57

Mascilli Migliorini, and Raffaele Nocera (Santiago del Chile: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014), 109–34, 109–13, and passim. On Botero and Las Casas, see Benzoni, Americhe e modernità, 156. Borromeo, Haec moles universa, 86r. Borromeo, Miscellanea adnotationum variarum, 47–8. “Indos ipsos, ut pote veros homines, non solum christianae fidei capaces existere, sed ut nobis innotuit ad fidem ipsam promptissime currere,” Paul III, Veritas Ipsa, 1537. Borromeo, Haec moles universa, 69r, emphasis mine. Biagio Guenzati Vita di Federigo Borromeo, ed. Marina Bonomelli (Milan and Rome: Biblioteca Ambrosiana – Bulzoni, 2010), 185.

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Borromeo also expressed conflicting ideas about the Columbian Exchange. He observed on the one hand that in the Americas before Columbus, “there were no more than three types of quadrupeds, the largest of which were those called the porcelletti of India . . . now there is an abundance of all European fruits and animals.” On the other hand, he criticized Europeans’ insatiable quest for precious metals.58 For example, he described Potosí as a mining city dominated by a mountain, the Cerro Rico, a place of great misfortune where more than “fifty thousand laborers” worked to extract “a nearly unbelievable amount of silver veins.”59 Borromeo also noted the repercussions of the influx of huge quantities of American precious metals into Europe. More precisely, in his treatise De cognitionibus quas habent daemones, he associated the growing circulation of precious metals with the first age of globalization that linked civilizations and states around the world between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. “Today, the world is distributed into more powers than it once was. In fact, in the East Indies, there are various kingdoms, as similarly in the rest of Asia and Africa, which remain full of lords, and the lands of the New World [also] have their sovereigns.”60 Nevertheless, when faced with the reduction in silver shipments to Europe by the early seventeenth century, Borromeo offered a moralizing explanation, inviting his readers to reflect on the instability of human fortune and the need to avoid greed and covetousness. In another passage from De cognitionibus quas habent daemones, Borromeo underlined that “a little bit everywhere, the veins and caves of gold have been exhausted . . . waxing and waning, the supplies now are abundant, and then start to dwindle.”61 Borromeo’s notes and published texts reveal a long-standing passion for the study of the natural world; he systematically collected information on the climate, geography, flora, fauna, and inhabitants of the New World, and, true to his historicist approach, inserted references to the Americas within the framework of a natural history that had its roots in the classical auctoritates on which the cardinal had been nurtured.62 He considered the Columbian voyages significant for demonstrating the habitability of all the climatic zones of the earth, dismissing the traditional imago mundi and encouraging the expansion of Christian Europe around the planet.63 A 1594 Latin annotation linked early on Native Americans’ general social and cultural inferiority to the American climate, which explained the savagery of the local population as well 58 59

60 62

63

Borromeo, Haec moles universa, 86v. Borromeo, De cognitionibus quas habent daemones liber unus, 262–3; see also Borromeo, Haec moles universa, 75v. Borromeo, De cognitionibus quas habent daemones, 262. 61 Ibid., 263. For some excerpts drawn from translations of Monardes and da Orta’s works, which were devoted respectively to the simples and drugs of the West and East Indies, see Federico Borromeo, Selectorum ex variis auctoribus miscellanea, 245–8 (BAMi – G24 Inf. n. 7). Borromeo, Excerpta, 17r.

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as the corruption of the moral fiber of the Europeans who had come to the New World: “There they felt the worst conditions of the soul, which they had not known before. There too live savage peoples, such as cannibals.”64 In his compendium of Botero’s Prima parte delle relationi universali, Borromeo similarly equated Chichimecas and Brazilian “savagery” with incivility tout court. In this case, however, he focused on their social organization. For Borromeo, the Chichimechas were “most barbarian in name and custom, with no laws or commerce, of whom others live in caverns and mountains in the manner of wild beasts, others go roaming around . . . flaunting their brutality. They wield the bow excellently and live off assassinations.”65 His texts also reveal a keen attention to the physical geography and meteorological phenomena of the Americas. An attentive reader of Jean Bodin’s Methodus, Borromeo often focused on the latitude of the Americas, allowing him to place the New World in a global context and also, to assert his own independent opinions about its climate and its meaning. For instance, he criticized José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias – one of the most significant texts for Borromeo on the Americas – for emphasizing the novelty of nature in the New World. Borromeo observed, “As for things of the New World, [Acosta] says much about the peculiarities of the torrid zone, and he speaks about them as being inherent to that part [of the torrid zone] that lies in the New World: Peru, etc. Nevertheless many of these – such as frequent craters, lakes on top of mountains – are common to the entire zone of every country that falls within it.”66 Borromeo often emphasized the orography and morphology of the New World, where mountain ranges and active volcanoes directly influenced daily life and colonial organization.67 He noted that the coastal population in Peru was “ugly, vile, barely and poorly dressed [and] eats raw fish and meat.”68 In the foothills, he added, there live “three nations, the natives, Spaniards and negroes,” while in the Andean region, the inhabitants are “cross-eyed or utterly blind.”69 His treatises on demonology refute the belief that devils inhabited the ice of the Alps, stating that crashes heard in the mountains were nothing but “purely natural effects,” and Borromeo extended such skepticism to chroniclers of and missionaries in the Americas who had similarly attempted to ascribe American meteorological phenomena to diabolical causes.70 However, while warning of the fierce storms that threatened the safety of those traveling to the Americas and around the world, he also regularly referred to the account of Alonso Sánchez (1545–93), a Spanish Jesuit he most likely met in Rome, who 64

65 66 67 70

Borromeo, Miscellanea adnotationum variarum, 3. On the New World, climate, and latitude, see Nicolas Wey Gomez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Borromeo, Haec moles universa, 70r. Borromeo, Miscellanea adnotationum variarum, 16, emphasis mine. Borromeo, Haec moles universa, 66v–76v. 68 Ibid., 75v. 69 Ibid. On the Alps, see Borromeo, Parallela cosmographica, 103–4.

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recorded how a ship at the latitude of the Bermuda Triangle was “ruled by devils during the storm.”71 Through all these perspectives, a more complete understanding of Borromeo’s vision of the Americas permits us to understand more clearly how early modern Italian political, intellectual, and religious circles contributed to the gathering, diffusion, and production of American knowledge.72 Borromeo’s tendency to understand the New World in a global perspective suggests the capacity of early modern Italian intellectuals to think globally in their time and to conceive of global connections with an intercontinental reach.73 Far from reflecting a cultural backwater as Albònico suggested, Federico Borromeo was motivated to spread the message of Counter Reform, and in turn his written texts both reflected and constructed concrete visions of early modern globalization. As Federico Borromeo’s late seventeenth-century biographer, Biagio Guenzati, confirms, describing the global stretch of Borromeo’s religious interests in the Americas: Inasmuch as there burned within him the apostolic fire to spread the light of the gospel from one pole to the other; to rid the orient of the palpable shadows of the Ottoman moon; to plant the cross over the ruins of a defeated idolatry in the recently discovered Indies and to advance towards the ice of the most remote northern regions with the flames of divine love. And it was for this reason that he never ceased to urge popes to send apostles to America and the southern shores and to enrich with spiritual treasures those precious coastal areas in order that the ship of Peter may sail safely along the waves of baptismal waters.74

71

72

73

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Borromeo, Selectorum ex variis auctoribus miscellanea, 7. See also Borromeo, Parallela cosmographica, 124. On this “virtual encounter,” see Federico Chabod, Scritti sul Rinascimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1981); ibid., Storia dell’idea d’Europa (Bari: Laterza, 1964); Rosario Romeo, Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 19893); Antonello Gerbi, La disputa del Nuovo Mondo. Storia di una polemica, ed. Sandro Gerbi (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1983); Antonello Gerbi, La natura delle Indie Nove. Da Cristoforo Colombo a Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1975); Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il Nuovo Mondo. La nascita della antropologia come ideologia coloniale: Dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali (1500–1700) (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977); Aldo Albònico, Il mondo americano di Giovanni Botero; Con una selezione dalle Epistolae e dalle Relationi universali (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990); Giuseppe Marcocci, “L’Italia nella prima età globale (ca. 1300–1700),” Storica, 60 (2014): 7–50. See also Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico, and ibid., Americhe e modernità. For Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, and Giovanni Botero’s views on early globalization, see Benzoni, “Pensare il mondo nella prima età moderna.” Guenzati, Vita di Federigo Borromeo, 399.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

THE VIRGIN OF COPACABANA IN EARLY MODERN ITALY: A DISEMBODIED DEVOTION Karen J. Lloyd

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n february 3, 1675, the roman church of san lorenzo in Lucina hosted a sumptuous celebration of a devotion whose origins lay far from the Eternal City: the Peruvian Virgin of Copacabana. Above an altar gleaming with 200 silver candlesticks, silver flowers, vases, and reliquaries, an image of the Virgin held up by small, silver-gilt angels hung under a goldtrimmed baldachin. A crystal lamp and twelve candles lit the ensemble, and the bodies of two unnamed saints placed to either side of the altar gave additional sacred gravitas. Choral music in four-part harmony performed by “the best voices in Rome” completed the sensory experience.1 A great crowd of people, princesses, and noblewomen, as well as twenty-three cardinals, came to see the spectacle, and they were all satisfied by the beautiful decoration, “even if,” as Ruggiero Caetano, the diarist who recorded the event, said, “it was nothing compared to what is owed to such a devout and miraculous image.”2 Copacabana, a village on the shores of Lake Titicaca in what was the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, was of long-standing importance in traditional Andean

My thanks to Alexander Nagel and Luisa Elena Alcalá for their comments and criticisms on this essay in progress, it is the better for them. I am grateful to Dott.ssa Caterina Fiorani and the Fondazione Camillo Caetani for allowing me to work in the Caetani family archives. 1 Ruggiero Caetano, Le memorie dell’Anno Santo MDCLXXV celebrato da Papa Clemente X e consacrate alla solennità di N.S. Papa Innocenzo XII descritte in forma di giornale dall’Abate Ruggiero Caetano Romano (Rome, 1691), 79. 2 Ibid.

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and Incan worship, famed for its Temple of the Sun.3 In the late sixteenth century, it became a destination for Catholic pilgrimage thanks to a miracleworking statue of the Madonna and Child created by indigenous Andean artist Francisco Tito Yupanqui around 1583 (Figure 8.1).4 Sculpted copies and painted representations of the statue spread across Peru, with some of the statues – like the Virgin of Cocharcas – becoming in turn the centers of new local cults.5 More than half a century later, from the mid-1650s on, iterations of the Virgin of Copacabana began to appear on the Italian Peninsula, first in Rome, and then elsewhere, including Turin and Bologna; the latest currently known can be dated to the 1710s. They were hung in churches and in private homes, some brought from abroad and some made in Italy. So many copies were eventually in circulation that in the first decade of the eighteenth century, sculptor Pierre Le Gros compared the Virgin of Copacabana to the Madonna of Loreto because of the ubiquitousness of her image, and used the Copacabana as an example of how miraculous images are copied in order to increase devotion to the original.6 The first European displays of the Copacabana Virgin were found, not unsurprisingly, in Spain. It seems that the installations were polychrome, dressed sculptures: the first known example was installed in the church of the College of the Incarnation in Madrid, another was in a chapel of the Augustinian College of Alcalá de Henares, and in 1662, a third was placed in a chapel of the nowdestroyed Convent of St. Augustine in Madrid.7 Chapels were also dedicated to her before the end of the seventeenth century in Barcelona, Toledo, and 3

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Copacabana is in current-day Bolivia. On the sacred history of the region, see Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Verónica Salles-Reese, From Viracocha to the Virgin of Copacabana: Representation of the Sacred at Lake Titicaca (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013). José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, Escultura virreinal en Bolivia (La Paz: Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Bolivia, 1972), 74–87; Teresa Gisbert, Iconografía y mitos indígenas en el arte (La Paz: Gisbert S. A., 1980), 21–2 and 51–5; Luisa Elena Alcalá, “Beginnings: Art, Time, and Tito Yupanqui’s Virgin of Copacabana,” in The Arts of South America, 1492–1850: Papers from the 2008 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum, ed. Donna Pierce (Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 2010), 141–68. Carolyn Dean, “The Renewal of Old World Images and the Creation of Colonial Peruvian Visual Culture,” in Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America, ed. Diana Fane (New York: Brooklyn Museum and Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 174–7. News of the miraculous statue circulated in Rome as early as 1589 in a short Latin text published by the Collegio Romano. Andrés Eichmann Oehrli, “Copacabana en el escenario de la primera mundialización. Un episodio significativo,” Migraciones e rutas del Barroco, ed. Norma Campos Vera and Magdalena Pereira (Bolivia: Fundación Visión Cultural y la Fundación Altiplano, 2014), 369. Francis Haskell, “Pierre LeGros and a Statue of the Blessed Stanislaus Kostka,” The Burlington Magazine 97 (1955): 288–91. Primary sources use the ambiguous word “image”; none of these works has been located or identified. Daisy Rípodas Ardanaz, “Presencia de América en la España del seiscientos. El culto a la Virgen de Copacabana,” Páginas sobre Hispanoamérica colonial: Sociedad y Cultura 2

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8.1 Francisco Tito Yupanqui, The Virgin of Copacabana, Sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, Bolivia, ca. 1583. Photo by Carlos Rúa, Courtesy of Rafael Ramos Sosa. (1995): 49, 53. According to Rípodas Ardanaz, the Copacabana was placed on the high altar of the church of the College of the Incarnation, while other sources indicate instead that it was placed in the Chapel of Christ of the Good Death. Francisco B. Luján López, “Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, una devoción andina patrona de Rubielos Altos (Cuenca). Su origen y difusión,” Revista Murciana de Antropología 8 (2002): 206; Antonio Iturbe, “Patrimonio artístico de tres conventos agustinos en Madrid antes y después de la desamortización de Mendizábal,” La desamortización: el expolio del patrimonio artístico y cultural de la Iglesia en España: actas del Simposium 6/9-IX-2007, ed. Francisco Javier Campos and Fernández de Sevilla (San Lorenzo el Escorial: Ediciones Escurialenses, 2007), 358.

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Valencia.8 A print showing the Copacabana from the Convent of St. Augustine follows the conventions of sculpture paintings, with vases of flowers set on an altar table below the Virgin.9 A late eighteenth-century print showing the Copacabana installed in the Convent of St. Monica in Barcelona clearly shows a statue in a wide dress.10 Spain had a strong tradition of polychromatic sculpture in wood and mixed media, so the format of the Copacabana Virgin’s presentation would have been entirely familiar to Spanish audiences. The Copacabana devotion was promoted in Italy by a variety of different intermediaries: a criollo member of the order of the Augustinian Recollects, Spaniards and Italians acting on behalf of the Spanish Crown, and Italians seeking to curry favor with the Spanish. However, despite strong ties to Spain and the existence of powerful Italian precedents like the dressed sculpture of the Madonna of Loreto, no evidence suggests that the Copacabana ever took the form of a three-dimensional sculpture in Italy. The cult statue found in the Spanish Americas and on the Iberian Peninsula was transformed in Rome into a two-dimensional image, represented only through paintings and prints in an emphatically visionary and iconic form. The representations of the Copacabana that circulated in Italy and the texts that were published to explain the cult to Italian audiences suggest concern about indigenous American agency, idolatry, and aesthetics. To make a persuasive devotional object for Italian audiences, Yupanqui’s stocky, surface-texture-rich statue was sublimated into an icon: self-contained, repeatable, and otherworldly. There is some evidence of active devotion to the Virgin of Copacabana in Italy even into the nineteenth century, however it was sporadic and localized. In the end, the cult remained intrinsically entangled with Spanish interests and identity and failed to carve out a lasting place in the pantheon of Italian devotions. The presence of the Virgin of Copacabana in Italy on the one hand testifies to successful Spanish evangelization in the Americas, while the material and conceptual transformation of the cult object, on the other hand, reveals veins of political and cultural tension in the newly global Catholic world. A NEW ORIGINAL

The first known public representation of the Virgin of Copacabana in Italy was a painting set on the high altar of the Roman church of SS. Ildefonso 8

9 10

Luján López, “Nuestra Señora,” 209. Ángel Martínez Cuesta, “María en la espiritualidad y apostolado de los agustinos recoletos,” in Agustinos recoletos. Historia y espiritualidad, ed. Ángel Martínez Cuesta (Madrid: Avgvstinvs, 2007), 496. Luján López, “Nuestra Señora,” 207, fig. 3. Gozos de la milagrosa imagen de Nuestra Señora de Copacavana, Guia, que se cantan en su capilla, en el convento de Santa Monica de la presente ciudad de Barcelona (Barcelona: Heirs of Maria Angela Martí, undated but likely ca. 1770). Luján López, “Nuestra Señora,” 209.

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e Tommaso da Villanova on December 8, 1655 (Plate 2).11 Early sources attribute it to Placido Siculo, an otherwise almost unknown Sicilian painter, and note that it was accompanied by representations of her miracles.12 The painting records the iconographic fundamentals of the original statue, showing Mary as a Candelaria Virgin (Virgin of Candlemas). It takes the form of a cutout (in Italian a sagoma, or silhouette), whose contours are defined by the edges of Mary’s triangular dress, mantle, and veil; the lightweight canvas was likely inexpensive and made to be carried in processions.13 The church belonged to the order of the Augustinian Recollects of Spain and the Indies, and celebrated their successes in the Americas through the Copacabana as well as images of the Virgin of Guadalupe.14 As Pablo González Tornel has argued, the church can be understood as a national institution, the decoration of which promoted the piety of the Spanish Crown; appropriately for a church belonging to the Augustinians, the program of the decoration is also deeply Marian.15 The interior was decorated in the 1670s with accomplished stuccowork by Antonio and Carlo Cometti. Emblems in the frieze and relief panels between the side chapels celebrate Mary’s sinless creation through reference to the litanies of the Immaculate Virgin. Support for the doctrine of the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception was a defining aspect of early modern Spanish Habsburg identity, and was fiercely promoted throughout the Seicento.16 It is worth noting that in most Spanish American statue paintings,

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The work is 113 x 79 cm, oil on canvas, attached to a wood backing. Ippolito Marracci, De diva virgine Copacavana in peruano novi mundi regno celeberrima. Liber unus. (Rome: Colinii, 1656), 29. Filippo Titi, Studio di Pittura, Scoltura, et Architettura nelle Chiese di Roma (1674–1763), ed. Bruno Contardi and Serena Romano (Florence: Centro Di, 1987), 181. The only other notice of Siculo’s presence in Rome is a reference to a painting in the now-destroyed church of S. Adriano. Michele Dattoli, “Appunti per la storia di S. Adriano nell’età moderna,” Archivio della R. Società Romana Di Storia. Patria 43 (1920): 351. The high altar of SS. Ildefonso e Tommaso da Villanova was entirely redesigned in the nineteenth century. Pablo González Tornel, “La iglesia de los Santos Ildefonso y Tomás de Villanueva en Roma: un monumento barroco a la pietas hispanica,” Archivo Español de Arte 88 (2015): 69–84. There is a small notch at the bottom of the painting, suggesting that it was carried as a standard. A cartouche over the door on the retrofaçade reads: S. MARIA DE COPACAVANA / ORA PRO NOBIS, “St. Mary of Copacabana, pray for us.” González Tornel, “La iglesia,” 75, 81–2. On Spain and the Immaculate Conception, see Suzanne L. Stratton, The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Alexander VII decreed that masses and offices in honor of the Immaculate Virgin could be celebrated, first in Spain in 1664 and then in Spanish possessions in southern Italy and Northern Europe in 1665. Despite that, in 1675, Spanish King Carlos II convened a royal junta to press the papacy to finally declare on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (ibid., 104). Sebastian Schütze, “The Politics of Counter-Reformation Iconography and a Quest for the Spanishness of Neapolitan Art,” in Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion 1500–1700, ed. Thomas James Dandelet and John A. Marino (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 558–9.

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the Virgin of Copacabana is shown in a red or pinkish dress and mantle; in Italy, however, her dress is white and her mantle blue, a color combination typically associated with images of the Immaculate Virgin.17 The program also includes six life-size stucco sculptures in niches along the nave. On the Evangelist side, closest to the altar, is the statue of Ferdinand III, the king of Castile and Leon, who is celebrated for his victories over Islam. The message is not subtle: Ferdinand rests his foot on a decapitated, turbaned head. The theme of the triumph over heresy is continued by two other nave statues: St. Fulgentius, the bishop of Ruspe in North Africa, and St. Alypius, the bishop of Tagaste in what is now Algeria. By permanently incorporating the crescent moon into her image, dressing her in blue and white, and surrounding her with the symbolism of the Immaculate Conception, in the Augustinian Recollects’ Roman church, the Virgin of Copacabana was reaffirmed as a Virgin of the Purification and thus a manifestation of the Virgin Immaculate. Viewed in conjunction with the nave statues, her miracles and victories over idolatry in the New World – once shown in smaller panels around the cutout – became an extension of the long-standing battle against Islam on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Mediterranean. As recent scholarship has shown, including Katherine McAllen’s essay in this volume, this was a strategy frequently employed by the Spanish as well as religious orders like the Jesuits. In the case of the Virgin of Copacabana, her sphere of influence was broadened eastward, to Spain and Western Europe, as she was co-opted and shown as an extension of the Spanish battle against un-Christian belief in all its forms. Miguel de Aguirre, a member of the Augustinian Recollects, commissioned this first Roman painting of the Copacabana; he is the critical connection between Peru and Italy, the primary agent of the Copacabana’s transfer to Europe. Aguirre was born in La Plata and joined the Augustinian order in Lima; he knew Yupanqui’s statue firsthand.18 He traveled first to Madrid in 1650 in the retinue of the returning viceroy, the Marquis de Mancera, and spent a year in Rome in 1655 at a general meeting of the Augustinian order. Aguirre was responsible for installing all three of the Copacabana images in Madrid, and encouraged publications on the cult.19 Aguirre’s efforts to promote the Copacabana devotion can be compared to those of Spanish Hieronymite friar Diego de Ocaña, who traveled to Peru in the seventeenth century to spread

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Without the surviving Spanish sculptures, it cannot be determined at this point if that shift began in Spain. Rípodas Ardanaz, “Presencia de América,” 48. On Aguirre, see J. T. Medina, “Fray Miguel de Aguirre, noticia biográfica,” in Colección de historiadores de Chile y de documentos relativos a la historia nacional, vol. XLV, “Los Holandeses en Chile” (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1923), v–x. Rípodas Ardanaz, “Presencia de América,” 48–53, 55. Aguirre returned to Madrid and remained there until his death on November 2, 1664.

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devotion to the Spanish Lady of Guadalupe.20 Ocaña argued that his paintings were better than earlier images of the Virgin of Guadalupe that had arrived in Peru because he knew the original firsthand; similarly, Aguirre’s personal connection to the Peruvian sculpture gave his images authority.21 The representation he installed in Madrid was said to have been “touched” (tocada) to the original in Copacabana, giving it the status of a touch relic.22 Aguirre’s goal was no doubt to promote the Augustinian Order’s successful evangelism in Peru, and his travels testify to the globalizing effects of the order. Subsequently – as seen in the decoration of SS. Ildefonso e Tommaso da Villanova – devotion to the Copacabana was co-opted by the Spanish monarchy, and spread in Italy by functionaries of the Spanish Crown as a means to advance the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Francesco Caetani, the Duke of Sermoneta, was a life-long servant of Spain and the sponsor of the celebration in San Lorenzo in Lucina described in the opening of this essay.23 The painting that Aguirre installed in Rome was said to have inspired Caetani’s devotion, but his support of the Copacabana cult was clearly also an aspect of his political identity as a representative of the Spanish Crown.24 In 1661, while he was governor of Milan, Caetani organized a large musical service in honor of the Virgin of Copacabana and the feast of the Purification; as Robert Kendrick has argued, that event should be read as an indirect celebration of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.25 The celebration was somewhat controversial for its public music performance, but it received Philip IV’s explicit blessing, suggesting Spain’s deep interest – and Caetani’s sustained efforts – in promoting the Copacabana cult.26 The focal point of the 1675 Roman festivities was a now-lost painting that Caetani otherwise kept in a chapel in his palace, where he had special papal 20

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Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition, 140–4; Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014), 41–68. Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition, 142. Rípodas Ardanaz, “Presencia de América,” 49. On Francesco Caetani’s career, see Marina Raffaeli Cammarota and Giuseppe Scichilone, “Caetani, Francesco,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 16 (1973); www.treccani.it/enci clopedia/francesco-caetani_res-507b7560-87e9-11dc-8e9d-0016357eee51_(DizionarioBiografico)/. Sermoneta was on the border of the kingdom of Naples, and from the 1570s the Caetani were pro-Spanish. Irene Fosi, Papal Justice, Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500–1750, trans. Thomas V. Cohen (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 81. Andrés de San Nicolás, Imagen de N. S. de Copacabana (Madrid: Antonio Garcia de la Iglesia, 1663), unpaginated, prologue. A 1665 inventory of Francesco’s goods does not list any images of the Virgin of Copacabana; it would seem that the majority of the images were acquired later. Archivio Caetani, Miscellanea, 193–558. Robert L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 109–11, 111, n. 76. Ibid., 111, n. 76.

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dispensation to have mass said before it twice a day.27 In his palace chapel it was the centerpiece of an altar display brimming with silver: a silver crucifix with a silver pedestal, two round silver vases with silver enameled flowers, six silver candelabra, a silver altar frontal decorated with low relief, a silver plated service for the mass, and silver torches and sconces.28 Caetani and his wife, Eleonora di Pimentel Toledo, had other paintings – as well as several armoire drawers full of prints – of the Peruvian Virgin in their palace.29 One of the panel paintings was paired with an image of the Madonna of Loreto, suggesting that Le Gros’s connection of the two devotions was not incidental, but perhaps a deliberate strategy used to promote the Copacabana cult.30 When Eleonora died, she willed an image of the Virgin of Copacabana set in a frame studded with 27

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Caetano, Le memorie, 80. It is described in the inventory made after Francesco Caetani’s death as: “un quadro con effigie miracolosa della Madonna Santissima di Copacavana con sua cornice d’Argento alta otto palmi in circa, e larga cinque in sei” (“a painting with the miraculous effigy of the Most Holy Madonna of Copacabana with its silver frame, around 8 palmi tall, and five to six [palmi] wide”). Archivio Caetani, Miscellanea 231–5, 44v. It is likely the work listed in a 1760 inventory of Michelangelo Caetani’s goods as “an oversized painting on canvas representing the Madonna of the Purification with [a] turquoise frame threaded with varnished silver.” Adriano Amendola, I Caetani di Sermoneta: storia artistica di un antico casato tra Roma e l’Europa nel Seicento (Rome: Campisano, 2010), 252. The palace is now known as Palazzo Ruspoli al Corso; the Caetani were resident there from 1629 through the end of the seventeenth century. Carlo Pietrangeli, ed., Palazzo Ruspoli (Rome: Editalia, 1992), 83–7. Archivio Caetani, Miscellanea 231–53, 44v–45v, 60r. Ibid., 15r–v; 17v; 18v. “Una scatola lunga palmi due, alta un palmo con dentro diverse Imagini piccole di carta ordinaria della Madonna di Cappacavana, et alcuni libretti di divotione . . . Un altra scatola di legno bianca con dentro diversi mappetti d’Imagini della sudetta Madonna di Coppacavana” (15r–15v). (“A box two palmi long, one palmo high, with inside various small images on ordinary paper of the Madonna of Copacabana, and several little devotional books . . . Another box of white wood with inside various mappetti of images of the aforementioned Madonna of Copacabana.”) “Nell’altro [studiolo] di sotto vi sono molte Imagini della Madonna di Coppaca.na . . . Un altro studiolino d’ebano lungo tre palmi, alto un palmo compagno del primo descritto, con sei Tiracorini dentro tre de quali vi sono dell’Imagine di Carta di detta Madonna di Coppacavana e negl’altri tre alcune [poluti?] e parte d’odori” (17v). (“In the other cupboard below there are many images of the Madonna of Copacabana . . . Another small ebony cupboard three palmi long, one palmo high, pair of the one described above, with three tiracorini inside three of which there are images on paper of the aforementioned Madonna of Copacabana and in the other three [tiracorini] several [poluti?]and parts of herbs.”) “Un quadro della Madonna Santissima di Coppacavana dipinta in Tela alto palmi cinque in circa largo palmi quattro e mezzo con cornice tutta dorata intagliata e trasforata con fondo rosso, con cortina di seta bianca avanti con suo merletto d’argento intorno” (18v). (“A painting of the Very Holy Madonna of Copacabana painted on canvas around five palmi high, four and a half palmi wide, with an entirely gilded, carved, and drilled frame with red ground, with [a]white silk curtain in front with its silver lace around.”) Archivio Caetani, Miscellanea 231–53, 11v–12r. “Un Immagine di Nostra Signora di Coppalavana [sic] dipinta in tavola con sopra un vetro con cornicetta di pero di grandezza un palmo scarso, et un Imagine della Madonna di Loreto stampata in tela, lunga un palmo e mezzo in circa con un Acqua Santa di Cristallo” (11v–12r). (“An image of Our Lady of Copacabana painted on panel with above a glass with a little pear wood frame, barely a palmo high, and an image of the Madonna of Loreto printed on canvas, around a palmo and a half long with a crystal holy water [container].”)

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diamonds to a woman named Catarina de Vera, Countess della Rocca, then living in a convent in Madrid.31 The Caetani’s images show how devotional imagery could travel through personal channels, and how public images like that in SS. Ildefonso e Tommaso da Villanova are merely the most visible and best documented examples of much more diffuse visual cultures of devotion. Representatives of Spain promoted the Copacabana in other parts of the Italian Peninsula. In 1691, Spanish nobleman Carlo Omodei sent a painting of the Copacabana from Valencia to the Savoy court in Turin, where it was installed in the ducally protected church of San Carlo (Plate 3).32 The picture has enough similarities to those that circulated in central Italy – the triangular form floating against a void, the schematic design of the dress – to suggest a common model.33 The gift may be related to Spanish royal politics. In 1701, Omodei served as an extraordinary ambassador at the Savoy court, acting on behalf of Philip V in drafting a marriage contract between the Spanish king and Princess Maria Gabriela di Savoia, daughter of Vittorio Amedeo II. Omodei then accompanied the princess on her voyage to Spain.34 Omodei’s gift of an image of the Copacabana may well have laid the foundation for his subsequent role at both the Spanish and Savoy courts, and suggests the importance of the devotion as a marker of Spanish identity. A pamphlet about the Virgin of Copacabana published in Bologna in 1720 stressed the role of the Spanish not just in converting the New World, but also in bringing the results of their conquests back to Europe. The text praises the Spanish for the “glorious conquests . . . made in that new very distant world,” and for bringing Catholicism with them.35 In the Americas, “very many [images] were made based on this model [i.e., the Copacabana], and the Spanish brought from Peru this truly precious treasure, dispensing them [i.e., the images] to enrich our world, and it is the custom [of the Spanish] to wear these small images around their neck, held with very vivid faith and total 31

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Archivio Caetani, Miscellanea 231–53, 360r. “Item per raggione di Legato come sopra lascio all’Eccellentissima Signora Donna Catarina de Vera Contessa della Rocca, che si ritrova nella Corte di Madrid nel Convento della Madalena . . . Item un Immagine della Madonna di Cupocavana guarnita di Diamanti intorno.” (“Item by reason of the bequest as above I leave to the Most Excellent Signora Donna Catarina de Vera Countess della Rocca, who is found at the court in Madrid in the Convent of the Magdalene . . . Item an image of the Madonna of Copacabana decorated around with diamonds.”) Records from an inheritance struggle after Francesco Caetani’s death suggest that it was Eleonora who held a strong personal attachment to the cult. Antonio Bosio, Sulla R[eale] Chiesa Parrochiale di S. Carlo in Torino. Memorie (Turin: Tipografia del Collegio degli Artigianelli, 1866), 8. There was a chapel dedicated to the Virgin of Copacabana in Valencia by the 1670s. Martínez Cuesta, “María en la espiritualidad,” 496. Archivio di Stato, Turin. Matrimoni, 38. 1701. Compendio dell’Origine, e miracoli di Maria Vergine detta di Copacavana (Bologna: Successori del Benacci, 1720), unpaginated.

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veneration.”36 The text makes explicit what is suggested by the patronage of each of the public Italian Copacabana images: the cult remained deeply connected to Spain. In the Roman church of the Augustinian Recollects, the devotion was woven into a program celebrating militant Spanish piety; Francesco Caetani celebrated it as a means of promoting the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception on behalf of the Spanish Habsburgs; Carlo Omodei aimed to represent himself and the Spanish Crown at the Savoy court; and the patron of the Bolognese picture, Giuseppe Ippolito Maria Grati, sought to endear himself with Spain by publicly exhibiting his picture of the Copacabana and publishing a pamphlet in its honor that inextricably linked the cult to Spain. Unlike the Jesuit martyrdom images discussed by McAllen, which subordinated national identities in favor of institutional Jesuit affiliation and were meant to inspire further travels and missionary activities, the Copacabana was presented to Italians as a Spanish success story. The celebration of the Copacabana in effect asked Italian audiences to devote themselves to an iteration of the Madonna whose origins were geographically and experientially foreign. IDOL TO ICON

As in Spanish American statue paintings, paintings and prints of the Copacabana Virgin in Italy always show her encased in a wide-spreading gown and mantle. The emphatically three-dimensional figure carved by Yupanqui, in which the Virgin’s knee pushes forward insistently to indicate her body below the drapery, vanishes under the flat, schematic dress. Statue paintings and prints inevitably include altars, pedestals, or altar furnishings to remain clear that the original work was a statue.37 None of the Italian images of the Copacabana, however, includes such a setting, uncoupling the devotion from a geographical locus and from a singular physical object. What was solidly three-dimensional becomes a disembodied vision of the Madonna and Child and, in Hans Belting’s formulation of “a pictorial concept that lends itself to veneration,” a kind of icon.38 The Italian images refer back to an archetype, first a print, and then the paintings produced from it. They are repeated and are conservative in their repetition, and most critically, “[t]he artist’s hand . . . had to wither away before [the image] found

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Ibid. Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition, 4. See also the print that accompanied Alonso Ramos Gavilán’s text. Alonso Ramos Gavilán, Historia de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana; Segunda edición completa, según la impresión príncipe de 1621 (La Paz, Bolivia: Academia Boliviana de la Historia, 1976). Some Spanish prints, on the other hand, follow the visionary model. See Luján López, “Nuestra Señora de Copacabana,” 210, fig. 4. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 29.

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its way to the correct type.”39 The lack of naturalism of the Italian Copacabana, in particular the stiffness and flatness imposed by the dress, work as a kind of archaism, giving the image the characteristically Byzantine arrangement of abstract, schematic clothing structuring an interaction between the faces and hands of Mary and Christ. This archaism, for European viewers, would suggest “a fiction of age” meant to establish the new cult image.40 The iconic Copacabana is also akin to images of other established Madonna cult statues, such as Carlo Saraceni’s painting of the Madonna of Loreto in San Bernardino alle Terme.41 The similarities in the flat, triangular, jeweled dress legitimize the Copacabana by visual association. The transformation of Yupanqui’s statue into an icon began in the Americas, in a print by Francisco de Bejarano published with Fernando de Valverde’s 1641 poem about the Copacabana (Figure 8.2). The Virgin in her triangular dress stands atop a globe with all of South America labeled as Peru. Below her, a view of the shores of Lake Titicaca is flanked by allegorical figures of Faith and Grace. As Barbara Duncan observed, the Virgin is flat and abstracted, akin to a popular woodcut, while the two allegorical women are more naturalistically three-dimensional and similar to Flemish prints.42 However, while the Virgin of Copacabana is presented as a kind of iconic vision, she is rooted in the physical world – the globe serves as a pedestal, and the curtains above her are clearly attached to an architectural structure; the composition retains the characteristics of the statue prints it is likely based on.43 The visionary is suggested but, as Maya Stanfield-Mazzi has observed of statue paintings, the image “hover[s] between the material and the immaterial.”44 That ambivalence lingers in the Italian images in the contrast between naturalistic faces and hands and abstracted clothing, but on the whole there is a shift toward the immaterial. In Italy, the schematic, isolated version of the Copacabana was established as authentic by the cutout image presented in the Augustinian Recollects church. The triangular cutout painting was likely inspired by a print brought 39

40 41

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Ibid., 19. See also Luisa Elena Alcalá, “The Image and Its Maker: The Problem of Authorship in Relation to Miraculous Images in Spanish America,” in Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World, ed. Ronda Kasl, exh. cat (Indianapolis, IN: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2009), 56. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 14. Maria Giulia Aurigemma et. al, Carlo Saraceni (1579–1620): un veneziano fra Roma e l’Europa, exh. cat. (Rome: De Luca, 2013), 174–6. Thanks to Lucia Abramovich for bringing this painting to my attention. Barbara Duncan, “Statue Paintings of the Virgin,” in Gloria in Excelsis. The Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and Bolivia, exh. cat. (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1986), 39. Ricardo Estabridis Cárdenas, El grabado en Lima virreinal. Documento histórico y artístico (siglos XVI al XIX) (Lima: Fondo editorial Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2002), 107. Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition, 4.

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8.2 Francisco de Bejarano, “Virgin of Copacabana,” in Fernando de Valverde, Santuario de N. Señora de Copacabana en el Peru, Lima, 1641. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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by Aguirre, perhaps similar to one that appeared in Rome in 1656 (Figure 8.3).45 It shows the Virgin of Copacabana with the moon, a standard element of the iconography of the Immaculate Virgin, at her feet. Below her is a serpent, a pointed reference to original sin that does not appear in any other surviving Italian image of the Virgin of Copacabana.46 She is set in front of a niche flanked by paired columns, in an arrangement recalling the celebration of the Virgin as the Portacoeli, the gateway to heaven. Her dress extends well below the ledge behind her and covers the bases of the closest columns to either side, making her appear to hover weightlessly in front of the architecture. This is thus a transitionary image, between statue and icon. In later Italian images, the cutout form remains the same, while the background changes. For instance, in an anonymous eighteenth-century painting of the Virgin of Copacabana, which once hung in the sacristy at SS. Ildefonso e Tommaso da Villanova (Plate 4), the cutout floats above a distant landscape with a walled city on a tongue of land extending into a lake; in the foreground two tiny figures hike toward the town.47 The terrain is recognizable as Copacabana, making the Virgin the protector of her eponymous birthplace and an instrument of conversion or affirmation of faith in the Americas. As in Bejarano’s print, there is a semantic distinction between the abstracted Virgin and the naturalistic landscape below, contrasting her otherworldliness with the scene’s geographic specificity. In other cases, as in prints published in Andrés de San Nicolás’s 1663 book about the Copacabana (Figure 8.4) and an anonymous tract published in Bologna (Figure 8.5), the cutout floats against a blank background, framed only by curtains suspended somewhere outside the visual field.48 The Bolognese print, which records a (lost?) painting that had been displayed for public devotion, includes the inscription: “Thou hast as many virtues, 45

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Rípodas Ardanaz, “Presencia de América,” 54–55. The print must have originated in Spain, as the text is in Castilian. As Rípodas Ardanaz has noted, the publishing history of the respective prints and texts celebrating the Copacabana is “anarchic,” with prints seemingly made for one publication appearing in another. Stanfield-Mazzi has suggested that in the colonial Andean context, the moon could have indicated the Virgin’s defeat of the pre-Hispanic Goddess of the Moon. Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition, 83. The serpent could also have been read as the “fish-shaped” preIncan idol of Copacabana. On the idol see Salles-Reese, From Viracocha, 13–14. González Tornel, “La iglesia,” 74. The Copacabana in this picture was initially based on the picture installed in the church by Aguirre. There is a larger triangular outline around the floating Virgin that echoes her form; it is especially clear in raking light. The dimensions of this vanished Virgin (113 cm high by 85.5 cm wide, 44.5ʺ ╳ 33.7ʺ) are very close to those of the cutout (113 cm from the top of the head to the bottom of the skirt and 79 cm at the widest point; 44.5ʺ ╳ 31.1ʺ), suggesting that the cutout was traced onto the canvas to create a precise replica before a change in plans was made. My thanks to José Javier Lizarraga and the Augustinian Recollects in Rome for allowing me to measure the paintings and work in the order’s archive. Rípodas Ardanaz suggests that Figure 8.4 was made for Marracci’s text, because of the Roman origin and the Latin inscription. Rípodas Ardanaz, “Presencia de América,” 54.

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8.3 Anonymous Spanish, “Virgin of Copacabana,” in Ippolito Marracci, De diva virgine Copacavana in peruano novi mundi regno celeberrima. Liber unus, Rome, 1656. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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8.4 “Io. Bon.” Virgin of Copacabana in Andrés de San Nicolás, Imagen de N. S. de Copacavana portento del Nvevo Mvndo, ya conocido en Europa, Madrid, 1663. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

O Virgin, as there are stars in the heavens.”49 With the inscription, the Virgin of Copacabana comes to stand in for every possible permutation of the Madonna, making her fully universal, geographically and physically unbound. This visionary-iconic depiction of the Copacabana is entirely at odds with the origin story of the statue itself. Unlike other devotions to Mary, such as the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe, the creation of the Virgin of Copacabana and its physical form were not inspired by an appearance of the Virgin herself. Furthermore, unlike the acheiropoietic Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin of Copacabana has an identifiable author (or rather, authors).50 Tito Yupanqui’s firsthand account of his struggle to make the statue was recorded in a letter.51 As Teresa Gisbert and others have noted, of the many remarkable things about 49

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Compendio dell’Origine, unpaginated frontispiece. “Tot tibi sunt dotes Virgo quot Sydera Caelo [sic].” My thanks to Pamela Jones for correcting the Latin. The text is an epigram by Jesuit poet Bernard van Bauhuysen, which was famously reworked by poet Henry de Puy (Erycius Puteanus) into 1,022 grammatically distinct lines. On Puteanus see Fernand Hallyn, “Puteanus sur l’anagramme,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 49 (2000): 255–66; James J. Mertz and John P. Murphy, Jesuit Latin Poets of the 17th and 18th Centuries: An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1989), 63. Yupanqui worked with at least one brother and a Spanish gilder named Vargas. Alcalá, “The Image and Its Maker,” 71. Ramos Gavilán, Historia, 124–6. Yupanqui’s text is translated into English in Salles-Reese, From Viracocha, 177–81.

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8.5 “Virgin of Copacabana,” in Compendio dell’origine, e miracoli di Maria Vergine detta di Copacavana, Bologna, 1720. Courtesy of the Biblioteca communale dell’archiginnasio, Bologna.

this text, one is the almost total lack of the miraculous; Yupanqui’s emphasis is on the process of becoming a sculptor.52 He makes multiple attempts, seeks out a teacher, looks for an artistic model, asks for critiques of his work from other 52

Teresa Gisbert, “Idolatry and Post-Tridentine Marian Devotions,” in Painting of the Kingdoms, Shared Identities: Territories of the Spanish Monarchy, 16th–18th centuries, edited by Juana Gutiérrez Haces (Mexico: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 2008–9), 1272; Alcalá, “The Image and Its Maker,” 69; Vanessa K. Davidson, “Tito Yupanqui and the Creation of the Virgin of Copacabana: Instruments of Conversion at Lake Titicaca,” in Imagery, Spirituality and Ideology

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sculptors, applies for a license from the Spanish authorities to be a professional artist (enduring their derision toward the quality of his work), and collaborates with another artisan, a gilder named Vargas. Another author, Augustinian friar Alonso Ramos Gavilán, recorded the statue’s “first miracle”: Mary herself was said to have intervened to improve a major defect, shifting the Christ Child so that his crowned head would not block her face.53 In all the pictures that circulated in Italy, Christ leans well back and away from Mary’s face – in the case of the cutout, breaking beyond the contour line of the dress. What we see in the Italian pictures is thus not a representation of Yupanqui’s handiwork, but of Mary’s improvements. In theory, Yupanqui’s story is an example of successful colonization: he is devoted to the Madonna and he is driven to find a professional place for himself within the new colonial hierarchy. However, Yupanqui’s persistence toward his goal despite official resistance (and perhaps even his palpable pragmatism) hints at the challenge posed by his story and his work.54 Spanish authorities and writers were hyper-concerned about the possibility that apparent conversion could mask continued pagan practices, and that Catholic statues might be used in the worship of traditional Andean huacas.55 As a threedimensional work created by an indigenous hand, the material object at the center of the Copacabana devotion might have been suspect. Criollo writers therefore took pains to situate her at the front lines of the fight against idolatry.56 Ramos Gavilán argued that because of the Virgin’s presence in Copacabana “there is no trace of idols . . . nor anything that might smell of idolatry.”57 Similarly, Bejarano’s print (Figure 8.2) shows the Virgin triumphant over a huaca (depicted as a small devil) and an idolater, Incan prince Yupanqui Toca.58 The statue also caused difficulties because of its aesthetic imperfections; criollo and Augustinian author Antonio de la Calancha (1584–1654) rather bluntly described the work as “not at all beautiful, and tending towards ugly.”59 Concerns about idolatry and aesthetic value would trail the Virgin of Copacabana to the Old World and fundamentally shape her significance and appearance in Italy. The Italian pictures attest to the miraculous intervention of Mary in the evangelization of the

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in Baroque Spain and Latin America, ed. Jeremy Roe and Marta Bustillo (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 34. Ramos Gavilán, Historia, 129. 54 Alcalá, “Beginnings,” 158. On Spanish efforts against idolatry in the Andes in the mid-seventeenth century see Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Alcalá, “Beginnings,” 153. 57 Davidson, “Tito Yupanqui,” 41. Rolena Adorno, The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 191. Davidson, “Tito Yupanqui,” 35.

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New World, but excise the problematic physical evidence of indigenous agency with its possible lingering traces of idolatry by moving fully away from the three-dimensional object. GOLD AND SILVER

In his diary of the 1675 Holy Year, Roman abbot Ruggiero Caetano described the celebration held in San Lorenzo in Lucina in honor of the Virgin of Copacabana and explained the statue’s creation story because, he says, it is not “clear to everyone.”60 Caetano’s qualifying clause is important as it indicates that, twenty years after the first image of the Copacabana appeared in Rome, the devotion was not well known enough that he could assume his audience’s familiarity with the story. Caetano’s text is closely based on earlier criollo and other Spanish sources; however, it is short and thus selective in its telling. In his own account, Yupanqui stresses his active striving to produce an acceptable image. He studies, apprentices with Spanish artist Diego Ortiz de Guzmán, and searches out an appropriate artistic model for his work. Caetano eliminates all of this labor and all reference to Yupanqui’s participation in a system of artistic education.61 Instead of studying, Yupanqui “passed much time at prayer,” had a mass said for the Virgin, and persisted until he made an image that, while “it could not be called [well] formed,” seemed to Yupanqui’s eyes “to have every beauty (ogni vaghezza).”62 Vaghezza was an ambivalent word: it could refer to a superficial beauty of vulgar, seductive appeal, or a kind of grace that elevated base material, delighting and teaching.63 Caetano locates the source of that vaghezza slightly later in his story, when he recounts how the public recognized the miraculous nature of Yupanqui’s statue when it shone radiantly and became incredibly beautiful (“di tale stravagante bellezza”) on entering the church in Copacabana. Caetano uses the verb trasfigurare, “transfigure,” to describe the moment.64 The choice of the theologically loaded “transfigure” connects the image’s transformation to Christ’s revelation of his divine nature in human form. Caetano thus manages to invoke both meanings 60

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Caetano, Le memorie, 80. Ruggiero was Francesco’s much younger cousin, the bastard son of Francesco’s uncle, Gregorio Caetani. Ruggiero received money from the Caetani on a fairly regular basis (Archivio Caetani, Libro Mastro di Roma, I, 1715, 6r (year 1678); Libro Mastro di Roma H, 1714, 113r (year 1668)). In a codicil to his will, written on April 26, 1662, Francesco added “abbate Don Ruggero [sic] Caetani” to his inheritors. Archivio Caetani 150129. Gabriel de León and Andrés de San Nicolás both mention the search for a model in Potosí, while León mentions the work with Vargas and San Nicolás that Yupanqui looked for a teacher. Gabriel de León, Compendio del origen de la . . . Milagrosa imagen de N. Senora de Copacabana . . . (de Val, 1663), 18–19, 22; San Nicolás, Imagen, 36r. Caetano, Le memorie, 81. Philip Sohm, “Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia,” Renaissance Quarterly 48: 4 (1995): 768–9. Caetano, Le memorie, 82.

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of vaghezza: a superficial beauty produced and perceived by Yupanqui alone, and a divine grace that came from Mary herself and was recognized by the congregation. Yupanqui had his second work gilded, which he saw as an appropriate way to further improve an already satisfactory sculpture. Caetano reconfigures the narrative: Yupanqui, “led by naiveté,” resorts to “retouching” the work with gold out of desperation to improve it.65 This is in contrast to the Spanish author of a pamphlet on the Copacabana published in 1663, Gabriel de León, who commends Yupanqui for going forward with the gilding despite the “considerable disdain” directed at his work.66 Caetano further describes the final statue as made “without design” (senza disegno).67 Disegno could refer to a physical drawing, or a sense of composition, but also a higher intellectual and spiritual capacity behind the ideation of a work of art, as in Vasari’s definition of disegno as “an apparent expression and declaration of the concept that one has in the soul.”68 As Georges Didi-Huberman has stressed, disegno “served to constitute art as a field of intellectual knowledge.”69 By characterizing Yupanqui’s work as senza disegno, Caetano denies him a critical creative and intellectual capacity, instead casting him as misguided in his understanding of the techniques and aesthetics of good art, and as an incidental vehicle for the divine. According to criollo author Alonso Ramos Gavilán (ca. 1570–ca. 1639), after the initial failure of his second work, Yupanqui considered selling the sculpture.70 Similarly, León and Caetano say that local magistrate Gerolamo de Marañon sent Yupanqui forty gold reales as alms, to ensure that the statue would arrive in Copacabana and not be taken to a different town.71 In Caetano’s text, there is a kind of alternation of gold and light, of the material and the spiritual. He mentions the misguided gilding, then relates how the statue was initially kept out of the church in Copacabana by a resistant populace. The statue went to the cell of a Franciscan monk, Francesco Navarette, who saw it perform its first miracles, emitting rays of splendid light whenever he entered his cell. Nevertheless, Caetano says, Yupanqui resolved to sell the statue, and it was only Marañon’s intervention that saved it for the town of Copacabana. Thus Yupanqui tried to improve his statue by material means, and then was impervious to the first hints of its divine nature; only an earthly payment kept 65 67 68

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Ibid., 81. “guidato da la semplicità . . . ritoccandola con Oro.” 66 León, Compendio, 21. Caetano, Le memorie, 82. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, 9 vols. ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1906), 1:169. “una apparente espressione e dichiarazione del concetto che si ha nell’anima.” Georges Didi–Huberman, Confronting Images, Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 78. The italics are Didi-Huberman’s. Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition, 76, 201, n. 56. Caetano, Le memorie, 81–2; León, Compendio, 24.

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the statue in Copacabana. Given the brevity of Caetani’s text, the structure suggests that Yupanqui is, at the very least, fickle and perhaps distracted by material wealth (Caetano refers to Yupanqui as “simple” twice in the text). Furthermore, to any Catholic reader, the “forty pieces of gold” cannot but invoke Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, and Yupanqui is cast into the role of potential betrayer of his own Madonna and people. Caetano inscribes the hint of problematic materiality in the larger context of the relationship between Europe and the Americas at the very end of his text, saying, “the [Virgin of Copacabana’s] graces should be sought by all, as they are precious, like inestimable treasures, sent by Peru.”72 In the preface to León’s book, notice of the Virgin’s many miracles is “the greatest treasure that the Indies can send to the people of Spain,” while in the dedication to Spanish author Andrés de San Nicolás’s text on the devotion, the image of the Copacabana is a “very precious treasure,” whose veneration will enrich the veteromundanos [Old World elite] who “happily enjoy the gold, silver, and [precious] stones of the Americas.”73 To Europeans, Peru was inextricably associated with the flow of precious metals from her mines, particularly the silver mines at Potosí.74 The influential images in publisher Theodor de Bry’s monumental series on the Americas includes a depiction of Peruvians who “work hard to be goldsmiths” (Figure 8.6). In the engraving, nude and almost nude Peruvians melt, beat, and chase gold. Many of the objects they produce are luxury items, including large elaborate vases, plates, and high-stemmed dishes, while on a high shelf against the back wall, a nude figure, presumably an idol, watches over the workers. Material wealth, artistic skill, and idolatry are thus inextricably mixed. León and San Nicolás clearly put the Virgin above the material riches sent from the Americas. Caetano’s formulation is somewhat weaker: the Virgin’s graces are, at best, on a par with gold and silver. As Caetano has just subtly maligned gilding and gold coins, his comparison suggests that he associated New World objects with unsophisticated materiality and idolatry. There is a final peculiarity to the text: Caetano discusses Yupanqui’s process and the two works he produced entirely in terms of painting.75 Caetano must have known that the Peruvian Virgin was a statue; his most direct source, Francesco Caetani, apparently knew Miguel de Aguirre, and both León 72 73

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Caetano, Le memorie, 83. Rípodas Ardanaz, “Presencia de América,” 76–7. My thanks to Lisandra Estevez for help with this passage. David L. Barquist, “From the Andes to the Amazon: Silver in Colonial South America,” in Journeys to New Worlds: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art in the Roberta and Richard Huber Collection, ed. Suzanne L. Stratton–Pruitt (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2013), 147. Yupanqui is not a capable painter (“non vi era il lui punto di abilità, per la Pittura”), he “painted” (“ne pinse,” “comincio a dipingere”) the images, the locals pretend to not want “an image badly painted by an Indian” (“fingendo non dovere esser posta in quella Chiesa un’Imagine mal dipinta da un’Indiano”). Caetano, Le memorie, 79–83.

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8.6 “In Peru you can even find artful workers of gold,” in Theodor de Bry and Girolamo Benzoni, Das sechste Theil der neuwen Welt. Oder Der historien . . . das dritte Buch, Frankfurt, 1597. Copyright John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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and San Nicolás specify that the original statue was made of the indigenous agave maguey plant.76 Yet Ruggiero Caetano gives no indication that the original was a statue, nor does he convey that information to his Italian audience, who – as Caetano says – were presumably not familiar with the original work. The gilded sculpture made by a Peruvian is thus removed from Caetano’s text about the creation of that very object. Caetano delegitimizes Tito Yupanqui’s work, entirely crediting divine favor for the creation of the miraculous Virgin, and betrays aesthetic biases that undermine the status of the original as a work of art. Caetano’s reworking of the story of the Copacabana Virgin’s creation is analogous to the transformation of the statue’s image in Italy: the earthly author is divorced from the work itself, and the potentially idolatrous polychrome sculpture becomes a doctrinally “safe” painting. An additional Italian pamphlet on the Copacabana, written in Turin by Michele del Salvatore, delves into the prehistory of the devotion and the town of Copacabana. Del Salvatore begins by noting that Copacabana was famous before the arrival of the Spaniards for a temple, “where the Sun [in the form of an idol] was adored as a universal God.”77 The local people sacrificed “animals, children, and young women” to sustain the idol, and “thousands of idolaters” came from the furthest parts of the empire to worship it.78 Since the people of Copacabana lived and worked in such close proximity to the idol, they were particularly given to human sacrifice. Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca (echoing earlier criollo authors) praised Copacabana in a 1672 play as the “Rome of America,” because, like Rome, it had been the place where idolatry reigned most firmly, and yet was where the triumphant Church made her seat, where “faith established her Spanish monarchy.”79 Del Salvatore – with considerable political prudence – calls Copacabana instead the “Athens of errors, centre of superstition.”80 But, like his Spanish sources, Del Salvatore argues that it was precisely for that reason that the Madonna chose to appear there, so that “such a dawn would clear away the shadows from the Indians.”81 Indeed, the language, imagery, and many of the miracles surrounding the Virgin of Copacabana emphasize light and sun; her first miracle was to radiate light, 76 77

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León, Compendio, 20; San Nicolás, Imagen, 37. Michele del Salvatore, Relatione compensiosa, e semplice della Miracolosa Imagine della Beatissima Vergine di Copacavana del Perù, la cui copia anco di gratie risplendente si riverisce nalla Chiesa di San Carlo di Torino de’ MM. RR. PP. Agostiniani Scalzi (Per la Vedova Colonna e Fratelli Boetti, 1692), 7. The attribution to Giovanni Abbiati is offered here for the first time, and is based on stylistic similarities to a print by Abbiati illustrating Guarino Guarini, “S. Maria della Divina Providenza di Lisbona,” Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, E. 1235 V. On the sheet see: https://susanklaiber.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/altered-states-an-early-version-ofguarinis-lisbon-section-plate/ Salvatore, Relatione, 7. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Comedia famosa. La Aurora en Copacabana (Barcelona: n.p., 1785?), 36. León, Compendio, 7. Salvatore, Relatione, 7. 81 Ibid.

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and she was transformed from ugly to beautiful by a miraculous light on entering her church. The painting in Turin (Plate 3) shows the Virgin floating in a shadowy, cloud-filled space, while a gleaming golden moon, candle flame, and daubs of gold on her robe glint in the darkness, suggesting the importance of light to her cult. Furthermore, as with the Roman Copacabana, the Turin Virgin was also disseminated in prints that depict her as flat and floating, temporally and geographically unspecific (Figure 8.7). Like her other Italian counterparts, the Turin Virgin of Copacabana is dematerialized and visionary, worlds away – geographically and conceptually – from the statue that was, theoretically, her progenitor. CONCLUSION

The changes made to the image of the Virgin of Copacabana in Italy could be dismissed as purely aesthetic: superficial alterations arising from differences in taste and sheer distance from the original. However, written sources and the images themselves suggest that the shift in idiom had deeper implications. It attempted to make the cult and its statue palatable to Italian audiences who associated the Spanish Americas with idolatry, and to give her a universalized image that could be embraced far from the Americas. The push to promote the Virgin of Copacabana in Italy was however not, in the long run of several centuries, a success. Most of her images have disappeared from public view, or are known only through prints or written descriptions. The paintings belonging to the Caetani family as well as those in Bologna and “in Tuscany” (as mentioned by San Nicolás) have vanished or are hiding in plain sight.82 The Turin painting was actively venerated until at least the nineteenth century, but today nothing in the church explains the picture to the curious viewer and none of the literature about the church mentions or identifies it.83 In Italy, the Virgin of Copacabana’s foreignness was neutralized and made familiar, her representation subsumed into traditional iconographies like that of the Immaculate Virgin and the visual language of the icon. The transformation of the Copacabana attests to the complexities of an increasingly global Catholic visual culture. Indigenous and criollo Americans could use European forms in new materials and new contexts to express their autonomous worth and equality, as in the case of the Copacabana, which originally stood as a sign of Mary’s divine favor toward the people of Peru. The results of those efforts then served as fodder for the Spanish Crown on the European stage and the 82 83

San Nicolás, Imagen, 8v. Archivio Arcivescovile, Turin. “Inventario delli Arredi Sacri e non sacri In Argenterie, Paramenti, Lingerie, Mobigliare Titoli e Pesi Riguardanti la R[eal]e Chiesa Parrocchiale di S. Carlo Torino 1851.” 82r. In 1851, the Madonna and child were still adorned with silver crowns featuring precious stones, and Mary wore a gold necklace covered in gems.

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8.7 Giovanni Abbiati, Admirabilis Virgo de Cuppacavana, 1692. From Michele da Salvatore, Relatione compendiosa, e semplice della miracolosa imagine della beatissima vergine di Copacavana del Peru . . . Turin, 1692. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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significance of the devotion was altered, so that rather than a triumph for, she became a sign of triumph over the Americas. That triumph was inextricably linked to the political might of the Spanish Crown, which ultimately operated against widespread diffusion of the cult in Italy. In the attempt to universalize the devotion, the Virgin of Copacabana was stripped of her contextual specificity and her very objecthood, and in the process lost the significance that came from her singularity.

CHAPTER NINE

JESUIT MARTYRDOM IMAGERY BETWEEN MEXICO AND ROME Katherine McAllen

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riting from rome in the early seventeenth century, the Father General of the Jesuit Order, Mutio Vitelleschi, described the Jesuit missions of northern New Spain as God’s “new vineyard.” While the Jesuits participated in lucrative agricultural enterprises in the New World, their official focus was centered on the evangelization of indigenous populations, which they described as “abundant harvests.”1 Martyrdom, already a significant element of Counter Reformation spirituality in Europe and an important aspect of Jesuit evangelization, became an omnipresent subject in religious discourses on both sides of the Atlantic when Jesuits were killed in Indian attacks beginning in 1594.2 The Jesuits in colonial Mexico commissioned portraits of their slain members, including eight drawings by an anonymous artist depicting missionaries executed in the Tepehuan Revolt of 1616, and sent This project is dedicated to my husband, James, whose encouragement from the first day of research in Rome made this publication possible. I would also like to thank Tom Cummins, Clara Bargellini, Jennifer Roberts, and most recently, Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey for their invaluable guidance and suggestions. Father General Vitelleschi uses this term, nueva viña, in his 1618 letter from Rome to Mexico City, in Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome (cited hereafter as ARSI), Mex. 2, f. 202r. 1 For this 1604 letter, see ARSI, Mex. 8, 264; For other viticulture metaphors, see Mex. 15, 260v; Mex. 8, 255v. 2 Gonzalo de Tapia was the first Jesuit to be martyred in New Spain in 1594 in present-day Sinaloa. For the biographies of Jesuit martyrs in New Spain, see Francisco Zambrano, Diccionario Biobibliográfico de la Compania (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1961–77), 13:129–64, 10:614–35, 11:156.

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them to Rome via Mexico City (Plates 5–7).3 While the Augustinians promoted the Virgin of Copacabana in Italy, the Jesuits disseminated images of their martyrs from northern New Spain to Rome, transforming how Italian audiences would imagine colonial Mexico as an important theater of Jesuit evangelization abroad. In Rome in 1618, Father General Vitelleschi ordered the drawings of the eight Tepehuan martyrs to be reproduced as paintings on canvas and displayed among other portraits of Jesuit martyrs, so that the missionaries from the Tepehuan Revolt would “always be remembered” (ad futuram rei memoriam).4 Surviving textual accounts reveal religious spaces where the Jesuits could have displayed these images of New Spanish martyrs in Rome. This essay contends that these Jesuit martyrdom portraits from New Spain inspired the creation of new works of art in early seventeenth-century Rome that represented the sacrifices of missionaries in the New World. These portraits would have allowed viewers in both Rome and Mexico City to imagine the New Spanish mission frontier, where the Jesuits, in their emulation of early Church martyrs, negotiated Christian past and present.5 The location of these images in Italy also provided a new visibility for the cult of Mexican martyrs and emphasized the spiritual importance of New Spain in the formation of the Jesuits’ global missionary identity. These martyrdoms enabled the Society to link New Spain spatially and temporally to sites of martyrdom in Europe and the Holy Lands and further promote their evangelization efforts as a continuation of early apostolic Christianity.6 The 1640 Imago Primi Saeculi, for instance, compared the evangelical work of Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier to that of Saints Peter 3

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These drawings were created in pen and ink with chalk on paper, and each of the four folios measures 34.8 cm by 50.5 cm. See ARSI Map Collection, Grandi Formati, Cassetto 12, 17.1–17.4. A special thanks to James McAllen, Jr. for photographing these drawings and to Lorenza Guerra and Diego Guerra for their expert editing. Vitelleschi’s 1618 letter states: “These portraits and the accounts of their martyrdom have been received [in Rome] and read in the refectory with universal consolation by all due to having eight more brothers in heaven. They are painting portraits on canvas to put with the others.” ARSI, Mex. 2, f. 202r–204r. Antonio Astraín transcribed this letter incorrectly in Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la asistencia de España, vol. 6 (Madrid: Razón y fe, 1916), 346, 721; Francisco Zambrano cites Astraín’s incorrect transcription in Diccionario Bio-bibliográfico, 10:635. The Jesuits and Franciscans often used the term “frontier” not as a political border, but as a cultural boundary at the extremities of the viceroyalty, as seen in a 1637 letter describing the missions as “la frontera de otras gentiles.” ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico 1467, Busta 96, Number 5, 8v. Franciscan missionaries also used the term “frontier.” See Archivum Generale O.F.M., Rome, M29, Nueva Vizcaya, Descripción de Nueva Vizcaya, 145v; M62, Zacatecas, 321r. Clara Bargellini also notes how the Jesuits’ own use of the term “frontier” as a distant place has influenced modern historiographies in “At the Center on the Frontier: The Jesuit Tarahumara Missions of New Spain,” in Time and Place: The Geohistory of Art, ed. Thomas da Costa Kaufmann and Elizabeth Pilliod (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 124. Andrés Pérez de Ribas made many references to Jesuit martyrs as historical heirs to early Church martyrs in his History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, trans. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 127, 130, 308. See also John O’Malley, The First Jesuits

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and Paul, the pillars of the early Christian church in Rome.7 Jesuit correspondences between New Spain and Rome in the seventeenth century similarly described New World evangelization efforts as “holy sacrifices” that were “done in the missionary theater of Apostolic work.”8 When martyrdom became an important part of Jesuit discourses, the deaths of missionaries mirrored the sacrifices of Christ and his Apostles.9 Father General Vitelleschi invoked the metaphor of blood watering the seeds of Christendom from the letters of Paul, when he stated that God had ordained beforehand that “His vineyard” of New Spain would be “irrigated with the blood of His Jesuit servants.”10 In 1645, Andrés Pérez de Ribas published his Historia de los triunfos de nuestra santa fé, the first account of the lives of the Jesuits whose evangelization work had culminated in martyrdom. Here, Pérez de Ribas provided detailed accounts of the deaths of Jesuit missionaries in New Spain and connected their sacrifices to those of Christ, the Apostles, and martyrs of the early Christian church.11 As the northern missions became a place of sacred martyrdom, this region became crucial in allowing the Jesuits to link their work in New Spain to both the Apostolic past and other sites of Jesuit martyrdom worldwide.12 Pérez de Ribas’s volume did not contain illustrations; however, the organization of his chapters worked to create a “verbal retablo” presenting detailed accounts of Jesuit martyrs killed in New Spain. The Society’s production of martyrdom portraits after the 1616 Tepehuan Revolt allowed images, as well as texts, to play a key role in what Maureen Ahern calls the Jesuits’ “social construction of the northern frontier.”13 Given that these likenesses were created at the request of the Jesuits in Rome, it is clear that the order sought to visualize martyrdom in the New

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(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 371–2; Maria Cristina Oswald, “Goa and Jesuit Cult and Iconography before 1622,” Archivum Historicum Societatus Iesu 74 (2005): 160–4. Lydia Salviucci Insolera, L’imago primi saeculi e il significato dell’immagine allegorica nella Compagnia de Iesu (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2004). The Father General’s letters from Rome to Jesuits abroad identify contemporary Jesuits as the historical heirs of Christ’s Apostles in ARSI, Mex. 2, f. 193v, 204r, 210r, and 253v. See also missionaries’ annual reports from New Spain to Rome using terms such as this in ARSI, Mex. 15, f. 261r. Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 532. ARSI, Mex. 2, 202r. Many seventeenth-century writers incorporated this reference to establish a parallel between early Christian and contemporary martyrdoms. See Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 128. Pérez de Ribas compares Gonzalo de Tapia with Saint Paul when he describes the dead arm of the first Jesuit martyr in New Spain miraculously making the sign of the cross similar to the severed head of Paul miraculously speaking, in History of the Triumphs, 55. Pérez de Ribas equates the martyrdom of Julio Pascual and Manuel Martínez in New Spain to the deaths of Jesuit martyrs worldwide, in History of the Triumphs, 323. Maureen Ahern notes clear hagiographic parallels in Pérez de Ribas’s account with histories of Iberian martyrs on imperial Roman frontiers, among them Saints Lawrence and Vincent, in “Visual and Verbal Sites: The Construction of Jesuit Martyrdom in Northwest New Spain, in Andrés Pérez de Ribas’s Historia (1645),” Colonial Latin American Review 8 (1999): 19. Ahern, “Visual and Verbal Sites,” 8, 21.

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World and, in turn, to promote the importance of Jesuit missions in New Spain. In this way, martyrdom portraits became important visual images integrated into Jesuit devotions to promote evangelization for audiences in both Italy and New Spain. The Tepehuan Revolt began with an uprising on November 16, 1616 in the region on the western slopes of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range (in the present-day state of Durango, Mexico), where the Jesuits had established missions in Santiago de Papasquiaro, Santa Catarina, and El Zape. In 1616, the indigenous leaders, many of whom who were baptized Christians, encouraged their fellow Tepehuanes to revolt and kill or expel all Spanish colonizers, especially the missionaries. In a series of coordinated attacks on multiple missions between November 16 and 18, the Tepehuanes killed eight Jesuits, two mendicant priests, and hundreds of European and criollo settlers.14 Following this revolt near the missions of Santa Caterina, Santiago Papasquiaro, El Zape, and Tenerapa, Jesuit leaders brought the bodies of the eight Jesuit martyrs to the Jesuit College in Durango. Their remains were preserved and transferred to Mexico City to become part of the cult of Jesuit martyrs.15 At this time between 1616 and 1617, an unknown artist completed these eight portraits of the martyrs. These drawings of the Tepehuan martyrs are some of the earliest known New Spanish martyrdom images produced by the Jesuits. Textual evidence reveals they were used as preparatory studies for paintings in both New Spain and Rome.16 Each of the four large folios depicts two bust-length portraits of individual martyrs situated alone in the foreground with no landscape or interior represented in the background (see Plates 5–6).17 Variances in each drawing, such as the different vantage points depicting each missionary and contrasting styles of modeling three-dimensional facial features, suggest either that a single artist produced these eight portraits at different times or that multiple artists could have collaborated on the project when the bodies of the eight Tepehuan martyrs were 14

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Gerardo Decorme, Mártires Jesuitas de la Provincia de México (Guadalajara: Editorial Acevez, 1957), 46 and 51. One Jesuit missionary, Andrés López, survived the Tepehuan Revolt, and one Franciscan missionary, Pedro Gutierrez, died in the attacks. See Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 607. For Jesuit correspondences describing sending these remains, various textual accounts, and the portraits of these martyrs from Durango to Mexico City and then to Rome in 1617, see ARSI, Mex. 17, f. 86r–125v and 133v–189r. While a larger number of Franciscan martyrdom paintings survive, they date closer to the 1650s and into the eighteenth century. The survival of these eight Jesuit portraits reveal the Society produced works as early as 1617, but the larger corpus of Jesuit martyrdom images is less well known, likely due to the order’s expulsion in 1767. For Franciscan martyrs, see Antonio Rubial and María Teresa Suárez Molina, “Mártires y predicadores: la conquista de las fronteras y su representación plástica,” in De la patria criolla a la nación mexicana, 1750–1860, ed. Jaime Solar Frost (Mexico: Museo Nacional de Arte, 2000), 52. The eight missionaries in these drawings are: Diego de Orozco, Bernardo de Cisneros, Gerónimo de Moranta, Juan del Fonte, Luis de Alaves, Juan del Valle, Fernando de Santarén, and Hernando de Tovar.

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recovered at different times.18 Some corpses were mutilated or decapitated, so the artist(s) may have had to rely on memory or previous sketches of these missionaries to complete the portraits. The drawings were made in pen and ink on paper, using colored chalk to render flesh tones over the facial areas. Finally, dramatic redpainted highlights were added to depict bleeding from wounds inflicted by spears, axes, arrows, and other instruments. Fernando de Santarén, a Spaniard who reportedly spoke eleven languages, baptized more than 24,000 Indians, and erected fifty chapels in the north, is depicted wounded by two arrows, stabbed by a macana (flattened wooden club with a sharp point), and also bleeding from a large laceration in his head (Plate 6).19 Other Jesuits, such as Bernardo de Cisneros and Diego de Orozco, were killed while seeking refuge with other lay Christians during the attack at their mission church of Santiago Papasquiaro.20 Father Orozco, a Spanish Jesuit who was shot by arrows and finally killed by an axe to the chest, is depicted bleeding from these weapons as he gazes upward toward heaven (Plate 5). Father Cisneros, also a Castilian Spaniard, was stabbed by a lance through the chest and killed by a blow to the head by a macana.21 He is depicted in the surplice and robes he would have worn to deliver the Eucharist or perform baptisms, and he bleeds at his head and through his chest. These bust-length portraits served to document individual Jesuit identities, which would have been relevant for beatification inquiries that were begun as early as 1617.22 Yet the artists’ close attention to rendering the martyrs’ bleeding wounds and their detailed likenesses suggests that images such as those of Gerónimo de Moranta and Juan del Fonte may have also served devotional purposes (Plate 7). Jesuit viewers of these martyrdom portraits would have been familiar with Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, in which he instructed his readers to conjure vivid mental images of Christ and other religious subjects as a tool for devotion.23 Ignatius of Loyola often encouraged participants of the Spiritual Exercises to imagine a work of art depicting a specific devotion. As Jeffrey Chipps Smith observes, for Ignatius, “the visual image had to prompt remembrance” and bring the events of the biblical past into the present imagination of 18

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Jesuit accounts describe the bodies being retrieved in various locations at different dates; see ARSI, Mex. 17, f. 145r–189r. See Decorme, Mártires Jesuitas, 52–3. According to Pérez de Ribas, the rebellious Tepehuans offered peace to the missionaries and Spaniards seeking refuge in the church. When they exited carrying the monstrance in a solemn procession, the Indians knelt pretending to worship it and followed the procession to the cemetery nearby, where they attacked and killed the two missionaries and disarmed Spaniards. See Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 602. Ibid., 603. Charles E. O’Neill and Joaquín Ma. Domínguez, eds. Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús: Biográfico-temático (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2001), 3:2537. In the first week, first exercise, and first prelude (Number 47), Ignatius describes creating a “mental representation,” or visualization of biblical events, such as the Annunciation (Numbers 102–3) and the Nativity of Christ (Numbers 112 and 114), see Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, trans. Louis J. Puhl, S.J. (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 21, 41, 43.

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the contemporary viewer.24 Ignatius built on the ideas of mnemonic theoreticians such as Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, who encouraged creating extremely vivid mental pictures as an aid to memory.25 The startlingly graphic nature of these bloody Jesuit portraits may have served to inspire similar personal spiritual contemplation or action through a remembrance of these images. Just as Ignatius urged his reader to empathize with Christ’s suffering, by imagining a mental image of Him, so too could these portraits have functioned as cues to recall the sacred nature of these events. Emphasizing the gruesome character of these missionaries’ deaths could have helped Jesuit and lay audiences apply Ignatian mnemonic devices to make themselves present at these martyrdoms.26 With their display in Jesuit churches and residences, these portraits would transform religious culture on both sides of the Atlantic and encourage viewers to forge imaginative connections between the Old World and the New. LOCALIZED DEVOTIONS TO MARTYRDOM IN NORTHERN NEW SPAIN

In colonial Mexico, images that the Jesuits commissioned for display in their churches operated to help audiences imagine martyrs who died in Rome and other locations in Europe. On the missions, the Jesuits constructed chapels dedicated to early Christian and Jesuit martyrs, as in their rebuilding of their church of San Ignacio in the 1670s at Santa María de las Parras, in present-day Coahuila, Mexico.27 Jesuit inventories and surviving artworks reveal that paintings depicting the early Christian Roman martyr San Sebastián and the fourteenth-century Czech martyr San Juan Nepomuceno, were displayed in this chapel (Figure 9.1).28 From the pulpit in Parras, Jesuit orators highlighted the sacrifices of early Christian and Jesuit martyrs in their sermons and referred 24

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Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 36, 38. Ibid., 38; Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 115–27; Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 62–4. See also Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 4, 17. Ignatius uses the phrase “see the place” frequently when he encourages the reader to imagine being present at moments in Christ’s life, including the Passion and Crucifixion in the Third Week, Second Contemplation, First and Second Day (Numbers 202–8). See Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, 63–7. The Jesuits built this chapel and others in the 1670s and decorated them with paintings imported from Mexico City. Katherine McAllen, “Rethinking Frontier Paradigms in Northeastern New Spain: Jesuit Mission Art at Santa María de las Parras, 1598–1767,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2012, 69–115; Sergio Antonio Corona Páez, La vitivinicultura en el pueblo de Santa María de las Parras (Torreón: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2004), 46. AGN, Temporalidades 64, f. 74v. The 1742 painting San Juan Nepomuceno is signed and dated by prominent artist Francisco Martínez. See Clara Bargellini and Michael Komanecky, The Arts of the Missions of Northern New Spain (Mexico City: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2009), 258; McAllen, “Rethinking Frontier Paradigms in Northeastern New Spain,” 280.

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9.1 Francisco Martínez, The Martyrdom of San Sebastián, Colección de pintura religiosa de la Universidad Iberoamericana Torreón, Coahuila, Mexico, 1742. Courtesy of the Universidad Iberoamericana, Torreón.

to specific paintings hanging in San Ignacio to engage their audiences with the artworks around them.29 This practice of making works of art active agents in 29

For a detailed analysis and transcription of these sermons that highlight the torments of Jesuit and early Christian martyrs, see McAllen, “Rethinking Frontier Paradigms in Northeastern New Spain,” 79 and Appendix A. See also AGN, Mexico City, Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, vol. 972, Expediente 1B.

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the relationship between word and image helped the Jesuits connect New Spain to sacred sites of martyrdom in Rome, Bohemia, and beyond.30 The eight drawings of Jesuit martyrs sent to Rome in 1617 also inspired the creation of paintings in Mexico City and in northern New Spain. Even as late as 1749, the Jesuits commissioned a painting depicting Tepehuan martyr Fernando de Santarén from Miguel Cabrera for their mission church of Santiago Papasquiaro in the present-day state of Durango (Figure 9.2).31 This Baroque painting presents an idealized Father Santarén as a youthful missionary looking up toward a celestial light, seemingly unaffected by the arrows piercing his body. Cabrera depicts this Jesuit missionary pierced by arrows, as he is shown in the original hand-drawn portrait sent to Rome in 1617. Yet he omits such macabre details as Santarén bleeding on his head and throughout his torso (see Plate 6). This stylistic difference has led scholars to assert that Cabrera did not use as his model the likeness of Santarén from the drawings sent to Rome nearly 130 years before he executed his painting.32 While this observation is plausible given the stylistic variances between the two works, both images of Cabrera’s painting and the drawing in Rome represent the missionary pierced with arrows. No existing textual account of Santarén’s martyrdom mentions this method of execution.33 Significant here is that Cabrera could have consulted paintings of these drawings after the originals were sent to Rome, pointing to a dynamic exchange of these images between Italy and New Spain. Inventories of the Jesuits’ professed house and church in Mexico City, known as La Profesa, identify specific portraits of Jesuit martyrs, including a painting of Tepehuan martyr Hernando de Tovar identified as a “copy.”34 These now-lost paintings in La Profesa may have directly inspired Cabrera to depict Santarén pierced by arrows, based on the original drawings sent to Rome in 1617. This painting, which the Jesuits commissioned for the mission church in Papasquiaro where the Revolt occurred, ultimately functioned to memorialize an important local event. Yet even though Cabrera painted this portrait for export to the northern missions, its production in Mexico City was linked to the Jesuits’ transatlantic movement of artworks from Mexico City to Rome. 30

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In these sermons, Jesuit preachers describe specific paintings located in chapels nearby, using phrases such as “the paintings show this.” See McAllen, “Rethinking Frontier Paradigms in Northeastern New Spain,” 80. This painting today hangs in the sacristy of the church in Papasquiaro where Santarén was martyred. Isabel Del Río Delmotte, “Santos mártires jesuitas en el arte novohispano” (MA thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2009); Bargellini and Komanecky, Arts of the Missions, 248. Pérez de Ribas, for example, recounts that Padre Santarén was killed by repeated blows to the head, but does not mention him being wounded by arrows in History of the Triumphs, 606–7. AGN, Temporalidades, vol. 147, f. 78v–79r.

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9.2 Miguel Cabrera, The Martyrdom of Fernando de Santarén, La Parroquia de Santiago Apóstol. Santiago Papasquiaro, Durango, Mexico. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1749. Reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

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Mexico City was the central hub for the Jesuits as the original embarkation point for missionary work and headquarters for communication with Europe. Beginning with the death in 1594 of Gonzalo de Tapia, the first Jesuit to be martyred in northern New Spain, the Jesuits concentrated on collecting the relics of their martyrs in the viceregal capital and displaying them next to miraculous objects brought from Europe.35 Jesuit superiors ordered the transfer of martyrs’ sacred remains to Mexico City and buried them beneath the altars of the Jesuit church at the Colegio Máximo de San Pedro y Pablo to affirm the importance of their own cult of martyrs in the viceregal capital. In his 1654 Corónica y historia religiosa de la Provincia de la Compañía de Jesús en México, Andrés Pérez de Ribas noted that the bones of eleven New Spanish martyrs were displayed within a retablo in the church of San Pedro y Pablo.36 The remains of these New Spanish martyrs were housed next to the relics of European saints, a piece of the Shroud of Turin, and a remnant of the True Cross brought from Italy.37 At the church of La Profesa in the viceregal capital, the Jesuits presented three sculptures of their own martyrs who died in 1597 in Nagasaki, Japan, in the decoration program of the church’s retablo mayor (high altar).38 The Jesuits’ residence at La Profesa also became an important location for displaying images of New Spanish martyrs in Mexico City to affirm the order’s global missionary identity, an idea that would have important resonance on both sides of the Atlantic. Textual descriptions relate that portraits of ten New Spanish martyrs from the missions, including Father Tovar from the Tepehuan Revolt, were displayed at the foot of the staircase in the main hallway of the professed house.39 While these paintings no longer exist, a 1768 inventory allows us to reconstruct the placement of these canvases next to four maps of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. In the intersecting hallway running north to south, twenty-three paintings of Jesuit martyrs hung on one wall, and the facing wall was covered with twenty-six portraits of the Society’s martyrs from around the world.40 This inventory describes rooms opening onto these hallways that 35

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For example, Jesuit superiors requested the heads of martyrs Julián Pascual and Manuel Martínez be carried to Mexico City. Others such as Hernando de Tovar were inspired to become missionaries after viewing the remains of Gonzalo de Tapia. See Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 266, 531. Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Corónica y historia religiosa de la provincia de la Compañía de Jesús en México (Mexico: Imprenta del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, 1986), 1:262–3. Ahern, “Visual and Verbal Sites,” 28; Pérez de Ribas, Corónica y historia religiosa, 262. The Society placed their own martyrs Pablo Miki, Diego Kisai, and Juan de Gotoo, who were beatified in 1627, opposite the Virgin and saints. See Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, “El retablo de la Profesa y su efímera transfiguración en 1672,” in Los discursos sobre el arte. XV Coloquio internacional de historial del arte, ed. Juana Gutierrez Haces (Mexico City: UNAM-IIE, 1995), 91–106; Aguilar Álvarez, “Los retablos de la Profesa” (MA thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998). The Jesuits also incorporated images of these Japanese martyrs at the novitiate church in Tepotzotlán. See María del Consuelo Maquívar, Los retablos de Tepotzotlán (Mexico: INAH, 1976), 27. See the 1768 inventory in AGN, Temporalidades, vol. 147, Exp. 1, f. 78v–79r. Ibid., vol. 147, Exp. 1, f. 83v–84r.

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displayed large works of art, such as the monumental allegorical painting of The Jesuits Worshipping the Name of Jesus from the mid-eighteenth century and the now-lost painting Saint Ignatius Showing the Name of Jesus to the Four Parts of the World.41 These written descriptions allow us to visualize Jesuits of that time walking through these halls and contemplating the sacrifices of their New Spanish martyrs and the universal apostolic efforts of the order. With these paintings at La Profesa that depicted the order’s canonized saints next to New Spanish martyrs, the Jesuits consciously created global links between their local evangelization efforts and the order’s international missionary identity. MEXICAN MARTYRS IN ROME

These New Spanish Jesuits also joined the international cult of martyrs in Rome, as the frequent travel of members of the Society brought the northern missionary theater to audiences across the Atlantic. Documents kept by the order reveal the Jesuits traveled regularly between New Spain and Italy, often moving between missions, residences, and colleges every three to five years.42 This coordinated circulation of Jesuits, which was dictated from the Father General at the order’s headquarters in Rome, enabled the Jesuits in New Spain to become important agents for the global circulation of texts and images.43 At the same time that the New Spanish martyrs’ sacred remains were being transferred to Mexico City and their images carefully presented in Jesuit churches and residences in New Spain, texts documenting the deaths of these Mexican missionaries were being transported to early modern Italy. When news arrived in Rome as early as 1594 recounting the events of Father Gonzalo de Tapia’s death in New Spain, martyrdom was already the focus of Jesuit attention in Rome. Textual accounts and portraits of martyrs functioned as important tools to “re-form Catholic identity” after the Protestant split from the Roman Church.44 Secular and religious audiences were poised to recognize images

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This painting is identified as “The Painting of the Name of Christ.” AGN, Temporalidades, vol. 147, Exp. 1, f. 81v. See also Bargellini and Komanecky, Arts of the Missions, 294. The ARSI documents known as the Catalogi Triennales et Breves locate every Jesuit priest, novice, and lay brother throughout the world and provide important evidence of the Jesuits’ frequent circulation of their members. See, for example, the frequent travels of the Oaxacaborn Jesuit Francisco de Arista in ARSI, Mex. 4, f. 53v, 84r, 167r, 179r, and f.427; ARSI, Mex. 2, f.201r; ARSI, Mex. 17, f.82r. For more on this subject of frequent travel, see McAllen, “Rethinking Frontier Paradigms in Northeastern New Spain,” 116, 120–1, and Appendix B. Luisa Elena Alcalá has also studied documents detailing how Jesuit procurators traveled fluidly between Europe and New Spain in “The Jesuits and the Visual Arts in New Spain, 1670–1767,” PhD dissertation, New York University, 1998, 126–71. As Clara Bargellini has noted, the Jesuits established cultural links between their viceroyalties and Europe by creating a “web of artistic relations,” in “At the center on the frontier,” 116. Jeffrey Chipps Smith uses this phrase in reference to Jesuit efforts to rebuild Catholic culture through reform, education, and a return to orthodoxy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Sensuous Worship, 7.

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of martyrdom abroad as a legitimization of the Catholic faith that was being challenged in England and other regions of Protestant Europe.45 In Rome, Father General Mutio Vitelleschi read aloud the accounts of Jesuit martyrs from the 1616 Tepehuan Revolt for all to hear in the refectory of the Jesuit Curia house.46 Father Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, in his handwritten compendium of lives of Jesuit missionaries, also described his practice of reading aloud to fellow Jesuits in the refectory during mealtimes. Nieremberg included accounts of the New Spanish martyrs, which were read to all members of the house, who sat in silence and reflected on these narrations.47 Louis Richeôme depicted an image of this scene in the refectory of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale in Rome in his 1611 devotional treatise La peinture spirituelle (Figure 9.3).48 The engraving depicts a Jesuit in an elevated pulpit on the wall reading to the novices at Sant’Andrea while they eat and listen.49 Just as the Father General described reading aloud martyrdom accounts from New Spain in the refectory of the Curia house in Rome, this print depicts the Jesuits participating in similar practices in the novitiate of Sant’Andrea. In Book Three, Richeôme instructs the readers how to contemplate what they have heard at mealtimes in the next space of the novitiate, the Recreation Room: “Every day after the meal you have some appropriate recreation [here], speaking of what you have heard while eating, or [discussing] the stories that are couched in the paint of the paintings spread about the walls [in this room].”50 In this practice of listening to oral accounts of Mexican martyrs told together with stories of evangelization around the world, Roman Jesuits were connected to their fellow members in New Spain and abroad, thus creating a global network in Rome through the recitation of Jesuit testimonies. In addition to the narratives that were circulated orally in Jesuit refectories in Italy, members of the order acquired a substantial amount of written documentation detailing these events of New Spanish martyrdoms in Rome. The records sent from Mexico City to Rome range from official testimonies and correspondences to personal devotional treatises on the subject. In 1616, for example, at the request of the Father General in Rome and the bishop of 45 47

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ARSI, Mex. 16, Folio 137–150. 46 ARSI, Mex. 2, f. 204r. For accounts of the martyrdoms of Gonzalo de Tapia and Tomas Basilio from the Province of Mexico, see Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Glorias del Segundo siglo de la Compañía de Jesús dibujadas en las vidas y elogios de algunos de sus varones ilustres en virtud, letras, y zelo de las almas, que han florecido desde el año 1640, trans. Padre Joseph Cassani, S.J. (Madrid: n.p., 1734), 2 and 8:130. This manuscript is located in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid (BNM), Signatura 20139. This engraving is the frontispiece of Book Two in Louis Richeôme, La peinture spirituelle (Lyon: Chez Pierre Rigaud, 1611), 64. Richeôme uses this phrase in his Sommere des Livres in the beginning pages of La peinture spirituelle. “Tous les iours apres le repas vous estes une petite heure, pour une honneste recreation, deuisant de ce que vous auez ouy durant le manger: ou des histoires, qui sont couchées en la peincture des Tableaux estalez en ces parois en grand nombre.” See Richeôme, La peinture spirituelle, f.153. I would like to thank Greg Landel for his expertise and generous guidance in the proper translation of Richeôme’s ideas.

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9.3 Frontispiece to Book Two in Louis Richeôme, La peinture spirituelle, Lyon, 1611. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Durango in New Spain, Jesuit superiors in Mexico City collected the testimonies of Jesuit companions, missionaries from other orders, and Indian witnesses to authenticate the events of the Tepehuan martyrs.51 Apart from the official accounts sent to Jesuit superiors in Rome, small, unpublished texts circulated for everyday devotion and contemplation for Jesuit and lay readers to learn about martyrs abroad. For example, Giuseppe de Monteis’s 1630 Martyrologium Societatis Gesu Beatis Martyribus was one such handwritten compendium that listed Jesuit martyrs chronologically.52 Monteis identifies Father Gonzalo de Tapia in “Mexico” as the 55th martyr to die for the Society, and the Tepehuan martyrs make up the 130th through the 137th martyrs. Jesuits of all ranks in Rome could have read texts such as these that included information about New Spain. Martyrdom would have resonated with the personal piety of each Jesuit, even those who were not granted missionary vocations abroad. The taking of vows was known as a “white martyrdom,” when all religious were required to forsake their legal standing, personal rights, and worldly possessions to enter the priesthood.53 Actual martyrdom was therefore the physical culmination of the Jesuit mission, not something extraneous to it, as all had experienced becoming “dead to the world” upon entering the religious life of the Society. In all these ways, written accounts that the Jesuits either read or presented aloud enabled their audiences in Europe to imagine these sacred sites of martyrdom and stay connected with missionary frontiers abroad. In their letters to the Father General, many Jesuits would demonstrate that they followed the accounts of the lives of their fellow missionaries living in New Spain and sought to emulate their continuation of the Jesuit apostolic mission.54 Personal correspondences reveal that Jesuits in Europe made frequent requests to be sent abroad as missionaries and focused on preparing themselves intellectually and spiritually for these duties. Many of the Jesuits who would later become martyrs themselves sought to follow the sacrifices of Christ and his Apostles even before they departed from Europe. The Indepetae letters, or Jesuit requests to the Father General in Rome for deployment to missions in the Americas, India, 51

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These documents, prepared in the north in Durango and then sent to the Father Provincial in Mexico City for dissemination to Rome, were generated as part of canonization inquiries that Father General Mutio Vitelleschi initiated in 1619. None of the New Spanish martyrs were beatified or canonized. See ARSI, Mex. 17, f. 133r–189r and 257r. See also Decorme, Mártires Jesuitas, 54. See Giuseppe de Monteis, S.J., Martyrologium Societatis Gesu Beatis Martyribus (Rome, n.p., 1630) in Biblioteca Nazionale Rome (BNR), Fondo Gesuitico 1259, f. 33 and 65. I am grateful to Mary Moorman for her insight related to this topic. For more on the early Christian writings of Tertullian’s Scorpiace and martyrdom as a “second baptism” for all priests and the Christian community to embrace as a possible fate, see Timothy David Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 11, 163–7, and 174–5; Robert D. Sider, ed. Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire: The Witness of Tertullian (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001). Jesuits mention reading and listening to accounts of missionary life in the refectory. ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico 749, Epistolae Indipetae, number 355, September 9, 1691, f. 376.

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Africa, and Asia, provide important firsthand insight into the motivations of these early modern Europeans seeking transport to distant missionary fields.55 One of the Jesuits who died in the 1616 Tepehuan Revolt, Geronimo de Moranta, wrote to the Father General in Rome from Spain in 1599 requesting permission to depart for missionary work in colonial Mexico. When asking for deployment to the New Spanish missions, Moranta connected his future missionary work abroad with the early Christian apostolic past and the Jesuits’ global evangelization mission.56 Moranta expressed his desire to imitate Christ and other Jesuit martyrs abroad, stating, “I entered the order to be like Christ and give my blood for the salvation of the Indians.”57 Sicilian Jesuit Francisco Xavier de Saeta, who was martyred in 1695 in Caborca (present-day Sonora, Mexico), recalled hearing accounts of evangelization and martyrdom read aloud in the refectory of his Jesuit house in Palermo, Sicily, which catalyzed his multiple requests to the Father General for permission to depart for missionary work in colonial Mexico.58 Letters such as these that arrived in Rome from different cities throughout Europe helped promote New Spain as a sacred site of martyrdom by Jesuits who had not yet traveled to the Americas. These Indepetae letters must have played an important role in motivating the Father General in Rome to support the missions in New Spain by sending Jesuits who were poised to accept the possibility of martyrdom. In this process of communication that laid the groundwork for evangelization in New Spain, the Jesuits were able to maintain important ties between Italy and colonial Mexico and further solidify their international mission identity. JESUIT MARTYRDOM IMAGERY IN EARLY MODERN ROME

In Rome, the Jesuits also connected their contemporary Catholic piety to the sacrifices of martyrs. Martyrdom was inextricably linked to the Jesuit mission to 55

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For example, Tepehuan martyr Fernando de Santarén wrote to Father General Aquaviva in 1587 asking to go wherever in the world he wished to send him, “to die for God if He wills it.” ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico 758, Epistolae Indipetae vol. 28, number 71. Father Moranta was the nephew of Gerónimo Nadal and had many friends in prominent church positions, including the confessor of the queen of Spain, Father Ricardo Haller. According to Pérez de Ribas, Haller wrote to Moranta in New Spain, often discussing his possible martyrdom. See History of the Triumphs, 647. For Moranta’s imitation of Christ and the Apostolic mission, see 307–8. For Geronimo de Moranta’s letter, see ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico 758, Epistolae Indipetae vol. 28, number 227. For letters from Francisco Xavier de Saeta to the Father General requesting permission from the Father General in Rome to go to the New Spanish missions, see ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico 748, Epistolae Indipetae, number 422 (December 10, 1682); Fondo Gesuitico 749, Epistolae Indipetae, nos. 114 (September 19, 1687), 324 (January 5, 1691), 355 (September 9, 1691), 365 (September 19, 1691), and 431. See also Ernest Burrus, Kino’s Biography of Francisco Xavier Saeta, S.J., trans. Charles Polzer (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1971), 331–7.

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convert pagans and support papal efforts against heresy. The Jesuits decorated many of their church interiors in Rome with martyrdom cycles between 1565 and 1610 to combat the heresy of Protestantism and paganism and promote the order’s global missionary identity.59 In the years surrounding the consecration of the Gesù in 1584, the first two chapels Roman audiences encountered upon entering the church were dedicated to the early Christian martyr Saint Andrew and the two most important Roman martyrs, the Apostles Peter and Paul.60 In their seminaries in Rome founded in the late sixteenth century, the Jesuits also commissioned didactic decoration programs venerating contemporary Jesuit martyrs and early Christian saints. Fresco cycles from 1582 in the Jesuits’ English college of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the Hungarian college of Santo Stefano Rotondo, and the German College of Sant’Apollinare functioned to inspire young Jesuitsin-training and provide a triumphal response to the Protestant persecution of Catholics and the questioning of the legitimacy of its martyrs.61 The Jesuits commissioned these martyrdom cycles in the national seminary churches that Pope Gregory XIII gave to the Jesuits to combat heresy abroad.62 For novices in training and professed Jesuits seeking missionary work abroad, the images of these martyrs functioned to provide viewers with contemporary and early Christian martyrs whose ministries culminated in the ultimate sacrifice. The eight drawings of the New Spanish martyrs from the Tepehuan Revolt arrived in Rome in 1618 amid this Counter Reformation spiritual milieu, where contemporary Jesuit martyrs were venerated as exemplars of Catholic orthodoxy and the order’s global evangelization mission. In the novitiate of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, portraits of Jesuit martyrs who died on missions abroad in Asia, India, and Brazil functioned as important images to inspire novices and affirm the

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Gauvin Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 45; Luigi Lotti and Pier Luigi Lotti, La comunità cattolica inglese di Roma: La sua chiesa e il suogo collegio (Rome: Alma Roma, 1978), 125–8; Thomas M. Lucas, ed., Saint, Site, and Sacred Strategy: Ignatius, Rome, and Jesuit Urbanism (Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1990), 186–91. The chapel of Saint Andrew contained paintings of early Christian martyrs Saints Andrew, Stephen, Lawrence, Catherine, and Agnes, martyred bishops, and a ceiling fresco depicting Mary as Queen of Martyrs. See Howard Hibbard, “‘Ut pictorae sermones’: The First Painted Decorations of the Gesú,” in Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution, ed. Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffe (New York: Fordham University, 1972), 35. The Jesuits commissioned Niccolò Circignani, known as “Il Pomarancio,” to paint a cycle of Jesuit martyrs executed in England in St. Thomas of Canterbury. While paintings by Niccolò Circignani for St. Thomas of Canterbury and Sant’Apollinare are both lost, Circignani’s frescoes of thirty early Christian martyrs in Santo Stefano Rotondo survive today. Giovanni Battista Cavallieri produced a series of engravings of these now lost fresco cycles at St. Thomas in Ecclesiae anglicanae trophaea (Rome: Ex Officina Bartholomaei Grassi, 1584) and at Sant’Apollinare in Beati Apollinaris martyris primi Ravennatum epi res gestae prout Romae (Rome: Ex Officina Bartholomaei Grassi, 1586). See also Lucas, Saint, Site, and Sacred Strategy, 186–8; Hibbard, “Ut Pictora sermons,” 30–1. Thomas Buser, “Jerome Nadal and Early Jesuit Art in Rome,” Art Bulletin 58 (1976), 427–9.

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international focus of Jesuit mission enterprises.63 These works of art are now lost, but French Jesuit Louis Richeôme’s ekphrastic description of the paintings in the novitiate on the Quirinal Hill provides an excellent description of how these images may have fit into the original decoration of the church and residence.64 In his textual tour of the paintings in both the churches of Sant’Andrea and San Vitale, Richeôme describes each painting hanging on the walls of the sanctuary, refectory, and recreation rooms of the novitiate. Apart from his obvious use of Ignatian and Nadalian philosophies that merged pictures and mental images as a strategy for religious devotion, Richeôme explains his reasons for providing such meticulous detail of the paintings in his treatise. Encouraging readers outside of Rome to experience the decoration programs of Sant’Andrea, he states: “If your brothers, who are outside of Rome living spread out on other parts of the world . . . want to see the paintings in this house, open the doors of your devotions and let them freely take part as brothers.”65 Just as Jesuit works of art produced at this time presented connections between martyrs worldwide, Richeôme too referred to Jesuit missionaries or novices in training abroad in this passage to communicate the order’s global evangelization message. Describing the Sala di Ricreazione (Recreation Room) in Book Three, Richeôme identified each of the 102 paintings of Jesuit martyrs from locations worldwide that hung in this space.66 These portraits in Sant’Andrea al Quirinale included two large canvases depicting Jesuit missionaries killed at sea on their way to Brazil; the five martyrs slain in Salsette, India, who included Rudolfo Aquaviva, the nephew of Jesuit Father General Claudio Aquaviva; the Nagasaki martyrs executed in Japan; and the martyrdom of Abraham George in Ethiopia.67 Next to these portraits, Richeôme identifies a painting of Gonzalo de Tapia, who he notes was killed in Mexico.68 Above these paintings ran a broad painted cornice, which he called a “celestial zone,” that also depicted other martyrs of the order, “each with his angel bearing a palm and a crown, in 63

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Jennifer Selwyn, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2004), 4, 117–18. Drawing from Nadal’s Evangelicae Historiae Imagines and other Jesuits treatises, Richeôme keyed images to letters and texts, as seen in the frontispieces to Book Six and Book Seven. See Richeôme, La peinture spirituelle, f. 472 and 672. “Et si vos freres qui sont hors de Rome viuants espars és autres lieux de l’Vniuers, & les autres Chrestiens qui vous font tous freres en ce nom, veulent voir ces tableaux extraicts de vostre maison, ouurez leur la porte de vos devotions, & laissez les liberalment en en prendre leur part comme frères,” Richeôme, La peinture spirituelle, Epistre av R.P. Le Pere Octavian Navarola. Richeôme states in various parts of his ekphrastic descriptions, “I want you to contemplate the details of the painting.” See Richeôme, La peinture spirituelle, f. 6–7, 14. Father General Aquaviva requested for an arm of his nephew to be sent to the Curia in Rome in 1600, and the other arm was sent to the Jesuit College in Naples, where the Aquaviva family originated. Les Tableaux, qui suiuent, vous enseignent Iean Corneille, Anglois & Gonzaluus de Papia, Espagnol tuëz l’an 1594. Celuy là en Angleterre, cetuy-cj au Mexique. See Richeôme, La peinture spirituelle, f.153 (falls between f. 233 and 235; misnumbered).

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honor of his victory.”69 In this church where the Jesuits displayed the cult of Mexican martyrs among their other missionaries, New Spain was included as a sacred site of martyrdom for audiences in Rome. These paintings in the Recreation Room at Sant’Andrea helped Jesuit viewers conjure vivid mental images of these martyrdoms and even imagine being present at these disparate missionary locations worldwide.70 Themes of martyrdom also inspired the decoration program in the sacristy at the nearby fifth-century church of San Vitale, which was also part of the novitiate complex. The Jesuits renovated San Vitale when Pope Clement VIII assigned it to the care of the Society in 1595. During these renovations, the Society commissioned the now-lost facade frescoes depicting instruments of torture and martyrdom, which can be seen in Richeôme’s image of the Jesuit gardens in La peinture spirituelle.71 In text and image, Richeôme depicts the Jesuits in San Vitale giving sermons, speaking to foreign visitors in their native languages, hearing confessions, and providing food for the poor, while their audiences were able to contemplate works of art depicting themes of martyrdom.72 These works of art and their written descriptions would also have helped Jesuit novices in training on the Quirinal Hill understand their important role in the order’s evangelization mission worldwide. As noted earlier, in his 1618 letter Father General Vitelleschi mentions that the eight drawings depicting the Tepehuan martyrs were to be reproduced on canvas in Rome to accompany other images, which were most likely portraits of other slain Jesuits.73 While it is not known where the Jesuits permanently displayed these paintings of the Tepehuan martyrs once they were completed, it is likely that they were installed in a Jesuit religious space in Rome. The Tepehuan martyrs cycle could have remained in the Jesuit Curia house where the Father General resided. Given that these paintings depicting Jesuits who died in New Spain were likely intended to accompany other images of Jesuit martyrs, it is also possible that these paintings were hung in the Jesuits’ novitiate of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale in 69

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For Émile Mâle’s reference to Richeôme’s text, see his Religious Art from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1949), 175. Francis Haskell, “The Role of Patrons: Baroque Style Changes,” in Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution, ed. Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffe (New York: Fordham University, 1972), 55. Gauvin Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2003), 35–58; 107–8; Émile Mâle, Religious Art, 176. Richeôme, La peinture spirituelle, f. 472. See also Carolyn Valone, “Piety and Patronage: Women and the Early Jesuits,” in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. E. Ann Matter and John W. Coakley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 172. As Valone has revealed, the Jesuits did not always control the iconography of the decoration program at San Vitale. Private patrons such as Isabella della Rovere made donations to create four altarpieces along the nave with paintings she selected. However, Father General Claudio Aquaviva was personally involved in selecting the fresco cycle depicting early Christian saints and the martyrdom of San Vitale in 1596. See Valone, “Piety and Patronage,” 175–80. ARSI, Mex. 2, f. 202r.

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Rome. The display of these New Spanish martyrs near the portrait of Gonzalo de Tapia, whom Richeôme describes as martyred in “Mexico” in 1594, would have provided a commensurate setting in the Sala di Ricreazione to inspire novices walking through this space.74 These images, sent from Mexico to Italy (and back again), worked to emphasize New Spain as one of the important Jesuit missionary frontiers for audiences in Rome. JESUIT MARTYRS AT THE GESÙ: THE 1622 CANONIZATION CEREMONIES

The only image of Jesuit martyrs known to have been on permanent display in the Gesù was the painting depicting the five martyrs from Salsette, India, by Giuseppe Cesari. It is possible, however, that ephemeral artworks representing images of New Spanish missionaries were part of the collective iconography of the Jesuit cult when the order’s first saints were canonized in 1622.75 When the festivals commenced in Rome in March of that year to celebrate the canonization of Saint Ignatius and San Francisco Xavier, descriptions reveal that the Gesù and Saint Peter’s were filled with decorations and temporary works of art for the occasion. Within this setting, martyrdom played a role in communicating the importance of missionary work worldwide for Roman audiences. One description of the decorations created for the mass celebrating the canonization of Saint Ignatius, Saint Francis Xavier, and Saint Isidore the Farmer in Saint Peter’s on March 12, 1622, describes the church adorned with a “theater” of ephemeral pedestals and pilasters lit by candles that sparkled on gold and silver holders placed throughout the church. The sides of each chapel along the nave were decorated with richly brocaded banners and paintings depicting the miracles of the Society’s first two saints. For the festivals and masses performed to commemorate Ignatius and Francis Xavier’s newly canonized status at the Gesù three days later, the order organized a more specific celebration within a Jesuit setting. Paintings of the “Martyrs of the Society” were hung alternating with images of Jesus in a frieze that ran above the edge of the main altar and below the cornice in the Gesù.76 The Jesuits also displayed a sculpture of a Jesuit martyr from Japan in a niche on the facade of the Gesù next to sculptures of Saint Ignatius Holding the Constitutions and Saint Francis Xavier in Ecstasy. This sculpture of a Japanese martyr, who was probably Pablo Miki or 74

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ARSI, Mex. 2, f. 134; Gonzalo de Tapia’s portrait is identified as “Gonzaluus de Papia” by Richeôme and is numbered 88 of 102 individual canvases depicting Jesuit martyrs worldwide. These paintings are organized chronologically by year of death. Textual descriptions in a 1638 inventory identify this painting of The Five Martyrs from Salsette inside the Gesù. See Pio Pecchiai, Il Gesù di Roma descritto ed illustrato (Rome: Società grafica romana, 1952), 105. For a description of the church decorations for this mass, held March 15, 1622, see Real Accademia de la Historia (RAH), Madrid, Jesuitas 76, Signatura 9–3685/62, Ficha M2693, f. 2r.

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Juan Suan de Goto, was displayed prominently amid a pantheon of venerated Jesuits adorning the exterior of the order’s mother church during the canonization ceremonies of the two first Jesuit saints.77 The eight drawings from New Spain depicting the Jesuit martyrs from the Tepehuan Revolt may have been made into paintings to decorate the Gesù for these 1622 canonization ceremonies. Though the identification of these ephemeral paintings may never be confirmed, portraits of the New Spanish martyrs would have been commensurate subjects among the other Jesuit martyrdom paintings in the decoration plan at the Gesù to promote the Jesuits’ global missionary identity. MARTYROLOGIES AND RE-ENVISIONING NEW SPAIN FROM EUROPE

While portraits of New Spanish martyrs in specific Jesuit churches throughout Rome provided a new visibility for the cult of martyrs from the New World for audiences in southern Italy, illustrated martyrologies also disseminated these Jesuit images throughout Catholic Europe. Matthias Tanner authored one surviving treatise on Jesuit martyrs from missions worldwide titled Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis et vital profusiones militans in Europa, Africa, Asia, et America, published in 1675 from the Jesuit Clementinum in Prague. Illustrated compendia such as this would have circulated to the Father General and the Curia House in Rome, where it is currently located, for Jesuit leaders to read and share.78 Tanner’s martyrology includes textual accounts accompanied by portraits engraved by Melchior Kusell depicting Mexican martyrs attacked and killed in New Spanish mission settings and other locations. Although Tanner’s martyrology does not follow a Nadalian pairing of images with alphabetic letters and textual descriptions, his text and annotations below each engraving were in keeping with Jesuit practices of linking prayer and meditation with visual images.79 While Tanner and the engraver, Kusell, presented these images of Jesuit martyrs in New Spain to inspire the visual and mental engagement of their audiences, they focused less on the topographical details of the Mexican missions. Instead of making references to contemporary landscape or Spanish colonial architecture, Tanner and Kusell present the Martyrdom of Cornelius Beudin (known as Father Godínez) from the 1650 Tarahumara Revolt in a nondescript terrain marked only by a crucifix in the foreground and a walled city in the background (Figure 9.4).80 Inside these walls 77 78

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RAH, Madrid, Jesuitas 76, Signatura 9–3685/62, Numero de Ficha M2693, 2v. Matthias Tanner, Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis et vital profusiones militans in Europa, Africa, Asia, et America (Prague: San Clementem, 1675). This martyrology is part of the early modern collection of manuscripts and books located in ARSI, Biblioteca Storica Societatus Iesu, 14.0. Gerardo Decorme mentions this treatise in Mártires Jesuitas, 42–5. See Ignatius’s ekphrastic “composition of place” in Spiritual Exercises, 21; Geronimo Nadal, Adnotationes et meditationes in euangelia quae in sacrosancto missae sacrificio toto anno leguntur: cum Euangeliorum concordantia (Antwerp: Ex officina Plantiniana, 1607). Tanner, Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis, f. 544.

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9.4 Melchior Kusell, “The Martyrdom of Cornelius Beudin,” in Matthias Tanner, Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis, Prague, 1675.

in the background, Kusell included three Asia-inspired structures that audiences would have encountered in seventeenth-century Japan rather than New Spain. While these buildings that resembled Japanese pagodas and a walled city made

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little reference to the architecture of the Jesuit missions in the Tarahumara in present-day Chihuahua, it is clear that cultural accuracy was not the focus of these European artists.81 The concepts of the New World projected onto this landscape allowed Tanner and Kusell to transpose architectural forms from disparate geographical locations.82 With this view and other similar scenes, Tanner and Kusell pictured New Spain even farther away from Europe in their representation of this distant missionary frontier. Rather than capturing a glimpse of a Spanish colonial settlement, this European image functioned as an affirmation of the Jesuits’ dedication to evangelization abroad with Father Beudin’s martyrdom set within an imagined setting. Just as audiences in Spanish America imagined holy cities such as Rome and transported these “sacred geographies” to their own locations across the Atlantic, so too did audiences in Europe participate in similar meditative reconstructions of sacred sites in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.83 When viewing Mexican martyrdom portraits in Roman churches, audiences on the Italian Peninsula were encouraged to imagine the New World and to incorporate these “sacred geographies” into their own spiritual lives. Tanner’s compendium and other treatises like it would have circulated to and from Rome, throughout Europe to other Jesuit residences and colleges, and abroad to foreign missions. In northeastern New Spain, for example, the Jesuits at Santa María de las Parras held copies of Roman martyrologies in their college library.84 The transmission of New Spanish martyrdom portraits to Rome and the circulation of treatises venerating the Society’s cult of martyrs highlight the bidirectional movement of artworks and texts between New Spain and Europe that functioned to inspire devotion within a localized context and solidify the formation of the Jesuits’ missionary identity on a global scale. The Jesuits’ patronage of martyrdom images helped audiences in the New World and Europe contextualize the missionary frontier where the Jesuits actively sought to emulate the martyrs of the early Church. Yet while these portraits operated simultaneously in New Spain and Italy to help viewers 81

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Tom Cummins, “The Indulgent Image: Prints in the New World,” in Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, ed. Ilona Katzew (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2012), 214. This European practice of conflating architectural forms and distorting topographies in Spanish American scenes and cityscapes was common in the seventeenth century. For example, Ramusio’s 1556 engraving of Cuzco represented the city as an idealized, walled city thus depicting it as a “distant, exotic city suspended in time.” See Richard Kagan and Fernando Marias, Urban Images of the Hispanic World 1493–1793 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 70, 100. Carmen Fernández-Salvador uses this term in “Images and Memory: The Construction of Collective Identities in Seventeenth-Century Quito,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2005, 156. See also Walter Melion, The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625 (Philadelphia, PA: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2009), 122–5. A 1768 inventory of the Jesuit library at Parras identifies treatises including a “Martirologio Romano” in AGN, Temporalidades 64, f. 40v.

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remember the sacrifices of these missionaries, the Jesuits presented these images to very different audiences. In colonial Mexico, these portraits functioned to promote Jesuit martyrs as spiritual exemplars whose deaths confirmed the importance of the Jesuit presence on the northern frontier. In Rome, these images helped the Society incorporate New Spain into the Jesuits’ network of evangelization around the world. In this process, audiences in Rome could come to know these colonial Mexican frontiers they would likely never visit, and identify them as sacred sites in their increasingly global early modern religious culture. Religious centers in Italy depended on missionary images like these, as portraits of the martyrs that circulated between the Old World and the New boosted the spiritual life of the Jesuits and the universal Church worldwide.

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PART III

NEW WORLD PLANTS IN THE ITALIAN IMAGINATION

CHAPTER TEN

SOUTHERN ITALY AND THE NEW WORLD IN THE AGE OF ENCOUNTERS Mackenzie Cooley

“E

zquahuitl, or tree of blood . . . was in naples at this time.” This entry in the 1649 index of Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus, typically known as the Tesoro Messicano, offers a tantalizing image of how America arrived in the kingdom of Naples (Figure 10.1).1 In the eyes of Renaissance Italians, the tree of blood, ezquahuitl in Nahuatl, was one of the New World’s many treasures.2 The blood-colored resin that seeped from its punctured bark resembled dragon’s blood, a powerful medicinal substance. Before and after the time of Dioscorides, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs throughout the Mediterranean imported the resin from Socotra Island, North Africa, and Southeast Asia.3 1

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In the “E” section of the Index Plantarum, Animalium, et Mineralium, in Nardo Antonio Recchi, Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus seu Plantarum Animalium Mineralium Mexicanorum (Rome: Typographeio Vitalis Mascardi, 1649). In the Tesoro Messicano, ezquahuitl refers to two different plants. The first (Book 3, Chapter 22) came from Quahuchinanci, grew ample angular foliage, and produced cold, freezing juice that could strengthen teeth. The second variation (Book 3, Chapter 23) grew near water in the Quauhnahuacenses lands, sprouted round, bristled leaves, and produced a fragrant liquid that relieved eye inflammation. Recchi, Rerum Medicarum, 59. Several plants were said to produce dragon’s blood. The most widely known of these are Dracaena draco, of the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Morocco, and introduced to the Azores, and Daemomorps draco, of Southeast Asia. Jean H Langenheim, Plant Resins: Chemistry, Evolution, Ecology, and Ethnobotany (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2003), 441–4. In the territory of the Mexica and Maya, crotons (especially Croton sanguifluus) were known as the “tree of blood” or the “red tree of cochineal” (Chuh Cakché among the Maya). See Sylvanus Delia Goetz, Girswold Morley, and Adrián Recinos, Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 121–3. Most versions of the plant offered physiological effects, such as tightening gums.

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10.1 “Frontispiece,” of Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, Rome, 1651. Courtesy Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

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By the early seventeenth century, as the Tesoro Messicano suggested, the American tree of blood had seemingly made its way to southern Italy. Might ezquahuitl have grown among other exotic plants in gardens of Neapolitan members of the Accademia dei Lincei, the foremost scientific society in early modern Italy? Was its red resin on shelves in the pharmacy of the famous apothecary Ferrante Imperato? Might a Spanish official have brought it to Naples in the course of conducting imperial business? Many collaborated to create the colossal Tesoro Messicano, the most comprehensive European study of New World nature to date. As Nardo Antonio Recchi, Neapolitan physician to King Philip II, and his Lincean successors such as Fabio Colonna contributed to its many pages, they struggled with the essence of this plant and questioned whether it came from internal liquids or external structures. They wondered whether the American tree of blood and the medicinal simples it produced were fundamentally the same or different from those found in the Canary Islands and elsewhere. Ancient knowledge, medicine, and myth informed and guided perceptions of New World nature. But all this raises the question, why were these conversations and debates about the nature of the New World, including those that led to the production of the Tesoro Messicano, taking place in Naples? While the kingdom of Naples was a vast territory, rich in history, and at a strategic juncture of the Mediterranean, many have traditionally portrayed Naples as peripheral to Renaissance Italian politics, culture, and humanism: a place that played little role in shaping the early modern world, and furthermore appeared little connected to the Americas.4 Unlike Genoa and Florence, Naples had no Columbus or Vespucci; unlike Venice, Naples was not a hub of print culture or published information about the New World. Naples was, however, the lynchpin of Spanish power in Italy, linking Italy to the New World in complex and often paradoxical ways that have hitherto been little considered.5 The mobile personnel of the Spanish Empire and the newly global Catholic Church connected both places. Early modern naturalists understood the flora, fauna, and geography of the New World through the lens of southern Italy, and through their exchanges of ideas and objects, Neapolitan naturalists 4

5

Naples is rarely mentioned in the most central historiography on the reciprocal effects of Europe’s encounter with the Americas. See, for instance, Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), and Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). For a multifaceted narrative of Neapolitan history that navigates pervasive stereotypes, see Tommaso Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005). See Melissa Calaresu and Helen Hills, “Introduction: Between Exoticism and Marginalization: New Approaches to Naples,” in New Approaches to Naples c.1500–c.1800: The Power of Place, ed. Melissa Calaresu and Helen Hills (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).

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made American nature legible to a European audience. While the volcanoes of Etna and Vesuvius were not identical to the smoking hills of Nicaragua, early modern observers like Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo recognized them as being of the same type.6 Last, Habsburg imperial administrative structures directly linked these two worlds. Shared Spanish rule established a common structure of governance – vice-regal administration – in both regions, and through this connection also spread troops, diseases, and commerce that further linked the kingdom of Naples and the Americas. As we shall see, it was the connections between Naples and the New World that generated the Tesoro Messicano: one of the most significant studies of New World naturalia ever produced in the early modern West. Ultimately, Spanish Empire and Catholic global ambition went so far as to transform long-standing familiarity with the kingdom of Naples into something new, different, and “other.” In particular, the Jesuits created the idea of southern Italy as “the other Indies” (in Spanish, otras indias); this rhetorical tactic ultimately played itself out by rendering Neapolitans subject to the Spanish, much like Native Americans were.7 In this way, the Spanish Empire both connected southern Italy to the New World and at times rendered the meridionale peripheral, even as it became home to one of the largest cities in Western Europe whose inhabitants profoundly shaped knowledge and faith in this era. MIRRORED WORLDS: NAPLES AND THE NEW WORLD

The Spanish conquest of Naples and Sicily together with the establishment of colonial rule in the Americas represented two parallel elements in the formative development of the Spanish Empire. Midway through Columbus’s second voyage, in 1494, the French invasion of Naples briefly evicted the Aragonese dynasty, setting off the Italian Wars. From 1492 to 1504, while Columbus conducted his four voyages and established Spanish outposts in the New World, Ferdinand of Aragon’s forces swept into Naples to oust the French as

6

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Pilar Quel Barastegui, “Presencia de Sicilia en algunas crónicas de América,” in Libri, idee, uomini tra l’America iberica, l’Italia e la Sicilia: atti del convegno di Messina, ed. Aldo Albò nico (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993), 99–114. The idea of the “other indies” emerged in the Jesuits’ internal correspondence not only around southern Italy, but also around any place whose people were isolated and identified as superstitious. Adriano Prosperi argues that in 1553, Silvestro Landini was the first to connect the process of evangelizing Amerindian pagans and their European counterparts, in this case Corsicans. By 1600, the discourse of the “other indies” had expanded into common parlance. Adriano Prosperi, “‘Otras indias’: Missionari della Controriforma tra contadini e selvaggi,” in Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura, Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi (Florence, 26–30, giugno, 1980), 207–8; Jennifer D. Selwyn, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 1–3, 22; Croce, Il “Paradiso abitato da diavoli,” in Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1927).

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the Spanish simultaneously laid claim to both islands in the Caribbean and the kingdom of Naples by 1503.8 For the first three decades after the Spanish conquest of 1503, the kingdom of Naples was governed as a hereditary possession of the Crown of Aragon, incorporated into the royal inheritance like Sicily and Sardinia. The legacy of the Crown of Aragon’s reach across the Mediterranean can be found in the medieval Aragonese title of “viceroy,” which by the mid-fourteenth century designated those who ruled in the king’s stead in Majorca, Sardinia, and Sicily.9 The vice-regal system became a cornerstone of Spanish imperialism; by the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the structure of vice-regal administration extended to Mexico and Peru. As of 1524, the Council of the Indies was founded to govern the American territories, while, beginning in 1556, Naples and Milan were governed through the Council of Italy. Throughout the sixteenth century, viceroys across the empire were increasingly drawn from the same social class. For instance, the fifth viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, was the younger cousin of the most famous viceroy of Naples, Pedro de Toledo.10 A homogenized administration led members of the same families to oversee both the European and the American sections of the Spanish Empire. Through unified administration, systems of trade, definitions of belonging, and customs, the Spanish dug roots into southern Italy and the New World. The spread of syphilis highlights this administrative convergence, since within a year of the Spanish invasion of Naples this seemingly new disease had wreaked havoc on the city. Exactly where it came from baffled contemporaries, and debate raged about whether it was truly a new malady.11 While many theories attempted to explain the rise of syphilis – some blamed the Spanish poisoning wells in the city, others faulted the Jews who had recently sought refuge from Spain in Naples, and still more condemned the allegedly libidinous women of the Americas who infected Spanish soldiers – it was clear to contemporaries that the first appearance of syphilis in Naples coincided with the arrival of foreign troops.12 In the winter of 1494, hordes of Italian, Spanish, Swiss, Flemish, and Gascon soldiers and many in their camp of 800 followers, 8

9 10

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David Abulafia, ed., The French Descent into Renaissance Italy, 1494–1495 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), 96–141. J. H. Elliot, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 17–18. León Gómez Rivas, El virrey del Perú don Francisco de Toledo (Toledo: Instituto Provincial de Investigaciones y Estudios Toledanos, Diputacíon Provincial, 1994). On Spanish viceroyalty in Naples, see Giuseppe Coniglio, I vicerè spagnoli di Napoli (Naples: F. Fiorentino, 1967). Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 20–38. See also Claude Quétel, Le mal de Naples: Histoire de la syphilis (Paris: P. Seghers, 1986). The “lustful savage” was often blamed for the origins of syphilis. Anna Foa, “The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494–1520),” in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, eds. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990),

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including Neapolitan women working as prostitutes, fell victim to the malady. In his 1535 Historia general y natural de las Indias Occidentales, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557) wrote: “Many times in Italy I laughed hearing the Italians saying the French disease and the French calling it the disease of Naples, and in truth both would guess the name correctly if they were to call it the disease of the Indies.”13 A late seventeenth-century account corroborated Oviedo’s ideas, explaining that Spaniards first contracted the disease while “using violence against Indian women,” and that the disease was propagated in Naples when Spanish soldiers attacked “women, Neapolitans, and French.”14 Either syphilis was a Neapolitan creation, or, as these accounts suggest, Naples was the transit point for this New World disease. Connections between Naples and the New World are illuminated by the fact that many who later became conquistadors in the Americas had originally participated in the Italian Wars in Naples, or at least had considered the possibility, once again pointing to the parallel positions of these two parts of the Spanish Empire. A generation of conquistadors followed the Spanish heroes of the Italian Wars. Before departing for Cuba, for instance, Hernán Cortés had originally intended to join El gran capitán, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, for his 1503 Neapolitan campaign. At nineteen, Cortés and other ambitious young men had two military options: to travel to the Indies or to join the battle in Naples. As historian Francisco López de Gómara records, Cortés “considered which of the two routes would suit him best” and ultimately “decided to cross over to the Indies because he knew Ovando [the governor of the Indies] who would give him a position and because it seemed to him a more profitable journey than the one to Naples on account of the great quantity of gold which had come from there.”15 Many of the men who did join Córdoba’s campaign would eventually travel to the Indies themselves or send their sons, as we see in the cases of Amador de Lares and Gonzalo Pizarro.16

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33, 43. This chapter provided an English translation of Anna Foa, “Il Nuovo e il vecchio: l’insorgere della sifilide (1494–1520),” in Quaderni storici 55 (1984): 11–34. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general de las Indias (Seville: Empre[n]ta de Iuan Cromberger, 1535), 2.14. See Foa, “The New and the Old,” 32, 39, 41. Many others, such as Jean Bouchet, stuck to their assertion that since French troops were infected in that city, the disease was indeed “la maladie de Naples.” Jean Bouchet, Les annales d’Aquitaine (Pocitiers: Marnef & Bouche, 1558), fn. 180r. Thanks to Lia Markey and Alessandra Foscati for sharing their unpublished essay “A New World Disease and Therapy: Stradano’s Guaiacum Engraving in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence,” in which this passage is cited. Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, Giro del mondo, Parte sesta (Naples: Giuseppe Roselli, 1708), 146. Francisco López de Gómara, in Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), xlv. José María Sánchez de Toca and Ferando Martínez Laínez, El Gran Capitán: Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (Madrid: Edaf, 2008), 128, 132–5, 230 and Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan (New York: Random House, 2003), 321.

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Southern Italian merchants, mariners, and soldiers quickly integrated themselves into the wider Spanish imperial system as it extended west across the Atlantic and east through the Italian Peninsula. While the presence of Neapolitans and Sicilians in Seville and Andalusia before 1492 had been trivial, their numbers increased significantly through 1580. Unlike the Genoese and Florentines, southern Italians did not form their own communities within Spanish cities, but rather integrated themselves among the locals, often keeping only their surnames as a mark of their origins. Records from the Casa de Contratación and the Carrera de Indias show that southern Italians participated in voyages of exploration and the colonization of the Americas from the beginning, starting with Columbus’s first two voyages. Calabrian Antón Calabrés served on the Pinta, while Nicolás de Gaeta worked as the contromaestre of the nao “La Gallega” during the second Columbian voyage, from 1493 to 1496. This robust participation continued throughout the era of exploration. For instance, at least five southern Italians – from Capua, Naples, Trapani, and Messina – served on the Magellan expedition.17 After the Magellan expedition, Nicolao de Nápoles retired from his adventurous youth by settling in Seville, profiting from his seafaring skills by organizing ships to be sent to the Americas.18 While many southern Italians worked as mariners and soldiers along the networks connecting Spain and the Americas, others acted as shipbuilders, guides, helmsmen, and, as in the case of Juan de Nápoles, maestre of the Carrera de las Indias, ship owners in Seville.19 This career path was a well-trodden one for Neapolitans, as Felipe de Nápoles and Marcos de Nápoles also served as maestre of the Carrera de las Indias in the mid-sixteenth century.20 From Seville, southern Italians regularly departed for Mexico, Nombre de Dios, Venezuela, Santo Domingo, the Rio de la Plata, Peru, and Chile. They came as both emigrants and conquistadors. Juan Vincencio de Nápoles and many other southern Italian men joined Cortés’s campaign in Tehuantepec, Mexico.21 The conquistadors of Mexico included Calabrian Antón Sánches Calabrés, Neapolitans Felipe Napolitano and Luis Napolitano, and Sicilians

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18 20 21

Luisa D’Arienzo, “Napoletani e Siciliani sulle via delle indie all’epoca di Cristoforo Colombo,” and Paolo Scarano, “Mezzogiorno d’Italia per la nascita, crescita ed emancipazione dell’Iberoamerica,” in Il nuovo mondo tra storia e invenzione: l’Italia e Napoli, ed. Giovanni Battista De Cesare (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 161, 169–73, and 184–6. These were 161 (Nicolao de Capua), 169–73 (Nicolao de Nápoles), 184 (Jácome de Mesina), 185 (Lucas de Messina), and 186 (Antonio Salamon). D’Arienzo, “Napoletani e Siciliani,” 169–73. 19 Ibid., 165–7. Ibid., 164 (Felipe) and 168–9 (Marcos). Ibid., and Scarano, “Mezzogiorno d’Italia per la nascita, crescita ed emancipazione dell’Iberoamerica,” 157, 160–2, 167–70, 271. Vincenzo di Napoli was among Cortes’s men (mentioned in G. de Gandía, Los primeros Italianos en el Rio de la Plata y otros estudios, Buenos Aires 1932, p. 12) (Scarano, 271).

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Aruega and Juan Siciliano.22 A further expedition, sent by Cortés to the Moluccas from the west coast of Mexico on October 31, 1527, included Francisco de Gaeta, Neapolitans Angel de Nápoles, Julián de Nápoles, Juan Vicencio de Nápoles, and Sicilian Matteo de Palermo.23 In light of this substantial southern Italian role, it is perhaps unsurprising that the wave of expeditions that followed the conquest of Mexico included southern Italians. Sicilian Francisco de Mesina joined Pizarro and Almagro in Peru in 1531. Neapolitan Francisco Bosso was among the conquistadores of Peru in 1535, while Neapolitan Antonio Román and Sicilian Antonio de Lipari were condemned for participation in the 1542 rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro in Peru; Sicilian Martín de Cecilia was also a Pizarrist in Peru.24 Likewise, the conquistadors of Río de la Plata who served under Cabeza de Vaca included Angelo Castelano, Leonardo Tragonete, and Juan Calabrés from the kingdom of Naples and Sicilians Juan de Orona and Diego Bernardo de Urlanda.25 For all their maritime and military prowess, southern Italians also played a role in the construction of the new societies of colonial Latin America. Among the emigrants and travelers were Neapolitan Juan Canseco, who went to Santo Domingo, Hispaniola in 1535 and Antonio Napolitano, who traveled to Veragua that same year.26 Mining was central to the early colonial project, and thus we find southern Italians extracting resources from the countryside. Pedro de Nápoles owned a mine in Zacatecas, New Spain from 1550, while Juan Andrea de Nápoles moved to Chile in 1551, and was at the Chilean mines of Quilacoya in 1553.27 Likewise, Antón de Nápoles lived in Nombre de Dios and was in Concepción in 1569.28 These men married, bought homes, and established new lives away from the Italian south. As this profusion of names suggests, southern Italians were deeply implicated in every part of the Spanish colonial system, profiting from the treasure they lifted from American shores, fighting for power as conquistadors, charting courses across the Atlantic, and settling in new societies as distant as southern Chile. In addition to these military and administrative connections between the kingdom of Naples and the Iberian Americas, some of the earliest strands of European natural history in the Americas also linked these two worlds. Before 22

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D’Arienzo, “Napoletani e Siciliani,” 175 (Felipe Napolitano), 176 (Luis Napolitano), 177 (Antón Sánches Calabrés), 182 (Aruega), and 187 (Juan Siciliano). Filippo Napolitano was among Cortes’s men (M. Vannini de Gerulewicz, cit., p. 302) in (Scarano, 271). D’Arienzo, “Napoletani e Siciliani,” 161 (Francisco de Gaeta), 164 (Angel de Nápoles), 168 (Julián de Nápoles), 173 (Juan Vicencio de Nápoles), and 185 (Matteo de Palermo). Ibid., 160 (Francisco Bosso), 177 (Antonio Román), 183 (Martín de Cecilia), 183–4 (Francisco de Mesina), and 184 (Antonio de Lipari). Ibid., 160 (Juan Calabrés), 161 (Angelo Castelano), 181 (Leonardo Tragonete), 185 (Juan de Orona), and 189 (Diego Bernardo de Urlanda). Ibid., 160 (Juan Canseco) and 174 (Antonio Napolitano). Ibid., 168 (Juan Andrea de Nápoles) and 173 (Pedro de Nápoles). 28 Ibid., 164.

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the American travels he famously described in his Historia general de las Indias (1535), Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557) also visited southern Italy. He journeyed across the peninsula from 1499 to 1502, residing among noble and royal households in Milan, Mantua, Rome, and, finally, Naples and Sicily. Sailing to Palermo, Oviedo saw Mount Etna and surely remembered Odysseus’s journey to Sicily; he later wrote, “I also have heard speak from many in Sicily about that Mongibel, which the ancients call Etna, and about which so much is mentioned by records and ancient poets.”29 Southern Italy’s fecund, dramatic terrain and lawless inhabitants later lingered in Oviedo’s memory when he traveled to the Americas and, like other contemporary chroniclers, including Las Casas, Oviedo used Sicily to describe the New World.30 When he mentioned volcanoes or earthquakes, described the land’s beauty and fertility, or bemoaned lawless savagery in the Americas, Oviedo often employed Sicily as a lens to explain these new lands through the classical vernacular of southern Italian natural and human geography.31 Cannibalism and human sacrifice in the New World’s present directly recalled the man-eating Cyclops and Laestrygonians in southern Italy’s ancient past. Oviedo devoted an entire chapter to reconciling Pliny’s descriptions of ancient sacrifice and consumption of human bodies with the continuation of that tradition by Amerindians.32 Today we know about the cannibals on these islands, the people of New Spain, the provinces of Nicaragua, the provinces of Peru, and those that live on the continent in the Equinoctial and nearby there, as in Quito and Popayán, and other parts of the continent where it is very normal to sacrifice men and as common to eat human flesh, as in France and Spain and Italy one eats ram or cow. All the more, in that matter of eating human flesh, says Pliny, among the places there are many generations that sustain themselves from eating human flesh, and that in the middle of the earth, in Italy and in Sicily, there were Cyclops and Laestrygonians that did the same things, sacrifice men.33

For Oviedo, southern Italy’s past was the New World’s present. Like Cortés at Popocatepetl, Oviedo also scaled an American volcano: Nicaragua’s Masaya. For Oviedo, the American continent dwarfed Europe, and he was convinced that Masaya similarly dwarfed Vesuvius and Etna (though, in fact, it is the other way around) because the Americas loomed so 29

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Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, 42:5. See Giuliano Soria, “Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo in Italia,” in Il nuovo mondo tra storia e invenzione: l’Italia e Napoli, ed. Giovanni Battista De Cesare (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 91–110. Las Casas on Oviedo: Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias (Madrid: Miguel Ginesta, 1875), 1.8. Quel Barastegui, “Presencia de Sicilia,” 99–100. Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, 5.3. 33 Ibid.,

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large in his vision of the world: “But it seems to me,” Oviedo wrote after he visited the volcano in 1529, “that neither of the above mentioned [mountains] is as admirable or as notable as Masaya.”34 As Sean Cocco argues, “The historical, natural, and even ethnographical material the Spaniard gathered reinforced some crucial affinities between Southern Italy and Central America, though the New World seemed to magnify everything.”35 Oviedo described arriving in two different untamed wildernesses, both on the periphery of civilization, as if to suggest that they functioned symbolically as mirrors of one another.36 As the most populous city in the Spanish Empire and a key political and military center on which Spain’s Mediterranean position hinged, Naples was deeply embedded in the networks of power that linked the Spanish Habsburg monarchy to its possessions throughout the world.37 Troops, administrators, silver, and ships constantly circulated between southern Italy and the rest of the Spanish Empire, including the Americas by way of Seville. At any given moment during the sixteenth century, there were 3,000 to 5,000 Spanish infantrymen and cavalrymen in the kingdom of Naples, and 1,000 soldiers in Sicily.38 Spanish became the international language, spoken more in Italy than in the rest of Europe, and more in southern Italy than elsewhere on the peninsula.39 While Spain’s attempt at establishing cultural hegemony in Naples was not identical to that in the American colonies, it was parallel and similar; both of these efforts changed the local language, eroded local institutions and education, and empowered elites while eventually subjugating the 34

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Ibid., 42:5; cited in Sean Cocco, Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 39. Cocco, Watching Vesuvius, 37–8. By today’s measurements, however, while Masaya climbs to only 2,083 feet, Vesuvius reaches 4,203 feet and Etna 10,924 feet (Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Project). It is also worth noting that Oviedo did not merely comment on the ties between Italy and the New World, but also helped forge them. After he took up his post as commander of the fort (alcaide) in Santo Domingo in 1532, he continued to facilitate trade between Venice and the Americas. On December 20, 1537, he arranged for a shipment of Venetian goods to sail to Hispaniola on a ship belonging to the duke of Ferrara. To connect Venice and Santo Domingo, however, he made sure that the cargo also passed through the port of Messina, and from there to Cádiz, thereby pulling southern Italy into the Atlantic trade routes. See Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 171–3; Scarano, “Mezzogiorno d’Italia per la nascita, crescita ed emancipazione dell’Iberoamerica,” 272; Paolo Revelli, Terre d’America e archivi d’Italia (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1926), 69–70. By 1600, Naples was one of the three largest cities in Europe: Naples (281,000), Paris (220,000), and London (200,000). Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (London: Metheun, 1984). Astarita, Salt Water, 100. Giuseppe Galasso, “Aspetti dei rapporti tra Italia e Spagna nei secoli XVI e XVII,” in Il tesoro messicano: libri e saperi tra Europa e Nuovo Mondo, ed. Maria Eugenia Cadeddu and Marco Guardo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2013), 5–15.

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masses through a repressive regime.40 In some ways, the Spanish held their non-Iberian subjects at arm’s length from Castilian identity and privilege, and in other ways they facilitated southern Italians’ travel to Seville and the Americas to use their manpower in the conquest of continents. While some southern Italians entered the channels of transatlantic empire, it is important to remember that many others did not.41 However, what is clear is that the Spanish Empire offered significant opportunities for southern Italian individuals. JESUITS BETWEEN THE INDIES AND “THE OTHER INDIES”

At the same time that the Spanish imperial administration was forging links between Naples and the New World, the newly formed Society of Jesus set its sights on Naples, drawn to the city by its cultural prestige and their religious commitments; by 1552–3, a small group had established a presence in the city.42 Observing dire conditions in the region – rampant prostitution, high rates of imprisonment, numerous Muslim slaves, and poverty among the popolo – the Jesuits developed the idea of a civilizing mission aimed at “eradicating many vices and planting many virtues there.”43 The Neapolitan urban populace had swelled with immigrant peasants who threatened the Spanish with rebellion, increasing the potential for disruption in the city.44 By the middle of the sixteenth century, Naples became a training ground for members of the Society of Jesus, and local young southern Italians joined their efforts. As the Jesuit evangelizing mission became increasingly international, the idea of the Indies became a powerful lure for young Neapolitans.45 Many served in Naples with the hopes that such service would prepare them for a more prestigious appointment in the Indies, and southern Italian Jesuits, the perceived plight of their homeland notwithstanding, began to dream increasingly 40

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44 45

On the slow effects of colonization on New World peoples and cultures, see, for instance, James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 427–36. This is a central tension in Neapolitan historiography. See Benedetto Croce, La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la Rinascenza (Bari: G. Laterza & figli, 1968); John Marino, “Ritual Time and Ritual Space,” in Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Thomas James Dandelet and John A. Marino, Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion 1500–1700 (Boston, MA: Brill, 2007); Galasso, “Aspetti dei rapporti tra Italia e Spagna nei secoli XVI e XVII.” Selwyn, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils, 55–69; See Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). ARSI, Litterae Annuae Historia Provinciae Napoletanae, 72:II, ff 5-10v; in Selwyn, Paradise Inhabited by Devils, 55. Large rebellions did break out in Naples during 1547, 1585, and, most famously, 1647–8. Gian Carlo Rosconi, Il desiderio delle Indie: Storie, sogni e fughe di giovani gesuiti italiani (Turin: Einaudi, 2001).

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of saving souls in the Americas.46 In the process of selecting the most promising missionaries to serve in the Indies, Jesuit leaders often visited colleges in Naples and Messina, which sent growing numbers of Neapolitan Jesuits to the Americas in the early seventeenth century. In this way, Naples came to form a globally metropolitan center as it hosted specialized educational institutions from which trained Jesuits could set forth on missions in Uruguay, Mexico, Colombia, and other sites in the Americas. When the newly established viceroyalty of New Granada (Colombia) expressed a pressing need for spiritual workers in 1605, the most accomplished Neapolitan Jesuits obtained these posts.47 Similarly, in 1610, Carlo d’Orta and five other Neapolitan Jesuits were selected to serve in the Cartagena missions, and, after eight months of travel, arrived in Colombia. While d’Orta’s life was cut short during his American travels, many other enthusiastic Neapolitan youths followed in his wake. In 1616, the Neapolitan College sent 2 percent of its community to the Americas.48 That year, Father Giovanni Vianna, the procurator of the province of Paraguay, planned to travel to Naples, Genoa, Bologna, and Milan to find “select men to reinforce the American mission.”49 In the Jesuits’ spiritual conquest of the Indies, Neapolitans were among the vanguard of the Spanish conquistadors of faith; they represented six men selected to travel to Buenos Aires in the “famous Empire of Paraguay” by way of the Canary Islands.50 These expeditions likely continued through the heyday of the Jesuit missions in the seventeenth century. In 1684, Francesco Maria Piccolo, a Sicilian Jesuit born in Palermo, was selected to serve as one of the first missionaries in the conquest and colonization of California.51 Despite the allure of more exotic locales, the Jesuits determined that frontiers closer to home were in need of their forces. By the 1590s, Superior General of the Jesuits Claudio Aquaviva formally required Jesuits to conduct internal missions in Europe.52 Just as Jesuit networks transported religious imagery between Italy and the Americas, so they also provided a venue for comparisons about faith in Europe and New Spain. Perhaps unsurprisingly considering the cultural capital of distant travel, Jesuits serving in Europe dramatized the sinfulness of the European regions in which they served, in effect making 46 47

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Croce, Il “Paradiso abitato da diavoli,” 68. Selwyn, Paradise Inhabited by Devils, 111, citing Saverio Santagata, Istoria della Compagnia di Gesù appartenente al Regno di Napoli (Naples: Nella Stamperia di Vincenzo Mazzola, 1756–7), 4:50. Six men of the Neapolitan College were chosen to be sent to America: Alfonso di Aragona, Giovanni Battista Sansone, Cesare Graziano, Ortenzio Sabelloni, Claudio Rovilier, Pietro Comentale. Santagata, Istoria, 4:4; Selwyn, Paradise Inhabited by Devils, 111. Santagata, Istoria, 4:4. 50 Ibid., 4:5. Ibid., 4:4–4:5; Selwyn, Paradise Inhabited by Devils, 111; Ana María González, “La visíon del indio en el jesuita siciliano Francesco Maria Piccolo,” in Libri, idee, uomini tra l’America iberica, l’Italia e la Sicilia: atti del convegno di Messina, ed. Aldo Albò nico (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993), 220–2. Selwyn, Paradise Inhabited by Devils, 104.

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them comparable to missions in the Americas. From the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuit correspondence often portrayed the Italian south as suffering the same plight as the Indies. In a letter of January 1, 1568, Pietro Blanca – the rector of the college of Teramo – wrote to Girolamo Nadal, arguing that one might speak of Sicily as the “true Indies” (vera India) and the Abruzzo as the “Italian Indies” (India italiana).53 Later that year, Jesuit Dionisio Vasquez dall’Abruzzo wrote that “in the mountains that are large and very nearby we have an indies in ignorance and in need of spiritual help.”54 Carlo d’Orta drew the connection directly from the American side of the Atlantic, remarking how, unlike the obstinate sinners he so often encountered in southern Italy, his Amerindian parishioners had “simplicity which is exactly that of a child” and “entreated [d’Orta] to baptise them quickly.”55 D’Orta’s letters reveal a stark contrast between Africans and Amerindians eager to embrace Christianity and the southern Italians’ lack of religious vigor, and in doing so, reinforced the perceived connection between these two places. Along these lines, in a curious reversal, while they devoted considerable resources – financial, personal, and institutional – to reforming Neapolitan religion and culture, the extensive Jesuit epistolary and print network simultaneously worked to spread the myth of Naples as a site of social and spiritual chaos to a broad European public in order to justify its evangelical mission there.56 From the mid-sixteenth century onward, it became an adage that Naples, like the Americas, was beautiful, but uncivilized, a “paradise inhabited by devils.”57 Europeans on the margins of social control were, like the Amerindians, considered bestial, uncultured, and savage, lacking social and political organization and incompletely Christian. Jesuit writers likened the Neapolitan masses to New World natives, rendering Neapolitan behavior similar to that of unpredictable, self-destructive fronterizos, or frontier peasantry residing on the boundaries of the Spanish Empire.58 The Jesuits connected the kingdom of Naples to the Americas, by both producing and popularizing the discourse of 53

54 55

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Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia (Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1950), 1:345–25, cited in Prosperi, “Otras Indias,” 207 fn3. Tacchi Venturi, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù, 367, cited in Prosperi, “Otras Indias,” 207. Santagata, Istoria, 4:50. Carlo d’Orta (July 1, 1618), cited in Santagata, Istoria 4:51–3; Carlo D’Orta, “Letter to his colleagues in Aversa” (Cartagena, August 15, 1618), cited in Santagata, Istoria 4:136–40; both also in Selwyn, Paradise Inhabited by Devils, 114–17. Elisa Novi Chavarria, “Las Indias De Por Açà nelle relazioni dei gesuiti napoletani tra Cinque e Seicento,” in Les missions intérieures en France et en Italie du XVI siècle au XX siècle, eds. Christian Sorrel and Frédéric Meyer (Chambéry: Université de Savoie, 2001), 133–43; Selwyn, Paradise Inhabited by Devils, 3, 104. Selwyn, Paradise Inhabited by Devils, 1–21. I extend Tamar Herzog’s paradigm from her comparative analysis of imperial possession in Iberian empires to Spanish possessions in Italy. Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 145. Prosperi also argues that this saying was used commonly throughout Europe, not just in Italy; Prosperi, “Otras Indias,” 205–34.

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southern Italy as the “other indies.” Directly as missionaries and indirectly by juxtaposing these two “uncivilized” parts of the world, Jesuits played a crucial role in connecting Naples and America through their network of faith. NEAPOLITANS AND THE MEXICAN BOOK OF NATURE

Links between southern Italy and the Americas range from the generalizing and abstract to the more concrete; they were connected through the forces and administrative workings of the global Spanish Empire, as well as through specific people – soldiers, Jesuits, and naturalists – who traveled between these two worlds. Perhaps the most productive result of the connections between Naples and the New World was forged in the story of the Tesoro Messicano. From the beginning, New World landscapes were thought to contain materia medica with which to cure the diseases of Europe. For example, in his Universale fabbrica del mondo, ovvero Cosmografia (Naples, 1573) – which included a map of the Americas (Figure 10.2) – Neapolitan cosmographer and theologian Giovanni Lorenzo d’Anania (1545–1607/1609) discussed Amerindian peoples, animals, and cannibalism, as well as New World flora and its powerful medicinal properties. On the Isola di Borichen (Puerto Rico), d’Anania reported, merchants brought great quantities of a plant named Guaiaco, or legno Santo.59 This plant was “something useful against the mal francese, a disease particular to them, hence discovered to us at the time of the Great Captain Gonzalvo Fernandez”; d’Anania even mentions that he saw the plant himself.60 Finding cures for European maladies in the New World animated some of the most exciting investigations of the late sixteenth century. In the 1570s, King Philip II set out to improve his knowledge of his realms with the Hernández expedition to collect information about flora and fauna in the New World. Its findings would eventually result in the creation of the Tesoro Messicano. In February 1571, Francisco Hernández (1517–87), protomédico or royal doctor to King Philip II, was dispatched for five years to New Spain to find medicinal simples and craft a medical herbary for immediate use by recording animals, plants, and the practices of local healers.61 Hernández returned to Madrid 59

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On the use of guaiacum to treat diseases including syphilis, see Markey and Foscati, “A New World Disease and Therapy.” See also Robert Munger, “Guaiacum, the Holy Wood from the New World,” Journal of the History of Medicine 4 (1949): 196–229; Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 129; Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts. Giovanni Lorenzo d’Anania, Universale fabbrica del mondo, ovvero Cosmografia (Venice: Il Muschio, 1582), 378–9. Ezquahuitl, the tree of blood, was one of the specimens he described as he ventured through Quauhchinanco, a day’s journey south from Mexico City. Also see Jesús Bustamante García, “Un Libro, Tres Modelos, y el Atlántico: Los Datos de una historia: los antecedentes y el proyecto,” in Il tesoro messicano: Libri e saperi tra Europa e Nuovo Mondo, ed. Maria Eugenia Cadeddu and Marco Guardo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2013), 27.

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10.2 “America,” in Giovanni Lorenzo d’Anania, L’universale fabbrica del mondo, ovvero cosmografia, Venice, 1582. University of Iowa Libraries, Call number: G120. A5 1582.

in 1577, laden with boxes of simples, live plants and animals, skeletons, Amerindian antiquities, and descriptions and depictions of 4,000 varieties of Mexican flora, fauna, and materia medica. David Gentilcore’s essay in this volume demonstrates how new American foods were first approached with curiosity in Italy, and then disregarded. Indeed, as with so many early episodes of American plants and their integration into European food chains and pharmacies, Phillip II’s court immediately doubted the utility of this project. Critics were generally skeptical that these Mexican plants could find a medicinal purpose in Europe since the plants Hernández discussed were difficult to obtain and their medicinal properties might not be replicable, or might even be dangerous, when removed from their original climate.62 Giovanni Battista Della Porta wrote that having heard these critiques, Hernández died of sadness; the herbary Philip II had ordered was left unfinished.63 Hernández’s successor as protomedico, Nardo Antonio Recchi (d. 1595) – from Monte Corvino in southern Italy – took up the task of completing the herbal 62 63

Ibid., 31–2, 34. Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, MS Aldrov.136, vol. 8, fol. 294r (= vol. 8, fol. 53) in David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 248.

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in 1580. Italy had long been famous for its excellent doctors, and Recchi’s acquisition of this prestigious post was likely helped by southern Italy’s inclusion in the Spanish Empire. The Neapolitan physician traveled from Salerno to Madrid, waded through his predecessor’s vast collection of drawings and descriptions, then selected and copied 600 of the thousands of descriptions of Mexican flora and fauna that Hernández had left behind. If Francisco Hernández had been the New Pliny, intent on describing and organizing the vastness of New World nature, Recchi was the new Dioscorides, eager to sift useful medical simples out from the vast collection.64 He aimed to make the knowledge that Hernández had painstakingly harvested in Mexico useful to Renaissance Europeans. Recchi was probably particularly interested in ezquahuitl because the so-called dragon’s blood potentially offered a New World substitute for a medicine otherwise only available through expensive Mediterranean trade. Recchi recorded Hernández’s words that “this sap is cold and astringent; it makes teeth fast, prevents fluxes, and possesses in sum, the same virtues, same appearance, and same applications as the dragon’s blood from the Canaries.”65 In his view, ezquahuitl resembled trees and plants that had produced similar resin throughout the Old World.66 Later, Florentine traveler Francesco Carletti informed his patron, Ferdinando de Medici, that he had seen such trees in Acapulco. It shocked him that in a place “full of undergrowth and trees completely different from ours,” they found their own tree for dragon’s blood.67 This was clearly the same tree – the “tree of blood” or the “red tree of cochineal” – noted in the Popol Vuh, a sacred Mayan text.68 Ultimately, these stories of exotic New World nature must have been not only exciting for Recchi, but exhausting in their ambiguity. In any case, the labors of this southern Italian physician forged a nexus in the study of natural history between plants from the Old and New Worlds. 64 65

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Bustamante García, “Un Libro, Tres Modelos, y el Atlántico.” Francisco Hernández and Simon Varey, The Tesoro Messicano: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 196–7. By the 1580s, the Neapolitan protomédico was not the only one interested in the Spanish Indies’ dragon blood trees. Florence’s Grand Duke wanted a tree of his own. Brian Brege, The Empire That Wasn’t: Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Empire 1574–1609, PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2014, 277–8. Francesco Carletti, My Voyage Around the World: The Chronicles of a 16th Century Florentine Merchant, trans. Herbert Weinstock (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 55–6. Carletti reported striking a branch with a knife so that the tree oozed red liquid, like blood pouring from a wound. When he lost the tree’s seed, which was “wrapped in a leaf in the shape of a dragon,” the duke had failed in this attempt to possess his own Mexican tree. Writing to Vincenzo di Andea Alamanni, “Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Florence requests a ‘tree that makes dragon blood,’ seeds, bulbs, and plants to be shipped from ‘Portuguese India and Spanish India,’” according to the MAP synopsis. Medici Archive Project (MAP) Doc ID 4298. MAP entry for Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 5042. Brege, The Empire That Wasn’t, 277–8. Recinos, Popol vuh, 121–3.

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After he completed his appointment at the Spanish court in 1589, Recchi returned to southern Italy, bringing with him his redaction as well as notes and drawings copied from the Hernández manuscripts.69 Upon Recchi’s death, his nephew, bibliophile Marco Antonio Petilio, inherited the manuscripts, setting the stage for the Tesoro Messicano’s preservation and eventual publication by the Accademia dei Lincei.70 The Lincei enlisted Fabio Colonna (1567–1640), a Neapolitan expert on fossils and plants, to contribute to the Tesoro Messicano and better connect it to the intellectual elite of Naples. Neapolitan naturalists were already cultivating and collecting naturalia, living and dead, in local spiceries (spezierie). As noted in the works of Della Porta, Fabio Colonna, and Ferrante Imperato, these were gardens in which medical simples were grown and preserved, homes for the Americana that found its way to Naples through Spanish troop movements, political connections, and naturalists’ correspondence.71 Ferrante Imperato’s acclaimed museum of natural curiosities built on this tradition. There, clients of pharmacy and untrained visitors alike would have found the Americana Imperato had incorporated into his collection. By the time his Dell’historia naturale was published in 1599, Imperato had already described the thorny poppy (papavero spinoso or “Fico dell’inferno”), “a plant newly brought to Italy,” as one example of New World plants in Naples.72 By the time Colonna finalized his annotations to Recchi’s text in 1628, Neapolitan friar Donato d’Eremita – who maintained a close relationship with the Lincei and the city’s naturalist community – was nursing both an American passion flower and two dragon trees (Figure 10.3) in the monastery of Santa 69

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Surely Recchi did not predict the 1671 fire in the Escorial that ultimately destroyed the original Hernández collection, but perhaps he suspected that the Spanish Crown would not publish his work in a timely matter. Details concerning these documents – especially procurement and exactly which version the Lincei ultimately used – remain murky. Freedberg, Eye of the Lynx, 239–48; Luigi Guerrini, “The ‘Accademia dei Lincei’ and the New World” (Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, MPIWG Preprint Series 348, 2008); Marco Guardo, “Nell’officina del Tesoro Messicano: il ruolo misconosciuto di Marco Antonio Petilio nel sodalizio Linceo,” in Il tesoro messicano: Libri e saperi tra Europa e Nuovo Mondo, ed. Maria Eugenia Cadeddu and Marco Guardo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2013). See also Irene Baldriga, L’occhio della lince. I primi Lincei tra arte, scienza e collezionismo (1603–1630) (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 2002). On science and culture in Renaissance Naples, see Jerry H. Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 253–301; Sean Cocco, “Locating the Natural Sciences in Early Modern Naples,” in A Companion to Early Modern Naples, ed. Tommaso Astarita (Brill: Leiden, 2013), 453–76; Gabriella Belloni Speciale, “La Ricerca Botanica dei Lincei a Napoli,” in Galileo e Napoli, ed. Fabrizio Lomonaco and Maurizio Torrini (Napoli: Guida, 1987), 71–5. This plant is identified as Chicallotl seu spina. Recchi, Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, 787; Ferrante Imperato, Historia naturale di Ferrante Imperato napolitano (Venice: Presso Combi & La Noù, 1672), 662, 667; Andrea Russo, L’Arte degli speziali in Napoli (Napoli: Tip. La Buona Stampa, 1966), 24–5.

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10.3 “Granadilla Flos Passionis,” in Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, Rome, 1651. Courtesy Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

Caterina a Formiello, where he earned a reputation as the best apothecary in Naples in the 1620s.73 Throughout the Tesoro Messicano, one finds mentions of his close relationship with the Lincei. He diverted his attention from aromatics and the Elixir of Life, about which he wrote a book published in 1634, to care for a pair of dragon tree plants, which lived in the wooden barrel in which they were brought to him.74 Rather than the dragon-leafed plant Carletti cut in 73

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On granadilla hispanis, or flos passionis italis: Nardo Antonio Recchi, Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, 888–92; on Mexican snake specimens, 787; on Fra Donatus, 787, 866, 890. See Donato D’Eremita, Dell’Elixir Vitae (Naples: Secondino Roncagliolo, 1624).

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Acapulco, described by Hernández and Recchi, Fra Donato’s specimen was from the Canary Islands, a seedling of the exotic tree first depicted by naturalist Carolus Clusius in Rariorum Aliquot Stirpium Per Hispanias Observatarum Historia (Antwerp, 1576) (Figure 10.4).75 After two years, Donato’s dragon trees, like so many Atlantic plants in Italy, perished from inappropriate care.76 Fabio Colonna intended for his Tesoro Messicano annotations to draw out the presence of ezquahuitl in Naples, even if the Mexican plant was not actually known to be in the city. To our eyes, Hernández’s Mexican tree of blood and Fra Donato’s Canary Island dragon tree were not entirely the same. Without an image of Hernández’s plant to compare with Clusius’s, perhaps the Lincei was animated by the old belief that dragon blood, that essential resin, could be shared among two plants of disparate origin. The ezquahuitl of the Quahuchinanci – with “wide and strong angular leaves with blood dripping, which they call ‘draconis’” – resembled the tree from the Canary Islands in size, but the iconic branches of the tree from the Canaries were not mentioned by Recchi.77 Neither plant fully resembled that noted by the Florentine Carletti in his late sixteenth-century travels in Acapulco; he described the “tender plants, having a white, smooth bark” and leaves shaped like dragons.78 However, Colonna’s priority in his annotations was not to differentiate exact varieties among dragon blood trees. Rather, it was to prove that Naples was itself a city filled with scholars of nature. Just as the gardens of Rome, Pisa, Florence, Padua, and Bologna cultivated Americana, so too could local Neapolitan institutions. His note that ezquahuitl “was in Naples at this time” was meant to show readers a landscape of New World nature in the Neapolitan metropolis. By the early seventeenth century, Neapolitan scholars used knowledge of these exotic plants as a means to display their cosmopolitanism and erudition. ERUPTION, PRINT, REBELLION: PARADOXICAL CONCLUSIONS

Vesuvius erupted in 1631, sending shockwaves throughout a Europe newly impressed with the volcanic nature of southern Italy. The image of the volcano figured prominently in metaphors of social unrest leading up to the Revolt of Naples in 1647–8.79 The Spanish Habsburgs, crushed by the burdens of losing wars and rebellions at home, desperately raised taxes ever higher to stave off defeat. In the kingdom of Naples, the feudal nobility swelled and pervasive 75

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Carolus Clusius, Rarorum Aliquot Stirpium Per Hispanias Observatarum Historia (Antwerp: Christophori Plantini, 1576), 1–2. Colonna annotations in Nardo Antonio Recchi, Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, 59, 866. Compare Clusius, Rariorum, 1–2; Recchi, Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae, 59. Carletti was in Acapulco in 1595 and 1596. Carletti, My Voyage Around the World, 55–6, 69–71; see Brege, The Empire That Wasn’t, 534–5. Coco, Watching Vesuvius, 113–37.

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10.4 “Draco,” in Carolus Clusius, Rariorum Aliquot Stirpium Per Hispanias Observatarum Historia, Antwerp, 1576. Courtesy of Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, University of Minnesota.

inequality festered.80 In turn, between 1620 and 1647, Neapolitan vice-regal rule became increasingly authoritarian. The mutually self-serving relationship between Neapolitan elites and Spanish administrators frayed under the burden of a decaying empire. Revolt broke out in Palermo as the popolo protested Spanish taxation. In Naples, secular priest Camillo Tutini evoked the rumble of magma with the slogan “the Earth shouts,” using the image of Vesuvius as a symbol of protest against vice-regal rule and recalling the way naturalists like Oviedo had compared volcanoes. The Naples of the popolo – “the other 80

Rosario Villari, The Revolt of Naples (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 98–152.

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Indies” – and the lavish palaces of delight and learning of the Neapolitan elite had become disparate, if not worlds apart. Tutini wrote: The Earth shouts against the nobility and the popolari of Naples who are unjust and do not realize their ruin in being disunited, because the Spanish foment discord to keep them divided, so that they may more easily exterminate the nobility and keep the popolari enslaved . . . and if you do not abandon your particular interests and embrace the public good you will be treated worse than the Indians by these inhuman people.81

As he compared the fates of the subjugated Neapolitans with those of the vanquished Amerindians, Tutini’s rhetoric resembled that of Las Casas. Unable to unify in the face of Spanish power, he argued, southern Italian rich and poor were handing themselves over to the Spanish. His lament echoed the Black Legend’s representation of Spain’s mistreatment of the Amerindians. Seventeenth-century social unrest had brought the fates of Naples and the Americas together once again. Early modern Naples was connected to the New World in complex and often indirect ways. They were linked by Spanish rule, reshaped by both Spanish administrators and Jesuits. In addition, as the example of the Tesoro Messicano indicates, Naples represented a nexus through which ideas and images of the New World passed to the Old through the workings of Spanish imperial policies and networks such as those that involved Oviedo, Hernández, Recchi, and others. Over time, the pressures of colonial rule reduced the Neapolitan population to exoticized others, who, like Native Americans, were understood as irrational in the face of Spanish civilization and order. With Federico Cesi’s death in 1630, the Lincei lost its patron, the academy dissolved, and the scientific society crumbled. With the help of later collaborators, the Tesoro Messicano was eventually published in Rome in 1649–51, but by then the fervor for understanding and explaining New World nature apparent in Naples’s long sixteenth century had dissipated. After a century of parallel experience, their existence as shared worlds drew to a close. Naples and the New World went their separate ways, except of course for that late arrival: the tomato.82 81 82

Tutini, “Prodigiosi portenti del Monte Vesuvio,” in Cocco, Watching Vesuvius, 131. David Gentilcore, Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE IMPACT OF NEW WORLD PLANTS, 1500–1800: THE AMERICAS IN ITALY David Gentilcore

INTRODUCTION

In 1564, Agostino Gallo published a delightful work of horticulture and estate management, titled Le dieci giornate dell’agricoltura e de’ piaceri della villa. The fruit of half a lifetime’s experience spent cultivating his own estate near Brescia, the treatise was structured in the form of a dialog taking place over ten days. It proved so successful that it quickly went through three pirated editions in Venice before the author himself republished it with more content, upping the number of days first to thirteen (in a 1566 edition) and then to twenty (in 1569).1 And yet, despite his practical spirit and innovating approach – Gallo’s desire to embrace the new is evident in his discussion of lucerne (alfalfa) and silkworm cultivation – seventy years after the Columbian voyages, the books do not contain a single reference to the edible plants of the New World.2 The only New World presence is the turkey, then known in Italy as the gallo d’India, whose rearing he briefly discusses.3 It took two centuries, until the end 1

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Gino Benzoni, “Gallo, Agostino,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 51 (1998), online edition: www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/agostino-gallo_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ (accessed April 26, 2016). Mauro Ambrosoli, The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1350–1850, trans. Mary McCann Salvatorelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 123–7. Agostino Gallo, Le vinti giornate dell’agricoltura, et de’ piaceri della villa (Venice: Fratelli Borgominieri, 1572), 209–10. The turkey had quickly become a regular presence on elite tables. David Gentilcore, Food and Health in Early Modern Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2016),

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of our period, to add a twenty-five-page appendix on maize, when the Accademia Agraria of Brescia commissioned a reprint of the book.4 Hitherto, it seems, people could read Gallo’s treatise without feeling the need for any reference to maize; but by the late eighteenth century, when maize had conquered many parts of Europe, including the Bresciano, this lacuna was no longer acceptable. Belated it may have been, but this attention to maize is not surprising. Barely two years after Columbus’s first voyage, a letter from Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, scholar and tutor at the Spanish court, to Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, vice chancellor at the papal court in Rome, promised a delivery of “black and white seeds,” referred to in a previous letter: maize seeds.5 Maize was also the first New World food plant to be represented in art, in the festoons Giovanni da Udine painted for a series of frescoes during the years 1517–19 in the Villa Farnesina.6 The year 1517 also saw the first detailed description of the new plant, purportedly by a gentleman in Hernán Cortés’s army, in a work translated from the Spanish by Giovanni Battista Ramusio.7 The new could best be understood in terms of the known: thus maize grains are “akin to chickpeas,” the fronds like panic grass, and the tortillas made from them like bread. The native procedure for macerating the kernels in lime and grinding them to remove the skins as part of tortilla preparation would not make the transition to Italy, even if maize itself would. The new plant’s curiosity value meant that noble villas festooned their walls with depictions of maize, just as they planted it in their pleasure gardens. Indeed, maize was the first New World plant to be widely cultivated, especially in northern Italy, even if there was a lag between artistic depictions and actual cultivation.8 Maize would rival and then replace the so-called inferior cereals in Italy, like millet and buckwheat, and even come to compete with wheat in people’s esteem. By the time Gallo’s treatise was reissued in 1775, the Academy was so proud of the region’s maize production and its place in the local economy that they gushingly boasted that the plant

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141–4, and Sabine Eiche, Presenting the Turkey: The Fabulous Story of a Flamboyant and Flavourful Bird (Florence: Centro Di, 2004). It was written by the academy’s secretary, Cristoforo Pilati: “Aggiunta sopra il formentone,” in Agostino Gallo, Le venti giornate dell’agricoltura e de’ piaceri della villa (Brescia: Giambattista Bossini, 1775; photostatic reprint Brescia: Scaglia, 2003), 533–58. Francis A. MacNutt, trans., De orbe novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D’Anghera, 1912, 2 vols., www.gutenberg.org/files/12425/12425-h/12425-h.htm. Jules Janick and Giulia Caneva, “The First Images of Maize in Europe,” Maydica 50 (2005): 71–80. Janick and Caneva, “First Images of Maize in Europe.” Giovanni Battista Ramusio, “Relatione di alcune cose della nuova Spagna, & della gran città di Temestitán Messico, fatta per uno gentil’homo del signor Fernando Cortese,” in his Navigazioni e viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi (Turin: Einaudi, [1556] 1988), 6:353–5. Michele Fassina, “Il mais nel Veneto nel Cinquecento. Testimonianze iconografiche e prime esperienze colturali,” in L’impatto della scoperta dell’America nella cultura veneziana, ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 91.

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“has nowadays become the most common and universal foodstuff, not just in Italy, but in Europe (where climate permits), Asia, and Africa, as it was first in America.”9 It is certainly the most common American foodstuff in the Italian historical imagination, to judge by the quantity and quality of publications dedicated to it.10 And perhaps this is fitting: if we consider the three most cultivated crops in Italy today – maize, tomatoes, and potatoes – only maize became a staple item of cultivation and consumption during the early modern period. Plants that were considered analogous to native ones had a much better chance of quick success, such as New World beans and the chili pepper, in addition to maize.11 Those that were novel, like the tomato and the potato, posed a much greater challenge, and did not enter the Italian mainstream in terms of cultivation and consumption until the nineteenth century.12 (As a counterpoint, one could argue that the rejection of certain food plants, such as the cassava, might be just as revealing for the historian.13) In any case, each plant had its own trajectory, including some that could be problematic, or even counterintuitive. There is no doubt that Italy, like the rest of Europe, owes a lot to the Columbian Exchange.14 Columbus set in motion the biological unification of the planet, bringing together two agricultural systems that had hitherto 9 10

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Pilati, “Aggiunta,” 533. A few of the chief works: Roberto Finzi, “Sazia assai ma dà poco fiato,” Il mais nell’economia e nella vita rurale italiane, secoli XVI–XX (Bologna: CLUEB, 2009); Giovanni Levi, “Innovazione tecnica e resistenza contadina: Il mais nel Piemonte del ’600,” Quaderni Storici 14 (1979): 1092–1100; Danilo Gasparini, Polenta e formenton. Il mais nelle campagne venete tra XVI e XX secolo (Sommacampagna: Cierre, 2002); Franco Cazzola, “L’introduzione del mais in Italia e la sua utilizzazione alimentare (sec. XVI–XVIII),” in PACT 26 (1991), La préparation alimentaire des céréales: Rapports présentés à la table ronde organiseé à Ravello au Centre universitaire européen pour les biens culturels du 11 au 14 avril 1988, ed. François Sigaut and Dominique Fournier (Strasbourg: Conseil de l’Europe, 1991), 109–27; Alessio Fornasin, “Diffusione del mais e alimentazione nella campagne friulane del Seicento,” in Vivere in Friuli. Saggi di demografia storica (secc. XVI–XIX), ed. Marco Breschi (Udine: Forum, 1999), 21–42. On the chili, see Vito Teti, Storia del peperoncino. Un protagonista delle culture mediterranee (Rome: Donzelli, 2007). On beans, see Flavio Birri and Carlo Coco, Cade a fagiolo. Dal mondo antico alla nostra tavola. Storia, miti e pregiudizi della carne dei poveri (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), and Ken Albala, Beans: A History (Oxford: Berg, 2007). On the tomato, see Alberto Capatti, “The Identity of the Tomato in Gastronomy,” Rivista di antropologia, supplement to vol. 76 (1998): 245–54, and David Gentilcore, Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). On the potato, see Giovanni Biadene, Storia della patata in Italia dagli scritti dei Georgici (1625–1900) (Bologna: Avenue Media, 1996), and David Gentilcore, Italy and the Potato: A History, 1550–2000 (London: Continuum, 2012). Cassava (manioc) could have grown in the warmer parts of southern Europe, but Europeans were put off eating it by its toxicity when not correctly prepared. In general terms, we must begin with Alfred Crosby’s seminal work, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972). For Italy in particular, see Maurizio Sentieri and Guido Zazzu, I semi dell’Eldorado: l’alimentazione in Europa dopo la scoperta dell’America (Bari: Dedalo, 1992).

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evolved separately. The result was an exchange of the fruits of the earth that continues to this day; an exchange not just of agricultural products, but of foodways too; an exchange that began between Europe and the Americas, but quickly extended to Africa and Asia. In surveying these dramatic developments, it is all too tempting to observe the past from our own standpoint, granting pride of place to those food plants at the center of cultivation and consumption today. But how might things have appeared to an early modern Italian? The new arrivals certainly posed a challenge. How to classify them? Which might be edible, harmful, healthy? Which might be medicinal? Which would grow well? The factors determining which plants were assimilated, when, where in Italy, and in what ways, can tell us much about the nature of Italy’s engagement with the New World. To make sense of Italian responses, I have broken the process by which these three plants entered the food chain into two separate phases. The first phase is one of “observation”: characterized by identification, “experience,” and the exchange of information. We shall see how Italians tended to reduce New World products to their own norms and expectations, comparing them to the familiar nature of Europe. Ancient knowledge served as a tool, as well as an obstacle, in the intellectual exploration of new worlds. The second phase was one of “naturalization,” during which New World products were rendered familiar, native. They could now be appreciated, studied, and adapted to fit local needs, conditions, and tastes. This was when they made the leap from botanical and ornamental curiosities to garden vegetables, with a corresponding leap in terms of consumption patterns, poised to enter the Italian dietary and agricultural mainstream. Determining how the differing historical trajectories of maize, tomatoes, and potatoes fit into this scheme provides us with a means of exploring the nature of early modern Italian encounters and engagement with the Americas. As we shall see in this chapter, this was far from being love at first bite. OBSERVATION

When it comes to the first recorded Italian contact with the tomato, observation was quite literally the extent of it. On October 31, 1548, Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici of Tuscany was in Pisa with the rest of his household, when his house steward presented them with a basket containing produce from their Torre del Gallo estate on a hill overlooking Florence. “And the basket was opened and they looked at one another with much thoughtfulness.” After the event, the house steward wrote to the Medici private secretary to tell him that the basket of tomatoes – pomidoro – had arrived safely.15 In this casual, off-hand 15

Archivio di Stato, Florence, Mediceo del Principato, b. 1174, ins. 5, fol. 1, letter from Vincenzo Ferini, sottomaggiordomo of the Medici household, to Pierfrancesco Riccio, private secretary

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reference it is difficult for us to appreciate the strange novelty tomatoes once represented, upon the arrival of seeds from New Spain and the earliest attempts to grow the plants in Italy. It was apparently enough to marvel, briefly, at the new plant; the Medici do not appear to have tried eating them. There was good reason for this. Four years earlier, a fellow Tuscan, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, had written vaguely about their harmful qualities, describing the fruit without naming it. In his 1544 commentary on the materia medica of Dioscorides, an ancient pharmacological text, Mattioli mentions a new variety of eggplant. The plant is not given a name until the revised Latin edition of 1554, where Mattioli notes they are called pomi d’oro in the vernacular: the first time tomatoes are named in print.16 “Another species [of eggplant] has been brought to Italy in our time,” Mattioli says, and he describes their blood as of red or golden color when mature, and the fact that they can be divided into segments. He hazards that they can be eaten like eggplants, which is to say, cooked and seasoned with salt, black pepper, and olive oil.17 Not that this comparison was very encouraging, given that the eggplant, only recently arrived from the Middle East, was called the malus insanum, or “mad apple,” with dire health effects to match. The European encounter with the Americas and the myriad of novelties it produced came just as natural philosophy was rediscovering the knowledge of the ancients, through the first printed commentaries on the likes of Dioscorides, Galen, and Pliny. Commentaries like Mattioli’s sought to reconcile new empirical discoveries in a wide range of fields with old systems of thought, consistent with Renaissance humanism. The sixteenth century witnessed an unprecedented growth in the study of plants, with more than 1,000 Italian species of plants, natural and domesticated identified, while 127 species were brought in from abroad.18 If the Age of Encounters played a part in the growth of modern botany in Europe, there was still a lingering conviction that

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and maestro di casa, October 31, 1548, commenting on the court’s provision of grain, wine, and capers. Francesca Sboarina, Il lessico medico nel Dioscoride di Pietro Antionio Mattioli (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000), 53–62. Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo libri cinque. Della historia et materia medicinale tradotti in lingua volgare . . . (Venice: N. De Bascarini, 1544); id., Commentarii, in libros sex Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei, de medica materia (Venice: Vincentium Valgrisium, 1554), 479. Ambrosoli, Wild and the Sown, 109. See also Giuseppe Olmi, “Magnus campus: I naturalisti italiani di fronte all’America nel secolo XVI,” in Il nuovo mondo nella coscienza italiana e tedesca nel Cinquecento, ed. Adriano Prosperi and Wolfgang Reinhard (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 351–400; Antonio Barrera, “Local Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge, and Commodities in Spanish America,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 163–81; and Daniela Bleichmar, “Books, Bodies, and Fields: SixteenthCentury Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica,” in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 83–99.

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there could be nothing on earth unknown to the Bible or the ancient authorities. As a result, investigators saw the new arrivals in terms of those already described by the ancients, and looked for similarities and analogies. This was a process of integration, fitting the new plants into a preexisting unitary vision of nature. The study of plants was included in Italian medical faculties, and gardens of “simples” were established to facilitate the exchange of information and plant specimens at the European level. The confusion and ambivalence surrounding New World plants can be seen in the flurry of study that ensued during the second half of the sixteenth century. The approach of Pietro Antonio Michiel, Venetian patrician and botanist, is typical. Michiel was a great observer of plants. He assisted the prefect of the newly founded botanic garden in Padua for a time in the 1550s, kept his own garden on the “island” of San Trovaso in Venice (Dorsoduro), and was an assiduous trader in botanical news, seeds and specimens, corresponding with some of the greatest naturalists of the day. He recorded classical, Italian, and foreign plant names in order to identify them.19 And yet Michiel’s manuscript herbal, in five folios, describing 1,028 plants (of around 730 different species), did nothing to resolve any of the confusion. In addition to classifying the tomato as a variety of eggplant, Michiel records all of the tomato’s other names, from classical association (Lycopersicon Galeni, literally “Galen’s wolf-peach”) and vernacular term (pomodoro), to names used elsewhere in Europe (poma amoris, poma del Perù). He is content to list the names used, not confronting the contradiction posed between ancient attribution and Peruvian origins. But at least one contemporary realized investigators could not have it both ways. As physician Costanzo Felici wrote in 1569: “and some authors refer to it as Galen’s peach, but if it is a fruit come from Peru, as others suggest, then it could not very easily have been known by the ancients.”20 Plant investigators like Michiel were just as unsure how to classify the potato. Michiel may have described it, but it is clear from his description that he had never actually seen, much less tasted, one. The accompanying illustration, like those for most of Michiel’s New World plants, is similarly vague.21 Potatoes were first mentioned in a Spanish chronicle of Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, by soldier-scholar Pedro Cieza de León. Published in Spain in 1553, it became the source for Michiel’s information. Spanish chronicles about the conquest were quickly translated into Italian, as well as other European

19 20

21

Ibid., 116–17. Enzo Cecchini, ed. Costanzo Felici da Piobbico: Lettera sulle insalate, Lectio nona de fungis (Urbino: Arti grafiche editoriali, 1996), 97–8. José Pardo-Tomàs, “Tra ‘oppinioni’ e ‘dispareri’: la flora Americana nell’erbario di Pier’Antonio Michiel,” in La natura e il corpo: Studi in memoria di Attilio Zanca, ed. Giuseppe Olmi and Giuseppe Papagno (Florence: Olschki, 2006), 73–98.

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languages, and had a wide circulation.22 Michiel could have read Cieza’s work in one of five different Italian editions, four of which were published in Venice.23 And yet Italian authors refused to let go of a possible Old World origin. When the garden’s prefect, Giacomo Cortuso, compiled the first complete list of the plants in Padua’s botanic garden in 1591, it contained 1,170 entries, and one of them was the potato.24 Cortuso called it not by any of its New World names, but “Dioscorides’ Pycnocomus”: in other words, the pycnocomus as vaguely described by the ancient authority on materia medica, Dioscorides. This was a plant that other sixteenth-century botanists had been unable to identify – so why not apply the name to the potato? Otherwise, the potato is notable for its absence in most Italian botanical works. Neither Mattioli nor Castore Durante, in his Herbario nuovo (1585), mentions it. And other early possible references turn out to be about the sweet potato – a source of confusion for many years. It was not immediately obvious what the potato might be good for. Around this time, one of Europe’s richest and most wellconnected men obtained some potatoes from Michiel’s native Venice. In November 1580, Hans Fugger wrote from Augsburg to thank Hieronimus Ott in Venice for sending him the tartuffali (“little truffles,” one of the names by which potatoes were then being called).25 Fugger was an astute and avid collector of rare novelties and curiosities from the New World, with a dense network of correspondents and contacts throughout Europe, aside from being the scion of a powerful banking dynasty. Unfortunately for the historian – as with the Medici tomato encounter – there is no record of what Fugger did with his potatoes. A shame, perhaps, that Europeans did not pay more attention to New World usages of this strange new plant. When it comes to the main sources used in this chapter, botanical and dietetic treatises, their stay-at-home Italian authors, mostly doctors, were onesided in their (lack of) engagement with the reality of the Americas during the observation phase. The “experience” of food plants took place on Italian soil and rarely referred to, much less made use of, American practices and knowledge. This was in contrast to Italians actually living in the New World, who could be more open to an understanding of native uses. In his dictionary of the 22

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José Pardo-Tomàs, “La difusión en la Italia del siglo XVI de las obras españolas sobre historia natural y materia médica americanas,” in Viejo y nuevo continente: La medicina en el encuentro de dos mundos, ed. José M. López Piñero (Madrid: SANED, 1992), 309–24. Pedro Cieza de León, Parte primera de la chronica del Perú (Seville, 1553); Italian trans.: Pietro di Cieca di Lione, Cronica del gran regno del Peru (Venice: Pietro Bosello, 1560). Giacomo Antonio Cortuso, L’horto de i semplici di Padova (Venice: Girolamo Porro, 1591), cit. in Elsa Cappelletti, “Le collezioni viventi nell’orto botanico ai tempi di Cortuso (1591),” in L’orto botanico di Padova, 1545–1995, ed. Alessandro Minelli (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), 203. Letter of November 19, 1580, no. 1772 in Christl Karnehm, ed. Die Korrespondenz Hans Fuggers von 1566 bis 1594. Regesten der Kopierbücher aus dem Fuggerarchiv (München: Kommission für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 2003), vol. 2.1, 772–3.

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Aymara language of 1612, Italian Jesuit Lodovico Bertonio, active a long way from his native town of Rocca Contrada (modern Arcevia, in the province of Ancona), gives some of the different names applied to the diverse potatoes found in the central Andes, in what is now Bolivia.26 Jesuit missionaries like Bertonio made a point of exploring local cultures, from China to Mexico, as part of their conversion strategy, and dictionaries were part of this. So we learn from Bertonio that the Aymara differentiated their potatoes according to tuber phenotype (characteristics such as shape, skin and flesh color, and spacing of the “eyes”), ecology (resistance and adaptability), and culinary uses (texture and taste). Writing in 1628, Paduan physician Giovanni Domenico Sala was the last Italian to pay the potato any attention for 150 years. In describing the “rough, reddish, edible root,” “not long ago arrived in Italy,” Sala lists its various names and attributions, and how it can be cooked: in the embers, before being skinned and sprinkled with pepper.27 Sala is careful to distinguish potatoes (pappas) from sweet potatoes (battatas) and Jerusalem artichokes (asteris), but he nevertheless classifies them all together with other root vegetables, like turnips, parsnips, and carrots. These are all cold and moist, in terms of their “qualities.” They are also overly nourishing and hard to digest for the average person, according to Sala, which made them suitable only for peasants and other manual laborers.28 Commoners had enough other root vegetables to satisfy them, so that potatoes fell out of use in Italy after the first wave of muted botanical interest and curiosity. Confusion returned about what it was and what to call it: potato (our Solanum tuberosum), sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), and Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) were often confused or referred to in the same context. A similar sort of confusion surrounded the classification of maize, the first New World plant to attract widespread attention in Italy, as we saw at the start of this chapter. And yet seventy-five years after the first Italian reference to it, doubts as to its origins persisted. Mattioli first referred to maize in his 1571 edition of the commentary: the book was such a great success and its author so concerned to retain his preeminence in the field that he kept adding to it and republishing it for thirty years, until his death in 1577. He refers to maize as grano d’India (Indian corn), noting: “Amongst the species of grain that may be reasonably consumed is that which is wrongly called by some ‘Turkish wheat’ [formento turco], I say wrongly, because one should call it ‘Indian,’ and not 26

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Lodovico Bertonio, Vocabulario de la lengua Aymara [1612] (La Paz, Bolivia: Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Económica y Social, 1984), discussed in Stephen Brush, “Ethnoecology, Biodiversity, and Modernization in Andean Potato Agriculture,” Journal of Ethnobiology 12 (1992): 161–85, at 162, 164, 165. Giovanni Domenico Sala, De alimentis et eorum recta administratione (Padua: Giovanni Battista Martino, 1628), 12. Ibid., 54, 65, 77.

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‘Turkish,’ because it comes from the Western Indies, and not from Asia nor from Turkey as [botanist Leonhard] Fuchs believes.”29 The adjective “Turkish” has generated no end of difficulties among historians, who offer a variety of explanations, for instance, that maize had entered Venice by way of Bulgaria and Romania, then under Ottoman rule. However, it is just as plausible that “Turkish” was simply being used to indicate something foreign, exotic, perhaps even a bit threatening. “Turkish” or “Indian” might equally serve to label the New World arrivals: and in fact the edible “turkey” was first called gallo d’india in Italian, just as today’s granoturco (Italian for maize) was then called grano d’India.30 “The Indies” remained the common term for the Americas throughout the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth centuries, while also standing in for exoticism and abundance, derived from the fantastical and vaguely understood ancient land of India. When we add to this mix the lack, among Europeans, of accurate and detailed information about the native uses of things, we can begin to see why “Indian” (like “Turkish”) might refer to foods and objects from places as diverse as the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Levant.31 The curiosity value of the tomato and other New World plants went beyond physicians, taking in wealthy patrons and the educated public at large. Maize figured quite widely in Italian palace frescoes, decorating, for instance, the entryway of the garden room at the Villa Medici in Rome (Plate 8). Jacopo Zucchi painted the room in the late 1580s for Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, the owner of Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex and other important American treasures. The fact that maize was painted there suggests that it was growing outside in the garden. It was in the mixture of botanic and pleasure garden – since they both made room for “exotics” – that New World plants were first observed and experienced. As part of a process of information gathering, these gardens provided a laboratory that was at once scientific and practical. It was here that tomatoes, like maize, potatoes, tobacco, and American beans, were first grown before they were cultivated in the field.32 In August 1547, Cosimo expressed a wish to have a field of maize planted, “of the sort grown here . . . in the gardens of Florence and vicinity.” Evidently, Cosimo could not afford to be outdone by Lorenzo Cibo Malaspina, duke of Ferentillo, who had already planted maize at his estate in Agnano (near Pisa), so he ordered Pierfrancesco Riccio to procure as much seed as he could and keep 29

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Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Compendium de plantis omnibus, unà cum earum iconibus, de quibus scripsit suis in commentariis in Dioscoridem editis (Venice: Officina Valgrisiana, 1571), 305. The turkey was first compared to the guinea fowl, another edible bird with a place in its name (in this case Africa). Jessica Keating and Lia Markey, “‘Indian’ Objects in Medici and Austrian-Hapsburg Inventories: A Case Study of the Sixteenth-Century Term,” Journal of the History of Collections 23 (2011): 283–300, at 286–8. Ambrosoli, Wild and the Sown, 109; Sentieri and Zazzu, Semi dell’Eldorado, 275.

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it “because he wants to try planting a field of it.”33 Again, in April 1548, Cosimo ordered maize planted in his garden at Villa di Castello, specifically, in the field below the vivaio, the villa’s specially irrigated nursery and focal point.34 The entire villa had been renovated in 1537, becoming a showpiece, a means of propaganda and celebration of grand-ducal power, to impress visitors to the court, in which the botanical collections of the grand dukes would have pride of place.35 Were these comestible curiosities? Just occasionally, contemporaries ventured to try – in the sense of actually eat – some of the of the New World plants our medical investigators were writing about. In his Herbario nuovo of 1584, Roman physician and lecturer on simples at Rome’s “La Sapienza” University Castore Durante described tomatoes as “cold” (in terms of Galenic qualities) and warned that “they give little and poor nourishment.”36 Not everyone was put off. Felici tells us of the “gluttons and those eager for new things” who were prepared to eat them. Felici clearly did not count himself as one of them, though he did try them out of scientific curiosity. This involved frying tomatoes in a pan with the addition of juice of sour grapes (uva agresta), which Felici found “to my taste more beautiful than good.”37 Italian investigators like Durante and Felici continued with their observation and “experience” – Felici’s word – on the basis of living specimens. This was part of a sometimes very slow and painstaking process of identification and verification before the new foodstuffs might (or indeed might not) enter the food chain. From a dietary point of view, as opposed to a strictly botanical one, people like Felici and Durante were asking basic questions of the new plants. What do you resemble? What do you taste like? What can you replace?38 When it came to the tomato, the answer to the first question was the eggplant. As to the second, taste, it is evident that the tomato, like the sour grapes, was equated with tartness. For Felici, the tomato had nothing much to offer, other than its bright color, so it was not about to replace anything. It remained a curiosity or dietary extravagance, rather than a real foodstuff. Felici’s use of the word “experience” in this context is revealing, with its sense of trialing or testing something – something unusual or slightly suspect like the tomato. 33

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Archivio di Stato, Florence, Mediceo del Principato, b. 1170a, part 4, fol. 529, letter from Cristiano Pagni to Pierfrancesco Riccio, August 3, 1547. Archivio di Stato, Florence, Mediceo del Principato, b. 11, f. 88bis, unsigned and undated note (but probably April 30, 1548). Cristina Acidini Luchinat and Giorgio Galletti, Le ville e i giardini di Castello e Petraia a Firenze (Ospedaletto: Pacini, 1992), 75. Castore Durante, Herbario nuovo (Rome: B. Bonfadino and T. Diani, 1585), 372. Costanzo Felici, “Del’insalata e piante che in qualunque modo vengono per cibo dell’homo,” letter sent to Ulisse Aldrovandi, March 10, 1572, in Emilio Faccioli, ed. L’arte della cucina in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 469–90, at 480. Madeleine Ferrières, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, trans. J. Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 82–110.

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NATURALIZATION

Despite its uncertain beginnings in Italy, despite the lag between artistic depiction and actual cultivation, maize was the first of our three New World plants to be naturalized. It owed its early naturalization in Italy to its usefulness as food for the poor and substitute for lesser cereals. In what is perhaps the earliest Italian representation of a maize field, a map from 1549 shows part of an estate near Vigonza, in the countryside around Padua.39 The field is planted with what appears to be maize: not yet an established cultivation, but an occasional one, suited for marginal lands subject to seasonal flooding or to emergency situations, like famine. Maize was evidently not yet a part of the normal cycle of production or crop rotation. A year later, with famine threatening Tuscany, the self-styled “Cremonese nobleman resident in Venice,” Antonio Mussi, pitched a scheme to the Sienese authorities, by which he sought payment for a large quantity of seed corn, in exchange for overseeing its planting and milling, while providing instruction to interested landowners. Mussi boasted of his experience successfully growing the plant in the Venetian Republic, although the fact that he felt obliged to explain its characteristics and uses, careful to stress its value in times of dearth, suggests that we are still at an early stage in the naturalization of maize.40 By 1575, it was considered suitable for Tuscan galley slaves; and in 1630 in Venice and 1649 in Milan, supplies of maize were brought in to combat famines resulting from failures in the wheat harvest.41 With every harvest failure – and they came frequently – maize cultivation expanded further; it was more productive than other inferior cereals and more tolerant of the extremes of the Mediterranean climate. From famine food, maize became everyday food. Giacomo Agostinetti’s treatise of 1679 on running an agricultural estate, based on his experience as steward in the Veneto and Friuli, discusses maize among the many vegetables.42 By the eighteenth century, maize was being grown on a large scale in estates of the Po valley, where it had become part of the crop rotation and a staple element of the local peasant diet.43 Its quick naturalization was due to the way it could be easily accommodated into established food habits. Like other wheat substitutes, attempts were made to use maize in bread making, but the results were not encouraging. In parts of central and southern Italy, it was made into a flatbread, along the lines of modern focaccia. But the greatest success of all was 39 40

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Archivio Villa Emo, Treviso, Fondo Barisoni, in Finzi, “Sazia assai ma dà poco fiato,” 74. “Memoriale di Antonio Mussi,” Archivio di Stato, Siena, Balia, b. 721 (January–March 1550). On the poor harvests of 1549–51, see Aldo Mannucci, Vita di Cosimo I de’Medici granduca di Toscana (Pisa: Niccolò Capurro, 1822), 227, n. 1. Finzi, “Sazia assai ma dà poco fiato,” 28–9; Fassina, “Il mais nel Veneto,” 91. Giacomo Agostinetti, Cento e dieci ricordi che formano il buon fattor di villa, ed. Ulderico Bernardi and Enzo Dematté (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, [1679] 1998), 211–13. Gasparini, Polenta e formenton, 45ff.

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obtained by using the maize flour in another, traditional manner – polenta. A clear sign of this naturalization was the name given to the plant. In the Veneto maize was called formentón, the word previously used to indicate buckwheat.44 Wherever it was grown, the new word for maize took on the name of what had been the inferior cereal of that region, doing in people’s vocabulary just as it was doing in their fields and on their plates. As a result of this process of substitution, polenta went from being grey (buckwheat) to yellow (maize), as the plant became an established part of local cultivation and consumption. The social elites developed their own more sophisticated preparation methods for polenta: a further sign of naturalization. Maize, like the potato, started at the bottom of society and rose to the top (whereas the turkey took the opposite route). The 1775 appendix to Gallo’s treatise noted how, at first, “this very simple foodstuff” was eaten only by “poor peasants,” made with water and with little or nothing to accompany it; more recently, “artisans and town dwellers” had started to eat it; finally, “the landowners themselves wanted to try this rustic foodstuff, rendered more civilized by their customary seasonings.” This reminds us that a foodstuff’s naturalization is not only a factor of locale, but also one of class. In the process, maize’s health warning changed. If the social elites were initially put off by medical “scruples of the obstructions, bad humors and diseases it could cause,” they now believed maize to be “healthy, medicinal and beneficial for curing certain diseases and infirmities.”45 What the appendix did not mention was a terrible new disease associated with maize consumption that had first made its appearance in Italy in the middle of the century (and in Spain from the 1730s). Shifts in landholding and trade patterns during the eighteenth and nineteenth century meant that for agricultural laborers maize polenta became the staple food, and during winter and spring virtually the only food they consumed. The result of maize subsistence in the form of polenta was pellagra, the terrible disease of the four ‘d’s: dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death. It was first described in Italy in the 1760s and the popular label for it, pelle agra, meaning “rough skin,” soon became the accepted medical term. Debate over the nature of pellagra and its causation ensued in Lombardy and the Veneto, the two regions most affected, although the exact nature of the link between maize and pellagra, as a deficiency disease, would not become apparent until the 1930s.46 Closer 44

45 46

Luigi Messedaglia, “Omonomie pericolose,” in idem, La gloria del mais e altri scritti sull’alimentazione veneta (Vicenza: Angelo Colla, [1927] 2008), 61–9. Pilati, “Aggiunta,” 553–4. David Gentilcore, “‘Italic Scurvy,’ ‘Pellarina,’ ‘Pellagra’: Medical Reactions to a New Disease in Italy, 1770–1830,” in A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface, ed. Jonathan Reinarz and Kevin Siena (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 57–70; Giovanni Levi, “The Diffusion of Maize in Italy: From Resistance to the Peasants’ Defeat,” in Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–1824, ed. Bethany Aram and Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 100–16.

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attention to native American uses and preparation methods for maize might have spared Europeans this terrible epidemic. Because native societies were judged inferior by Europeans, the various roles plants had within them were not passed on except in a very superficial way. As it was, the European obsession with wheat, flour, and famine meant a cultural predisposition to treat maize like a cereal, with the result that, unbeknownst to them, the essential amino acid niacin, although present in maize, could not be absorbed by the body, resulting in pellagra. Though with fewer negative side effects, the naturalization of the tomato was much slower in coming. Initial suspicions about the tomato became firmly rooted. Even in areas like Italy where it could grow, the tomato had no obvious functions or characteristics to help it on its way. Other than its color, it had no positive signs for contemporary writers, like flavor or aroma. In comparison with other vegetables already available, it could not satisfy the pangs of hunger and was not filling, so it could not be recommended for the peasant population. And aside from the suspicious eggplant, it had no preexisting plant to ease its way into the dietary regimes of the time. By the 1660s, the tomato appears in a list of the “many fruits [the Italians] eat, which we either have not, or eat not in England,” compiled by English theologian, naturalist, and gardener John Ray during a three-year visit to the Continent (1663–6).47 The changing attitude to fruit and vegetables that characterized the late Renaissance period had something to do with this. So, too, did changing medical and scientific notions about how the process of digestion worked, its acidity increasingly valued. The tomato itself had not changed; attitudes toward it had. Before long it was appearing as an ingredient in cookbooks, such as that of Antonio Latini, steward of a Spanish noble family in Naples;48 on the tables of religious orders, like the Jesuits, in Rome;49 and in paintings from the Marche. Of the no fewer than ninety-nine still lifes that have been attributed to Carlo Magini, active in the middle of the eighteenth century, six contain tomatoes.50 Each painting is a meal or a dish, waiting to be cooked and consumed. Magini offers a close fit with documented dietary practices, suggesting how the tomato might be prepared and eaten: combined with eggplants and squash, to be served with cheese, eggs, chicken, or grilled mullet.

47

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John Ray, Travels through the Low-Countries, Germany, Italy and France, 2 vols. (London, [1673] 1730), 1, “Several sorts of meats, fruits, sallets, etc. used in Italy and other observations on diet,” 346–50. Antonio Latini, Lo scalco alla moderna, overo l’arte di ben disporre i conuiti, con le regole piu scelte di scalcheria, insegnate, e poste in pratica (Naples: Domenico Antonio Parrino e Michele Mutii, 1692–4), 2:55. David Gentilcore, “The Levitico, or How to Feed a Hundred Jesuits,” Food & History 8 (2010): 87–120. Pietro Zampetti, ed. Carlo Magini (Milan: Motta, 1990).

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By the end of the eighteenth century, the tomato was also being concentrated into a dry paste. A dense preserve like this could be stored and was used as a seasoning for soups and meats and in sauces. It appears in the kitchen account books of the Saluzzo family, dukes of Corigliano (Calabria), for the years 1789–91, as salsa or conserva di pomodoro. It is listed alongside other spices and flavorings – like cinnamon, nutmeg, and black pepper – an indication of how it was perceived.51 This use as condiment was a sign of things to come, even if the tomato’s real success lay in the nineteenth century, when it would become married to pasta and when tomato processing would become an important industry. The chronology of the potato is similar. Other New World arrivals made effective substitutes for existing foodstuffs. Maize could be turned into flour or meal, as we have seen; chili pepper into a spice far cheaper and more pungent than black pepper; and American beans were accepted so heartily that they lost any separate identity. By contrast, the potato, like the tomato, would only come into its own when Europeans learned to treat it as something different and developed new culinary associations for it. It is ironic that the earliest source of potatoes for Europe’s keen botanists was Spain and Italy, in southern Europe, whilst the regions quickest to cultivate and consume it were all in northern Europe. At first, the potato’s strangeness in Italian eyes meant ambivalence at best, disregard at worst. Europeans were unfamiliar with roots or tubers as a staple crop like wheat. Those roots that they already knew, like the turnip, were at most winter vegetables; and these were reproduced from seeds, not eyes or cuttings, as in the case with the potato. In their attempts to combat famine, Enlightenment reformers proposed using it to make bread – unsuccessfully – as a result, it was not about to take the place of cereals. Finally, technical problems delayed the potato’s spread. The first potato varieties introduced, to judge by contemporary botanical illustrations, were the short-day andigena varieties, rather than the long-day tuberosum varieties. These would not have set tubers until the onset of shorter, colder days in autumn, so they may not have had a chance to ripen fully before the cold set in, and unripe potatoes are potentially toxic. The selection of varieties suitable for planting in the European spring took more than 100 years. No wonder the Italian elites stuck to their truffles, and the mountain poor to their chestnuts. Two hundred years later, not much had changed. In 1769, Giuseppe Baretti, Turin native and long-time resident in London, wrote of his fellow Italians:

51

Lia Domenica Baldissarro, “Osservazioni sull’alimentazione nel secolo XVIII attraverso le carte di amministrazione di due famiglie nobili: Milano-Franco di Polistena e Saluzzo di Corigliano,” in Gli archivi per la storia dell’alimentazione, ed. Paola Carucci (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1995), 2:1250–65.

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We have not yet the use of the potatoe. . . . Such is the repugnance that the generality of mankind have for eating what they have not been accustomed to eat, that an English captain who brought to Naples a large cargo of potatoes during the late famine, was obliged to throw them overboard, as he could not even find people willing to take them for nothing. And yet we have several nations, if I may so call them, along the ridge of the Apennines, who eat almost nothing else through a good part of the year but chestnuts, of which they make even bread; and many poor peasants in other parts, who eat almost nothing else but polenta instead of wheat-bread.52

Why should the potato have found such fertile terrain in places like Ireland, in parts of France and in the Low Countries, from the early decades of the seventeenth century, whilst being rejected just about everywhere else until the late eighteenth century, and in Italy until the mid-nineteenth century?53 The answer must lie in large measure in the difficulties of growing potatoes in a Mediterranean climate, before its particular ecological niche could be found. According to one eighteenth-century Italian potato campaigner, Pietro Maria Bignami, the potato was “quite reluctant to become acclimatized and propagate in this climate.”54 In northern Europe, where the main threat to the harvest was too much rain and cold during the summer months, the potato did well. In much of Italy, by contrast, the usual danger was drought. As a result, the potato held little obvious attraction for Italian growers. Since most of Italy is mountainous, much could have been learned from native American practices in the potato’s Andean home. However, in addition to being dismissive of native American culture, Europeans had yet to explore or perceive the “mountain” in its specificity. It was only in the nineteenth century that Italian agronomists began recommending that the potato be grown higher up, where chestnuts prospered. During Baretti’s time, opposition to the potato came not only from the peasants who were being asked to grow and eat it, but from landowners. The landowning elites were hostile to potato cultivation on a large scale since they were doing quite well selling their cereals, even when these were bought at “political” prices during famines. Change is only noticeable from the 1830s, when the potato was increasingly cultivated in mountain areas where polyculture (mixed planting) dominated, making the most efficient use of limited resources. 52

53

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Giuseppe Baretti, An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (London: T. Davies and L. Davis, 1769), 2:202–3. Christian Vandenbroeke, “Cultivation and Consumption of the Potato in the 17th and 18th century,” Acta Historiae Neerlandica, 5 (1971): 15–39; Michel Morineau, “The Potato in the Eighteenth Century,” in Food and Drink in History: Selections from the Annales, ed. Robert Forster and Orest A. Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 17–36 [originally in French in the Annales 25 (1970): 1767–84]. Pietro Maria Bignami, Le patate (Bologna: Lelio della Volpe, 1773), 20.

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But this takes us beyond the chronological confines of this book. It is curious that potato cultivation was practiced by Italian peasants working on a small scale, in more marginal upland areas. This development happened, not as the Enlightenment agronomists had recommended, in order to produce more animal fodder and establish a more efficient system of crop rotation, but because peasant families sought to meet their own consumption needs. CONCLUSION

What do the histories of our three food plants reveal about connections between Italy and the New World during the early modern period? First of all, the chronology and geography differs for each of the three products considered. While maize, one of the first plants brought back from the New World, was grown in northern Italy by the sixteenth century and later revolutionized the area’s agrarian economy, the potato remained marginal before conquering Italy’s uplands in the mid-nineteenth century. The history of the tomato takes us from its ornamental and botanical cultivation and first hesitant dietary use in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; through to its small-scale agricultural cultivation and use as a condiment and seasoning in the eighteenth, in particular in central and southern Italy. When it comes to engagement with the Americas, the Italian elites – medical and otherwise – were intensely curious about the New World plants. This is evident in the frenzied information gathering, knowledge exchange, and “experiences” of what we have called the observation phase. However, the substantial time lag between this and our second phase, naturalization, suggests that Italians were not much interested in native American uses and in applying these to Italian realities; indeed, they were not much interested in consuming the new plants at all. The potato and tomato languished because Italians quite simply did not know what to do with them (or much care); whereas with maize, they were quite certain what to do with it – that is, drying it and turning it into flour – resulting in 150 years of unnecessary suffering and death due to pellagra. As Massimo Montanari has noted, it took the recurrent combination of hunger and harvest failure (along with comparatively high yields, we would add) to convince Italians of the usefulness of cultivating and consuming, first, maize, and later the potato.55 What the “naturalization” phase also suggests is that, rather than transforming Italian diets, the New World plants were themselves transformed in the process. Just as maize took the place of buckwheat in the making of polenta, and tomatoes were used to season existing dishes, Italians adapted New World food plants to suit their own culinary traditions, norms, and preferences. 55

Massimo Montanari, La fame e l’abbondanza. Storia dell’alimentazione in Europa (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993), 125.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

RENAISSANCE FLORENTINES IN THE TROPICS: BRAZIL, THE GRAND DUCHY OF TUSCANY, AND THE LIMITS OF EMPIRE Brian Brege

There was proverbially and probably literally a Florentine in every corner of the world. -Fernand Braudel1

For all its brilliant sophistication, Lorenzo il Magnifico’s (1449–92) Florence had no conception that Brazil existed. Just over a century later, old Tuscan families had settled and earned fortunes there, while Grand Duke Ferdinando I (1549–1609) sought to plant a Tuscan colony on Brazilian shores. The flourishing of individual Florentines in early colonial Brazil and the ultimate failure of Medici projects there reveal the possibilities and limitations of Tuscan engagement with Brazil. Traditional accounts of the sixteenth-century turn to the Atlantic have no space for the reality of Tuscan ports and ships engaged in long-distance trade. In this classic narrative, the powerful Italian states that dominated the medieval Mediterranean were supposed to have been left behind. In reality, Tuscans were fascinated by the prospects of the Americas, and especially of Brazil, but encountered persistent obstacles. These were neither technical nor financial, but political. Abbreviations: ASF = Archivio di Stato di Firenze, MdP = Mediceo del Principato, MAP = Medici Archive Project (www.medici.org/). Thanks to Beth Coggeshall, David Como, Paula Findlen, Elizabeth Horodowich, and Lia Markey for sources. 1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., 2nd revised ed., 1966, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), I:312.

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As soon as the Portuguese established regular maritime links across the Atlantic in the early sixteenth century, Tuscany gained mediated access to American goods through the long-established Florentine community in Lisbon.2 Transfers of colonial goods from Spain and Portugal to Tuscany’s principal port of Livorno appear regularly in surviving records: a 1567 bill of lading, a 1577 ship’s inventory, and avvisi from 1606 illustrate the pattern.3 While most Tuscan interactions with the Americas relied on other Europeans, direct access to the Americas from Tuscany was quite possible and sometimes occurred.4 By the late sixteenth century, Livorno had become a major port for oceangoing ships. Long-distance journeys, while uncommon, faced no technical barrier.5 On November 29, 1581, for instance, a ship carrying brazilwood arrived in Livorno directly from Brazil; in 1610, two ships, probably Portuguese, arrived from the Indian Ocean.6 Indeed, Tuscany had at least one oceangoing ship in service. In November 1586, the grand duke of Tuscany’s galleon, then in Spain, was chartered to carry munitions to Havana.7 Global conflict brought the galleon on an expedition against English piracy in the viceroyalty of Peru in 1587 and, ultimately, to a fiery doom in the Spanish Armada.8 2

3

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Anthony R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire: From Beginnings to 1807, 2 vols., I: Portugal; II: The Portuguese Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), II:241. For Florentines in Lisbon, see Nunziatella Alessandrini, “Images of India through the Eyes of Filippo Sassetti, a Florentine Humanist Merchant in the 16th Century,” in Sights and Insights: Interactive Images of Europe and the Wider World, ed. Mary N. Harris and Csaba Lévai (Pisa: PLUS-Pisa University Press, 2007), 46. For the 1567 bill of lading, see Medici Archive Project (MAP) Doc ID 17315, entry for Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato (MdP) 529a, 822 sent from Livorno on May 26, 1567. For the 1577 ship’s inventory, see MAP Doc ID 12585, entry for ASF, MdP 695, 199, sent from Livorno to Francesco I de’ Medici in Florence on March 20, 1577. For the avvisi of 1606, see MAP Doc ID 16443, entry for ASF, MdP 5080, 400 sent from Madrid to Florence on December 20, 1606. For the collection, display, and usage of objects from the Americas in Tuscany, see Detlef Heikamp with contributions by Ferdinand Anders, Mexico and the Medici, Quaderni d’Arte (Florence: Edam, 1972), and Lia Markey, “The New World in Renaissance Italy: A Vicarious Conquest of Art and Nature at the Medici Court,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008. Braudel, Mediterranean, II:821, cites Werner Sombart for Genoa’s equivalent suitability to Hamburg and Amsterdam for long-distance maritime trade. For Brazil, see Braudel, Mediterranean, I:106, n. 18, which cites ASF, MdP 2080 (November 29, 1581). Braudel gives the ship as “probably Portuguese (the Santo Antonio, captain Baltasar Dias) loaded in Brazil and carrying notably 460 cantars of pau brasil” (636, n. 547). For the ships from the Indian Ocean, see Braudel, Mediterranean, I:636, and 636, n. 548, which cites ASF, MdP 2079, 337 and 365. Braudel explains that, “the first ship, Nuestra Señora do Monte del Carmine, from Goa, had a cargo of 4000 cantars of pepper and her arrival is dated merely 1610 without details; on 14th August, 1610, arrived Nostra Signora di Pietà, from the East Indies, carrying 4170 cantars of pepper, precious stones and 145 cantars of Indian fabrics” (636, n. 548). Braudel, Mediterranean, I:106 and 106, n. 17. Eladi Romero García, El imperialismo hispanico en la Toscana durante el siglo XVI (Lleida: Dilagro, 1986), 126.

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As we have seen throughout this volume, early modern Italians were fascinated by the Americas. Neither technology nor lack of interest, then, blocked direct Tuscan access to the Americas; politics did. Iberian restrictions ostensibly banned outside involvement in the Indies. Tuscany’s close alliance with the Spanish Habsburgs, who had engineered the Medici return to Florence in 1530, and Spanish Habsburg power prevented Tuscany from making any outright break.9 In this chapter, I explore how individual Florentines from prominent families had striking success in surmounting the political obstacles to access, making fortunes and rising to positions of leadership in early colonial Brazil. By contrast, the Tuscan state’s creative and persistent efforts to organize trade links and arrange for direct colonization proved much less fruitful. These distinct outcomes rested on the politics of Tuscany’s fraught alliance with the Spanish Habsburg monarchy. The grand duchy of Tuscany was ultimately neither trusted enough to secure open commerce nor powerful enough to challenge Iberian restrictions. A FLORENTINE BANKER AND BRAZIL

With resources fully stretched by vast ambitions – from a quest to dominate Indian Ocean trade to enterprises around Africa – until 1530, Portugal’s efforts in Brazil were modest, focused on the extraction of brazilwood and trade through coastal feitorias. Portugal was, however, determined to enforce its claims to exclusive control. When French interloping threatened that monopoly, the Portuguese dramatically increased their commitment to territories claimed but not substantively occupied. The first Portuguese royal expedition (1530–4) set out to expel French interlopers and set up a settlement near what is now Santos.10 Portugal’s distinctive approach to colonization created economic and political structures that allowed Florentines to play a prominent role in early colonial 9

10

Indeed, restrictions on outsiders were so legally entrenched that, realities on the ground notwithstanding, Philip II wrote to his viceroy in Goa in 1594 reaffirming the prohibition on trade between the Portuguese East Indies and the Castilian West Indies, though Philip II was king of both. Historical Archives of Goa, Archive Number 7, Livros das Monções do Reino, no. 5, 44–5. Philip had promised to govern Portugal separately in 1581: Disney, History of Portugal, I:196–200. Disney, History of Portugal, II:204–7 and 210–11. Mickaël Augeron and Laurent Vidal, “Creating Colonial Brazil: The First Donatary Captaincies, or the System of Private Exclusivity (1534–1549),” in Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic, ed. Louis H. Roper and Bertrand van Ruymbeke (Boston, MA: Brill, 2007), 22–5. John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 377–411. For brazilwood, see Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 31–4.

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Brazil. The manifest inadequacy of the Portuguese Crown’s resources to the task of colonizing Brazil led it to mobilize private capital and personnel to found colonies. Portugal’s solution drew on its experience colonizing and administering Atlantic islands. In 1532–3, Martim Afonso de Sousa, leader of the royal expedition, divided the coast from Pernambuco to the southern edge of Portuguese territory into fifty-league captaincies. Extending the model north to the Amazon, the Portuguese Crown granted fifteen captaincies between 1534 and 1536. The donatary (doação – donation) captaincies were supposed to be hereditary, inalienable territories governed by captains who stood between the crown, which reserved certain rights over specific resources, and the subgrantees (sesmeiros) who were to actually develop the land. The captains acted as military and political leaders, possessed extensive judicial rights, and drew financial support from lands held directly and the right to levy taxes and dues on colonists. These opportunities were not restricted to native Portuguese.11 It is at this stage that Florentines enter our story. While the captaincy model proved incapable of sustaining the entire project of colonizing Brazil, it achieved its initial objectives. Using substantial private resources, settlements were planted in ten captaincies within a few years; some survived and a couple, especially Pernambuco and São Vicente, prospered immediately. All captaincies required nearly endless supplies of capital. War with understandably aggrieved Amerindians, slavery, and the costs of establishing new port cities, lucrative sugar mills, and transatlantic shipping consumed vast resources. An equipped and armed nef (a type of ship) in the 1530s cost 75,000 cruzados, a sum that required the donatary captain of Espírito Santo, Vasco Fernandes Coutinho, to sell all his possessions and take on debts. With outlays like these and profits expected well in the future, bankers were clearly needed. Fortunately, the community of Florentine merchants and bankers that had long resided in Lisbon possessed the necessary capital and skills, and was becoming ever more Portuguese with the passage of years.12 Luca Giraldi (1493–1565) first appears in Lisbon in 1515. Compromised by their republican politics, the Giraldi family officially cut ties with Florence after 1527. Giraldi then immersed himself in the Portuguese world, entering the sugar business in Madeira (1527–9), captaining a ship to India (1540), and eventually becoming a Portuguese noble (1550s). His illegitimate son, Francesco, legitimized after his father’s success, joined the Portuguese service elite, eventually serving as Portuguese ambassador to France and to England and governor of Bahia. Portuguese royal intervention in Brazil in 1548–9 had

11 12

Augeron and Vidal, “Creating Colonial Brazil,” 23–30; Disney, History of Portugal, II:210–16. Disney, History of Portugal, II:212 and 235–6. Augeron and Vidal, “Creating Colonial Brazil,” 33–43. Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 109.

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created a royal administration, turned Bahia into a royal captaincy, and reined in the captains.13 While Giraldi severed his own family’s direct ties to Florence, his banking service for the Portuguese Crown led him to renew connections with old Florentine families like the Bardi and the Cavalcanti. Working with the Cavalcanti, Giraldi remitted funds to cover debts contracted by Portuguese elites in Rome. Giraldi’s role as a trusted financial broker for the Portuguese ruling class made him well positioned to invest in Brazil. This he did by investing in rights to colonization in the captaincy of São Jorge dos Ilhéus from 1547. Here, Giraldi held one of the four sesmarias and participated in a consortium with the other sesmeiros to invest in sugar production, transport slaves from Guinea, and bring the animals, people, and implements necessary for an agricultural economy from Lisbon. These investments bore immediate fruit with the creation of an intensive trade between Lisbon and Ilhéus in the late 1540s, although war with the Tupinkin and an epidemic in the following decade wrought devastating damage. The need for fresh infusions of capital in the deeply damaged Portuguese position in Ilhéus, however, opened a space for Giraldi. He purchased the captaincy of Ilhéus from Jerónimo de Alarção de Figueiredo, the son and successor (1551) of the original captain, in 1560–1 for 4,825 cruzados.14 Thus, a Florentine banker turned Portuguese noble held one of the fifteen Brazilian captaincies. Yet this is not entirely a story of becoming Portuguese, since Luca Giraldi’s son Francesco developed new ties with the Tuscan government. A Francesco Giraldi in Brazil was the recipient of a request from the grand duke in 1586 that “when some curiosity or seeds come to your hands, which are not here,” that he send them.15 Francesco seems to have fulfilled this request. On April 30, 1588, Medici ambassador Vincenzo di Andrea Alamanni in Madrid wrote to Ferdinando I to report that he was sending along a case he had received from cavaliere Francesco Giraldi.16 Francesco Giraldi may also have 13

14

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Stefano Tabacchi, “Giraldi, Luca,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI), vol. 56 (2001) www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/luca-giraldi_(Dizionario-Biografico)/. Marica Milanesi, Filippo Sassetti (Florence: La Nuova, 1973), 35. On royal intervention and captaincies: Augeron and Vidal, “Creating Colonial Brazil,” 43–8. On Bahia: Augeron and Vidal, “Creating Colonial Brazil,” 44, n. 44, 45, and 50. The Crown continued to create captaincies; they were dissolved in the 1753 Pombaline reforms (Disney, History of Portugal, II:213). Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, paperback 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 104–5. Authorization to sell: 1560; royal confirmation: 1561. Augeron and Vidal, “Creating Colonial Brazil,” 35–6 (Table 3) and 50–1 (Table 8). Stefano Tabacchi, “Giraldi, Luca,” DBI, vol. 56 (2001). ASF, MdP 270, 6–7. This register contains condensed contents of letters. MAP Doc ID 19301, entry for ASF, MdP 270, 6 from Francesco I de’ Medici to Francesco Giraldi, December 26, 1586. MAP Doc ID 8238, entry for ASF, MdP 4919, 222 from Vincenzo di Andrea Alamanni in Madrid to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Florence, April 30, 1588. For Alamanni, see MAP Person ID 133, “Alamanni, Vincenzo di Andrea.”

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been a source of political and military information. The grand duke received a letter concerning English piracy against the Portuguese from a Francesco Giraldi.17 That the grand duke should show an interest in such distant affairs constitutes a marker of the political transformation since the Giraldi had left. Florence had been a fractious, inward-looking republic; now it was the capital of a globally ambitious absolute monarchy.18 ESPÍRITO SANTO

As the Tuscan diaspora integrated into its host societies, profiting from Iberian empire, the newly dynamic Tuscan state tried to follow its example. The Medici sought to acquire donatary captaincies on both sides of the Atlantic under the aegis of the Portuguese Crown (held by the Spanish Habsburgs since 1580).19 In 1608–9, the Medici explored buying the rights to, as yet unconquered, Sierra Leone from Pedro Álvares Pereira, a Portuguese noble. They were confronted by restrictions on settlement and trade, to the Portuguese and to Lisbon respectively, issues about appointments, and concerns about political allegiance; the bid failed.20 It was far easier for an individual Tuscan who had planted roots in Portugal to insert himself and his family into the project of empire. In a similar vein, earlier in 1608, the grand duke explored acquiring the captaincy of Espírito Santo in Brazil for his second or third son.21 Espírito Santo had been a troubled captaincy in its early years, with a fledgling sugar economy crushed by an Amerindian revolt. Vasco Fernandes Coutinho eventually 17

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20

21

Angelo De Gubernatis, ed., Storia dei viaggiatori italiani nelle Indie Orientali (Livorno: Francesco Vigo, 1875), 27–8. De Gubernatis cited “Lettera inedita, negli archivii toscani (Carte di Spagna)” (28, n. 1). Florentine historiography is vast. For some concise English accounts, see Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries 1527–1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); J. R. Hale, Florence and the Medici, 1977 paperback ed. (London: Phoenix, 2001); and John M. Najemy, A History of Florence: 1200–1575, 2006 paperback ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). For a recent edited volume, see Jean Boutier, Sandro Landi, and Olivier Rouchon, eds. Firenze e la Toscana: Genesi e trasformazione di uno stato (xiv–xix secolo), 2004, originally, Florence et la Toscane, XIV°–XIX° siècles. Les dynamiques d’un État italien (Firenze: Mandragora, 2010). Niccolò Capponi, “Le Palle di Marte: Military Strategy and Diplomacy in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under Ferdinand II de’ Medici (1621–1670),” The Journal of Military History 68 (2004): 1110. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização e Comércio Toscanos no Brasil ao Tempo do Grão Duque Fernando I (1587–1609),” Revista de História 142–3 (2000), 121, transcribes as Document #8 a short letter from Ferdinando I to Cardinal Maria Francesco del Monte Santa Maria in Rome of December 29, 1608. Paul Edward Hedley Hair and Jonathan D. Davies, “Sierra Leone and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany,” History in Africa 20 (1993), 61–9. Hair and Davies cited ASF, MdP 960, 363/412; ASF, MdP 951, 609; ASF, Miscellanea Medicea, 29, Insert 36, 1; ASF, Miscellanea Medicea, 29, Insert 36, 3–5; ASF, Miscellanea Medicea, 29, Insert 36, 6; ASF, MdP 3762 A; ASF, MdP 960, 364/411; ASF, MdP 960, 362/413. Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização,” 96. Hair and Davies, “Sierra Leone,” 62.

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renounced his captaincy to the royal governor in the late 1550s, but the captaincy was then granted to his nephew, Francisco de Aguiar Coutinho, in 1560.22 Ferdinando I wrote on November 9, 1608 to Sallustio Tarugi, his ambassador at the Spanish Habsburg court, of his desire to acquire “some place in New Spain or on the Coast of Brazil” under “obedience to His Catholic Majesty.” Ferdinando I had heard news of Espírito Santo, “under the Crown of Portugal” and “held in perpetual fief by certain Portuguese.”23 The grand duke expected little sugar, nor did he expect to find mines, but he considered its wood supplies of value.24 Keenly aware of the political challenges, Ferdinando proffered the sending of one of his sons as an attraction to Philip III, but then conceded to Tarugi that “it would suffice therefore to have license to be able to send two vessels every year for as many years as it should seem to His Majesty, the which vessels would be able to go and come freely, paying to His Majesty his rights as is required.”25 Ferdinando I’s knowledge of this Brazilian possibility suggests that he was quite well informed, drawing on Florentine émigrés in Brazil, Medici diplomats in Spain, and occasional letters from Brazil that reached Florence for information.26 The Medici bid was modest, well informed, and plausible. It was nonetheless rejected by Philip III’s government.27 BECOMING BRAZILIAN

Medici setbacks notwithstanding, Florentines continued to prosper in Brazil. The Cavalcanti of Brazil – whose relatives in Rome we have met – trace their origins to Filippo Cavalcanti. Scipione Ammirato recounts that Filippo Cavalcanti left Florence around 1550, heading first to Lisbon and then to the sugar center of Olinda in Pernambuco, Brazil; there he prospered.28 Ammirato explains that: 22

23

24

25 26

27 28

Augeron and Vidal, “Creating Colonial Brazil,” 32, 39, 48, and 50–1 (Table 8). On sugar: Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização,” 96; Burkholder and Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 162–5 and Map 6 (168). ASF, MdP 4939, 638 transcribed as Document #7 in Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização,” 119–20. MAP Person ID 873, “Tarugi, Sallustio.” ASF, MdP 4939, 638 transcribed as Document #7 in Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização,” 120. Ibid. ASF, MdP 4275, 20 and 21. MAP Doc ID 9952, entry for ASF, MdP 5080, 315. From Rio de Janeiro to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Florence on August 20, 1601. Giuseppe Gino Guarnieri, Un’audace impresa marittima di Ferdinando I dei Medici (Con una tavola fuori testo, documenti e glossario indo-caraibico): Contribuito alla storia della marina mercantile Italiana (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1928), 7 and 7, n. 4, which cites ASF, MdP 949, 1346r of July and August 1608. Hair and Davies, “Sierra Leone,” 62. Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização,” 96. ASF, Manoscritti, 382: “ISTORIA Della Famiglia de Cavalcanti scritta da Scipione Ammirato l’Anno 1586”; the title notwithstanding, it was updated through 1626. Thanks to Beth Coggeshall of Stanford for introducing me to this document, which she found as part of her work on the friends of Dante.

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He joined in alliance with the Lady Donna Caterina, Daughter of the Most Noble Lord Girolamo Albuquerque, a Noble Family of the Kingdom of Portugal and of Brazil. From them, he received some machines to refine sugar, and, with his wit and manner, became very rich, and in that country was a great man, who acquired grace with those people, and therefore, being very clever, governed the entire state by his wit for a long time, to the great and universal satisfaction of all those people, who greatly esteemed him.29

Amidst his account of how Cavalcanti’s offspring became part of the colonial Brazilian elite, Ammirato stressed that Portuguese primogeniture rules made Antonio Cavalcanti, born in 1560, Filippo’s heir.30 Continuing to describe this Florentine family’s ascent in colonial society, Ammirato wrote: Antonio Cavalcanti, first born and heir of Filippo, being in Brazil as above, took for wife the noble and wealthy Lady Isabella di Vasconsalos. He served the Catholic King for many years in the war of that country, with great burdens and with a great deal of his purse.31

Antonio Cavalcanti had a remarkably large family. Ammirato explained that, at the time of writing, Antonio Cavalcanti and eleven of his twenty children then lived. His heir, Girolamo, was in Brazil and, “is very rich, and is occupied in the service of the King of Spain.”32 As with the Giraldi, the Cavalcanti show both the openness of the Portuguese Brazilian elite to Florentines acculturated in Lisbon and the ways that ties to Florence mutually benefited Florentines in the Americas and the Tuscan state. Filippo Cavalcanti, scion of a famous Florentine house, had emigrated from ducal Florence in search of fortune. This he certainly found, in part by marrying into a major Portuguese family and by immigrating to Brazil. Yet the Cavalcanti also remained Florentine. Indeed, Antonio’s residual Florentine status brought this Brazilian sugar magnate into contact with the grand duke. On April 16, 1607, Medici ambassador to Spain Sallustio Tarugi wrote from Madrid regarding Antonio’s efforts to demonstrate his authentically Brazilian roots. This, ironically, required Florentine support, even though Cavalcanti’s eligibility for such support tacitly acknowledged his Florentine status. Tarugi wrote: Antonio Cavalcanti, who lives in Brazil, has showed me a letter of the Grand Duke our Lord in which His Highness says that, having ordered Signor Roderigo Alidosi his Ambassador in that time with the name, authority and favor of His Highness to help and favor certain pretensions of the said Cavalcanti, by virtue of the same letter and order, he would now like me to speak to these Lords of the Council of Portugal and where it would be necessary for the good dispatch of his pretensions, which must 29

ASF, Manoscritti, 382.

30

Ibid.

31

Ibid.

32

Ibid.

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be, as far as I understand, to be declared native to these Kingdoms and eligible for all the favors and privileges that are customarily enjoyed by natives and noblemen.33

The current ambassador did not know who Cavalcanti was and asked for instructions.34 His perplexity is understandable. Why had the grand duke wanted to intercede when Alidosi was ambassador? Alidosi was ambassador in Spain in 1602 and by 1605 was the Medici envoy to Poland, so Cavalcanti’s letter comes from 1602–4.35 This may bring us to an answer. Cavalcanti was a Brazilian sugar magnate, and in 1602, the Medici were fascinated by the possibility of bringing Brazilian sugar directly to the new Tuscan port of Livorno. They were then willing to do him favors. LIVORNO AND THE QUEST FOR SUGAR

Tuscany’s ability to enter the emerging Atlantic economy rested squarely on Livorno, a city famous in the historiography for its seventeenth-century flowering as a tolerant free port. Cosimo I (r. 1537–74) and Francesco I (r. 1574–87) laid the foundations of this future with massive investment in the city’s infrastructure, fortifications, and transport connections and Cosimo I’s 1545 grant of unique autonomy and fiscal advantages. Rapid growth, however, started in the 1590s with Ferdinando I’s (r. 1587–1609) affirmation of a legal architecture, including low customs duties and a welcoming attitude to religious minorities and foreigners, embodied in and symbolized by the livornine of 1591 and 1593.36 Contemporary accounts of Janus-faced Livorno, however, stress its military side. Sir Thomas Sherley, an English gentleman adventurer who briefly served the grand duke, wrote of Livorno in 1606–7 that “it wyll bee the finest smalle towne of Itali” and that its “fortification is one of the best that euer I sawe.”37 33 35 36

37

ASF, MdP 4937, 506r. 34 Ibid. MAP Person ID 147, “Alidosi de Mendoza, Rodrigo.” Corey Tazzara, “The Masterpiece of the Medici: Commerce, Politics, and the Making of the Free Port of Livorno, 1574–1790,” PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2011; Stephanie Nadalo, “Constructing Pluralism in Seventeenth-Century Livorno: Managing Religious Minorities in a Mediterranean Free Port (1537–1737),” PhD. dissertation, Northwestern University, 2013; Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 50–1, Table 2.1, 54–6, 57, 74, 78–9, and 107–8. Braudel, Mediterranean, I:629–36, 641 and II:819. Goldthwaite, Economy of Renaissance Florence, 38, 42, 114–15, and 124. Lambeth Palace Library (LPL), MS 514, f. 42, printed in: Camden Miscellany, Sr. Tho: Sherley, Discours of the Turkes, The Royal Historical Society, ed. E. Denison Ross, The Camden Miscellany, vol. XVI, Camden Third Series, vol. LII (London: Offices of the Society, 1936), Introduction (vi–vii) and 23–4. I worked with both in London, but quote from the printed edition and use its introduction. Sir Thomas Sherley: History of Parliament, www.historyofparliamentonline.org; Richard Raiswell, “Sherley, Sir Thomas (1564–1633/4),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, online ed., accessed May 11, 2014; Anthony D. Alderson, “Sir Thomas Sherley’s Piratical

RENA ISSANCE FLORENTINES IN THE TROPICS

William Davies, whose 1614 autobiographical account recounts his service on Tuscany’s Amazon expedition, also described Livorno. He knew it well, for his service on a 1597 trading voyage from London ended with his ship’s capture by Tuscan galleys off Tunis and his enslavement for more than eight years.38 Davies wrote: Ligorne is a Cittie of the Duke of Florence, and lyeth in low ground, having many towers without it standing in the Sea, also to this Towne doth belong a wilde road, and two very faire moulds for the safetie of the Dukes Gallies. In the entrance of these moulds is a very strong Castle with great store of Ordnance planted: also the Towne is very strongly fortified, for it is the chiefe garrison of the great Dukes, where is continually great store of Souldiers in pay. Which Souldiers are always imployed in his shipping or Gallies, wherewith he doth more offend the Turke then all Christendome, for they doe take Gallies and Carmizals and Briganteens, and Townes of the Turkes and Mores: possessing of Men, Women, and Children, selling them in Markets like to Horses, Cowes, or Sheepe, reserving the strongest for his owne slavery.”39

As the base for the socially elevated pious corsairs of the Medici-patronized Order of Santo Stefano, Livorno required all the apparatus of a slaving and piratical economy, earning Braudel’s characterization of it, with Malta, as “Christendom’s Algiers.” It was, thus, a perfect center for piracy and interloping, whether Tuscan, Dutch, or English.40 Livorno’s liminal particularity made various imaginations of its role possible. Just as the livornine were issued one such idea circulated in the upper echelons of Tuscan government. It would keep a firm hold on mercantile imaginations, even as the politics remained persistently intractable. In a letter of February 5,

38

39 40

Expedition to the Aegean and His Imprisonment in Constantinople,” Oriens 9, vol. 1 (Aug. 1956): 1–40. William Davies, True Relation of the Travailes and most miserable Captivitie of William Davies, Barber-Surgion of London, under the Duke of FLORENCE.: Wherein is truly set downe the manner of his taking, the long time of his slaverie, and meanes of his deliverie, after eight yeeres, and ten moneths Captivitie in the Gallies.: Discovering many mayne Landes, Ilandes, Rivers, Cities, and townes, of the Christians and Infidels, the condition of the people, and the manner of their Countrey: with many more strange things, as in the Booke is briefly and plainely expressed.: By William Davies, Barber-Surgion of London, and borne in the Citie of Hereford (London: Nicholas Bourne, 1614), 5 (pagination of pdf), right (Br); 9, left (v); 9, right. Ibid., 9 left (·v), then right (Cr). Braudel, Mediterranean, I:636 and II:865, 867 (for the quote), 870, 878, and 889. Hale, Florence and the Medici, 154. Cesare Ciano, I primi Medici e il mare: Note sulla politica marinara toscana da Cosimo I a Ferdinando I, Biblioteca del “Bolletino Storico Pisano” (Pisa: Pacini Editore: 1980). Gregory Hanlon, The Twilight of a Military Tradition: Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560–1800 (New York: Holmes and Meyer, 1998). On the order’s social role: Giovanna Benadusi, “Career Strategies in Early Modern Tuscany: The Emergence of a Regional Elite,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 25:1 (Spring 1994): 85–99.

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1594, Belisario Vinta in Florence wrote to Tuscan ambassador Francesco di Agnolo Guicciardini in Madrid:41 Our merchants would like to make here a sugar refinery, the which would be of great use to them and of great commodity to our states, and, where now it is done in Venice with all the profit in the hand of the Infidels, it would be directed here with utility for Christians, on condition that this same Majesty would be content and would give grace that eight ships, at minimum, and up to ten, at the most, loaded with sugar, would be able to come from Brazil by a direct route, through the strait of Gibraltar and from there to Livorno, fleeing the long route and the peril of going to Lisbon and having then to go from there to come to Livorno. And, for the rights and taxes of this Majesty, they would oblige themselves and they would give security to pay them and would pay them to His Majesty not otherwise then if they had passed through Lisbon with all the greater surety that the Ministers of the said Majesty would require, and because until the time of Ambassador Lenzoni who, however, never put his hand to this business if it was written of there, I send, in the name of the merchants, the memorials.42

Vinta continued by specifying that “a good and honorable tip” of 1,000 scudi might be given secretly to the Imperial ambassador for his help with the project.43 Bribing another ambassador may have been a desperate measure, but Ambassador Lenzoni, Medici ambassador at the Spanish court from 1591–3, already knew the futility of a direct request to the king. On December 15, 1591, Lenzoni wrote from Madrid concerning a similar proposal to send ten foreign ships from Brazil to Livorno, explaining that it was impossible because of Portuguese law.44 The negotiation did not end there, for Lenzoni wrote again from Madrid on March 1, 1592, indicating the continuing efforts he had made, requesting more information, and lamenting the king’s probable slowness in the matter.45 The plan was clearly viable logistically, since a consignment of 600 chests of sugar had already been sent to Livorno from Brazil in 1590.46 Rising Brazilian sugar production – from 6,000 to 10,000 metric tons between 1580 and 1610 – a trading regime that permitted relatively small ships from small Portuguese ports to trade in Brazilian sugar, sugar’s 41 42

43 44

45

46

MAP Person ID 842, “Guicciardini, Francesco di Agnolo.” ASF, MdP 5080, 1145. MAP Doc ID 16585 for ASF, MdP 5080, 1145. From Belisario di Francesco Vinta in Florence to Francesco di Agnolo Guicciardni in Madrid on February 5, 1594 (Adjusted). MAP Person ID 918, “Lenzoni, Francesco di Girolamo.” ASF, MdP 5080, 1145. ASF, MdP 492i, c. 405 transcribed as Document #1 in Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização,” 114. ASF, MdP 4921, 516–17, transcribed as Document #2 in Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização,” 115–16. A further round: ASF, MdP 4921, cc. 57071, transcribed as Document #3 in Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização,” 116–17. Braudel, Mediterranean, I:641 and 641, n. 575.

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modest contribution to royal finances, and the promise to pay taxes should all have militated in favor of the plan.47 However, Portuguese law and the politics of upholding it, as Lenzoni had seen, consistently blocked all efforts. The commercial logic of this plan and the apparent simplicity of the political solution meant versions of this idea persisted. On January 10, 1603, Don Giovanni de’ Medici – the grand duke’s illegitimate half-brother and a major military and diplomatic figure in Tuscany – wrote to Ferdinando I from Antwerp. Aware that Ferdinando had long wanted to introduce sugar refining into Livorno, he had spoken with some merchants who assured him that introducing it would be easy and that Flemish (apparently Dutch) ships regularly brought sugar from Brazil to Zeeland without stopping in Lisbon; they offered to open up a route to Livorno.48 At just this time Amsterdam and the Dutch Republic assumed an essential role in colonial trade, helped by large numbers of Antwerp merchants relocating there in 1600. These merchants provided the Brazilian sugar industry with essential goods and services, and, by 1621, dominated Brazilian export carrying, sugar refining, and sales.49 They were thus particularly well positioned at just this moment to incorporate Livorno into their new sugar business. A flurry of letters that winter discussed the project. Again, while the merchants were credible, the politics of the plan were not. Specifically, the Flemish merchants wanted a letter of protection from Queen Elizabeth I that would permit their ships to stop in ports subject to the Spanish Crown without being attacked by English ships.50 Another improbable political precondition underlay a similar project to introduce sugar refining to Livorno by establishing direct trade with Brazil.51 47

48

49

50

51

Sugar provided less than 5 percent of Portuguese Crown revenues in 1619. Disney, History of Portugal, II:238. Burkholder and Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 164 and 171. MAP Doc ID 9046, entry for ASF, MdP 5155, 127. From Giovanni di Cosimo I de’ Medici (Don Giovanni) in Antwerp to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Florence on January 10, 1602. I infer the modern date as 1603 based on MAP’s calendar correction later in this correspondence (MAP Doc ID 11668). MAP Person ID 556, “Medici, Giovanni di Cosimo I de’ (Don Giovanni).” His mother: MAP Person ID 4949, “Albizzi-Panciatichi, Eleonora degli.” James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 10; Disney, History of Portugal, II:221. MAP Doc ID 17618, entry for ASF, MdP 5155, 155. MAP Doc ID 17619, entry for ASF, MdP 5155, 156. Both from Cosimo Baroncelli in Antwerp to Belisario di Francesco Vinta in Florence on January 24, 1602. MAP Person ID 10215, “Baroncelli, Cosimo.” MAP Doc ID 17622, entry for ASF, MdP 5155, 166. From Giovanni di Cosimo de’ Medici (Don Giovanni) in Antwerp to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Florence on February 28, 1602. MAP Doc ID 9185, entry for ASF, MdP 5155, 376. From Cosimo Baroncelli in Antwerp to Belisario di Francesco Vinta in Florence on March 7, 1602. MAP Doc ID 11668, entry for ASF, MdP 5153, Insert 2, 39. From Ferdinando de’ Medici in Florence to Giovanni di Cosimo I de’ Medici (Don Giovanni) in Flanders on February 2, 1603. MAP Doc ID 9219, entry for ASF, MdP 5155, 444. From Cosimo Baroncelli in Antwerp to Belisario di Francesco Vinta in Florence on April 25, 1603. Guarnieri, Un’audace impresa marittima, 22–3, transcribes the Brazil proposal. ASF, Miscellanea Medicea 97, Insert 89, 3v.

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Outlined in a Tuscan memorandum on direct trade between Livorno and the Indies in 1608, this project involved securing permission for two or three Flemish ships (again apparently Dutch) to load sugar in Brazil for Livorno.52 The commercial dimensions of the project, involving both sugar and brazilwood, reasonable scale, and a multisided trade, seem to have been sound.53 Giuseppe Gino Guarnieri has, however, pointed out that there was no possibility that Philip III would grant permission for this arrangement; in fact, no sugar refining was set up in Livorno.54 Livorno’s qualities and Tuscany’s marginal status as a problematically independent Spanish ally made these proposals possible. Iberian distrust, protectionism, and, perhaps, a failure of imagination, however, made Philip III’s government unwilling to concede either captaincies to Medici heirs or the right to direct trade to Tuscany. In light of persistent Spanish intransigence, Tuscany exercised its last option. Turning to its English friends, it launched an independent expedition to the Amazon. TO THE AMAZON

Today, Brazil and the Amazon seem inextricably linked, yet, for a century, the Portuguese in South America largely bypassed it. Indeed, from 1621, shortly after the Portuguese arrived in force, the region was governed administratively separately from Brazil as the Estado do Maranhão.55 The limits of this early Portuguese presence left a space for other Europeans, the legacy of five of whose empires can be still felt in the region between Trinidad and Belém: Venezuela (Spain), Guyana (Dutch, then British), Suriname (English, then Dutch), French Guiana (France), and the Brazilian states of Amapá and Pará (Portugal). In the century from 1550 to 1650, the Dutch, English, Irish, French, Portuguese, and Tuscans sought to explore, trade, or settle the lower Amazon.56 Joyce Lorimer has persuasively divided this into periods of exploration (1596–1611) and settlement (1612-onward).57 The tempo of Lower Amazon exploration – English expeditions in 1596, 1598, 1609–12, and 1611, a Tuscan expedition led by an Englishman in 1608, and a Dutch one in 1598 – 52 53

54 55

56

57

ASF, Miscellanea Medicea 97, Insert 89, 3r–3v/4r. Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização,” 97–8. I infer that this is the same one described in the memorandum. Guarnieri, Un’audace impresa marittima, 23–4. Disney, History of Portugal, II:206 and 215–16, and Augeron and Vidal, “Creating Colonial Brazil,” 22–3, cite Portugal’s other commitments as limiting early investment in Brazil. Joyce Lorimer, ed., English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646, The Hakluyt Society, Series II, vol. 171 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1989), xiv–xxv. French presence: Disney, History of Portugal, II:215. I infer the distinction from Lorimer’s historical maps. Lorimer, ed., English and Irish Settlement, xviii–xxv.

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presaged intensive colonial competition. In northern Brazil, as in so many other parts of the Americas, the initial premise was to find and extract precious metals. Already in 1536, a 900-man Portuguese expedition in search of gold and silver was shipwrecked on the coast of nearby Maranhão.58 While the Portuguese eventually found abundant supplies of gold elsewhere in Brazil, initial hopes were disappointed in the Amazon. Instead, Amazonian forest products, extracted with indigenous knowledge, and tobacco came to form the basis of the stable economy developed in the period of settlement. From 1612, Northern European and Portuguese outposts were set up with remarkable speed, though the Portuguese eventually responded forcefully to competition, evicting the French (1615) and other Northern Europeans (1623 and 1625).59 Tuscany’s Amazon expedition stands at the end of the reconnaissance period’s search for gold. While the Florentine Vespucci had famously journeyed there more than a century before, Tuscany’s expedition drew primarily on English expatriate expertise.60 According to one such adventurer, Thomas Sherley, Ferdinando I was both friendly to James I and quite independent of English pressure.61 This independence allowed Tuscany to host figures like Sir Robert Dudley (1574–1649), the illegitimate son of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.62 Wealthy, well educated, and a figure at Queen Elizabeth’s court, Dudley was not only fascinated with navigation and scientific instruments, but also could legitimately claim to be a New World explorer; in November 1594, he took three ships to Trinidad, the mouth of the Orinoco, and Puerto Rico, returning in 1595.63 In 1605–6, after losing his suit to be recognized as his father’s legitimate heir, Dudley and Elizabeth Southwell went to France, married, and converted to Catholicism. While Dudley’s transfer to Florence in 1606–7 was controversial, Tuscany could and did ignore English complaints. Dudley delivered on his promises, presenting a book to senior Tuscan official Belisario Vinta that impressed him. By March 1608, Dudley’s galleon San Giovanni Battista was launched; he ultimately settled permanently in Tuscany.64 58 59

60

61 62

63

64

Augeron and Vidal, “Creating Colonial Brazil,” 44, n. 44. Disney, History of Portugal, II:214–15, 221, 235, and 267–77. Lorimer, ed., English and Irish Settlement, xx–xxv. Outposts: Irish (1612, 1620), English and Irish (1613), English (1612, 1620, 1629, 1631), Dutch and English (1616, 1623), Dutch and Irish (1629), Dutch (1615), French (1612; captured by the Portuguese in 1615), and Portuguese (1616, 1623, 1625, 1637–8); Belém founded (1616). Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America (New York: Random House, 2007), map (xxiii) and 141 among other places. Sherley, Discours of the Turkes, 24; this corresponds to LPL, MS 514, f. 44. Simon Adams, “Dudley, Sir Robert (1574–1649),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., accessed October 6, 2011. Buarque de Holanda, “Os Projetos de Colonização,” 100–1. Guarnieri, Un’audace impresa marittima, 32. Adams, “Dudley, Sir Robert.” For the book: MAP Doc ID 13503, entry for ASF, MdP 300, 4. From Belisario di Francesco Vinta in Livorno to (Sir) Robert Dudley on January 8, 1607.

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Dudley wrote the instructions for Robert Thornton, the Amazon expedition’s leader, outlining the goals of this Tuscan-backed voyage. The expedition was to search for gold and other mining and commercial opportunities.65 Thornton seems to have been typical of Livorno’s English captains. He was the owner of the Mercante Reale during an August 30, 1601 voyage to Genoa. Four years later, he commanded the vessel Il Leon Rosso as part of an expedition with Count Montecuccoli against the Turks; he also acquired a house and vineyard in Livorno at this point.66 Our best source, however, is neither Thornton nor Dudley, but William Davies. Davies found succor in Tuscany’s overseas expedition and so wrote of it. He explained that: The great Duke fitted a ship, a Tartane and a Frigot, being very well appointed and victualed dispesing of them into the West Indies, and chiefely for the River of the Amazons, appointing Captaine Robert Thornton, an Englishman to be chiefe Commander of the Ship, the Tartane and the Frigot.67

Thornton used the need for an experienced ship’s surgeon to secure Davies’s freedom on condition that Davies participated.68 Davies related in brief that: By this time all things were prepared and made readie for the performance of our pretended Voyage, now being bound to serve in the good Ship called the Santa Lucia, with a Frigot, and a Tartane, well victualed, and well manned, and chiefely bound to the River of Amazones, with other severall Rivers, the which the Duke would have inhabited, hoping for great store of gaine of Gold, but the Countries did afford no such thing, as

65

66

67

Anglo–Tuscan diplomatic sparring on several subjects took place between Tuscan envoy in Venice Asdrubale Barbolani di Montauto and English ambassador to Venice Henry Wotton. MAP Person ID 1043, “Barbolani di Montauto, Asdrubale.” MAP Doc ID 14188, entry for ASF, MdP 3000, 107. From Asdrubale Barbolani di Montauto in Venice to Belisario di Francesco Vinta in Florence on May 26, 1607. MAP Doc ID 14271, entry for ASF, MdP 3000, 154. From Asdrubale Barbolani di Montauto in Venice to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Florence on August 4, 1607. MAP Doc ID 14312, entry for ASF, MdP 3000, 163. From Asdrubale Barbolani di Montauto in Venice to Belisario di Francesco Vinta in Florence on August 18, 1607. MAP Person ID 775, “Vinta, Belisario di Francesco.” Guarnieri, Un’audace impresa marittima, 32–5; Thornton’s instructions (32–9); Dudley’s map (39–50). Guarnieri, Un’audace impresa marittima, 8, and section 2, 14–20. Guarnieri highlighted three documents: ASF, MdP 1829, 459r (8n2); “Dell’Arcano del Mare. Di D. Ruberto Dudleo Duca di Nortumbria, e conte di Warvich. Tomo secondo, contenente il libro sesto, nel quale si tratta delle Carte sue geografiche e particolari. Impressione seconda ecc. In Firenze, M. D. C. L. I. Nella nuova stamperia, per Giuseppe Cocchini, all’insegna della Stella. Ad istanza di Jacopo Bagnoni et Antonfrancesco Lucini. Parte quarta, libro 6.°, pag. 33 e seguenti” (8n3); and “A. S. C. L.; n. 5 – Capitaneria del porto. Magistrati al Governo. Rescritti per la contumacia, anno 1606 al 1611, c. 142 r.” (8, n. 4). Davies, True Relation, 10 left (Cv). 68 Ibid.; 10 right (C2r); 11 left (C2v);

RENA ISSANCE FLORENTINES IN THE TROPICS

hereafter shall be spoken of. Upon this Voyage we were foureteene moneths, making little gaine, or benefit for the Duke, for there was nothing to be gained.69

Davies closed his account of the journey by mentioning an English pirate’s unsuccessful night attack on the expedition.70 For all its English leadership, the expedition was clearly Tuscan enough to be vulnerable to English piracy. Davies was at extraordinary pains to confirm the veracity of his account, prefacing it with a long list of witnesses, including “Robert Thornton. Master of the good ship called the Royall Marchant of London.”71 His description of the Amazon region, although shorn of almost all references to the context of the voyage, included comments on the force of the river on the sea, the frequency of rainstorms, the ubiquity of mosquitoes, anthropological details on the local population, etc., which tend to suggest that he was in fact there.72 Davies claims to have been there ten weeks, while Guarnieri has separately estimated that the Santa Lucia Buonaventura spent forty-two days at the Amazon and made stops of twelve days in Guiana, ten at the Orinoco, and fifteen at Trinidad.73 There had been the various conspiracies on the expedition (the leader of the rebels was brought back in chains to Livorno), but the Santa Lucia Buonaventura returned by July 10, 1609, with forty-seven men from the Amazon. The ship also brought six young native South Americans, five of whom died of smallpox. The sixth served at the court of Cardinal de’ Medici and learned Italian.74 It had, in sum, been a normal early modern European voyage of reconnaissance.

Conclusion A core tension in Tuscany’s foreign policy, between the desire for the glory and profits of empire and the overwhelming need to maintain amicable relations with the Habsburg monarchy, kept independent experiments like the Amazon expedition from becoming a fledgling empire. Hemmed in by a powerful Spanish fleet operating in the western Mediterranean and Spanish garrisons in Milan and Naples, Tuscany did not have the option of supporting the military adventures of a Drake or the heavily armed commerce of the East India Company (EIC) or the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (United East India Company; VOC), although it did push the envelope. Instead of pursuing the risky independent path charted by the Amazon expedition, the Tuscans took a different course. They decided to make their port a strategic and 69 71 73 74

Ibid., 11 left (C2v) and 11 right (C3r). 70 Ibid., 11 right (C3r). Ibid., 4, right ([A4]r). 72 Ibid., 14, left (Dv); 14, right (D2r); 15, left (D2v); and 15 (D3r). Ibid., 15 (D3r). Guarnieri, Un’audace impresa marittima, section 2, 14–20. Guarnieri, Un’audace impresa marittima, 50–3; 50, n. 1: “A. S. C. L. Capitaneria del Porto, n. 5: ‘Magistrali al Governo; Rescritti per la Contumacia; anno 1606 al 1611’ c.142” Appendix, Document 14, pp. 77–8.

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welcoming stop for Protestant nations that traded heavily in the Mediterranean; the Dutch eventually established themselves, albeit temporarily, in Brazil (1630–54). Tuscany’s choice was probably a sound business and political decision, but it ensured that there would be no spot on the South American map over which a flag bearing the Medici palle flew. The abandonment of the colonial project left Tuscans to join other Italians in an imaginative engagement with the New World. Tuscan political visions of an open architecture of Iberian overseas empire, reinforced by trade and investment from close allies, garnered sufficient support to be seriously explored, but were ultimately rejected by the exclusivist protectionism and political distrust of the highest authorities at the Spanish Habsburg court. This policy avoided domestic political conflict and the complications of cooperative empire, but it ultimately doomed the massively overstretched Spanish Habsburgs to face the Atlantic European challenge alone. As Tuscany and the rest of Italy turned inward, the new mercantilist empires shredded the Iberian monopoly on the battlefield, leaving the Iberian empires to fight for survival in a newly hostile world.

PART IV

REPRESENTING AMERICA

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A L D R O V A N D I ’S N E W W O R L D N A T I V E S IN BOLOGNA (OR HOW TO DRAW THE UNSEEN AL VIVO) Lia Markey

I

n his discorso naturale (1572), ulisse aldrovandi (1522–1605) describes the composition of his collection: everyday we have before our eyes . . . natural things, that for the most part one sees assembled and put before one’s eyes, not only in actuality but also in pictures, painted al vivo in my little world of nature in which every day and night, neither sparing expense nor effort, with all of my power I try to embellish and enlarge it.1

Here, in the earliest description of his so-called little world of nature, the Bolognese naturalist emphasizes the importance of direct observation (“before our eyes,” “before one’s eyes”) and explains that his collection is composed of both specimens and images painted al vivo, or from life. This essay is an amplification of ideas and material briefly mentioned in chapter 5 of Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016). Versions of this essay were presented at the “Global Dimensions of European Knowledge, 1450–1700” conference at Birkbeck College London in 2011 and the “Ad Vivum?” conference at the Courtauld Institute in 2014. I am grateful to audience members at these presentations, the members of IRAHOP, Irina Oryshkevich for help with Latin translation and particularly Liz Horodowich, Claudia Swan, Jennifer Halam, and Caroline Duroselle-Melish for their close reading and helpful suggestions with the text. 1 Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna (BUB), Ms. Aldrovandi 91, 504r–504v. Aldrovandi’s Discorso naturale was not published until 1981, when it was transcribed by Sandra Tugnoli Pattaro in the appendix of Metodo e sistema delle scienze nel pensiero di Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna: Editrice Clueb, 1981), 173–232. The Discorso has been published online at www.filosofia.unibo.it/aldrovandi/pinakesweb/UlisseAldrovandi_discorsonaturale.asp.

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The evidence of images dating to the same decades in which Aldrovandi cultivated his collection of things and pictures demands a new understanding of what he understood as the meaning of an image created al vivo. For instance, a contemporaneous anonymous gouache study (Plate 9), which once served as an object for study and contemplation for Aldrovandi and now preserved in an album at the University of Bologna, represents an oddly proportioned female figure in a contextual void. According to the contemporary inscription, the image represents the “Queen of the island of Florida, covered with a feather veil.”2 The artist who painted this image would not have been able to see a Floridian in Bologna nor would he have traveled to the Americas. Therefore, it was highly unlikely that she could have been painted al vivo. The image of this unseen foreigner is compelling precisely in the way its simplistic style contrasts with its attention to detail. The figure and the patch of green on which she stands are heavily outlined. Chiaroscuro effects are attempted through the use of gradations of color in different tones. The belted blue-and-yellow dress both reveals and conceals her body. She holds a large unidentifiable generic plant in her right hand as if boasting of the fecundity in her land. At the same time, the illustration at the bottom left offers a detailed rendering of the construction of her feather headgear. The drawing epitomizes the complexity of Aldrovandi’s representations of the New World because it endeavors to document accurately a person not present before the eyes of its maker. Aldrovandi never visited the New World and there is no known evidence to suggest that he received any images of Americana directly from the Americas, even via the Spanish. Yet for Aldrovandi, detailed al vivo depictions of plants and animals from the Americas acted as important substitutes for specimens from the New World. Aldrovandi and his colleagues throughout Europe in the late sixteenth century cultivated “visual epistemology,” meaning that they used images not only for aesthetic or decorative purposes, but also to gain concrete knowledge and to extract specific information.3 For instance, in Aldrovandi’s album, there are at least three drawings of chrysanthemi peruniani, or the sunflower, in different views: one represents just the leaf, another the full plant with the roots, and the third offers a detailed representation of the flower. Together these present a thorough object of study through which to understand the complexities of this new plant. Such images could have been painted from life and might have been considered al vivo owing to their comprehensive portrayals from multiple perspectives. Aldrovandi’s drawings acted as visual descriptions of the New World and were studied in albums, copied, exchanged, and at times transferred into print. 2

3

“Regina insulae Floridae plumario tecta velo”; The inscriptions on the drawings are in a late sixteenth-century hand and appear to be contemporary with the images. I borrow this phrase from Daniela Bleichmar’s Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions & Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 9.

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In the late 1570s and early 1580s, the artist became the vehicle through which Aldrovandi could create his own archive of plants, animals, and people from around the globe. Aldrovandi’s workshop included artists from Bologna, Florence, Mantua, and Germany, most of whom renounced their personal artistic styles in the name of science and, in consequence, remain anonymous.4 By 1588, Aldrovandi possessed some sixteen volumes that included 3,000 drawings of animals, 4,000 illustrations of plants, and 7,000 pages of dried plants.5 These volumes were used for study and to supplement texts. Many of the drawings, like the Floridian, acted as models for woodcut images for his heavily illustrated books. Within the large corpus of extant drawings in Aldrovandi’s collection, there are few images of humans. Of these, most represent monstrosities and anomalies, such as conjoined twins, hermaphrodites, satyrs, and the like.6 Set within a section devoted to birds, two native Americans (Plates 9 and 10) stand regally in their feather accoutrements. This essay considers these two drawings of New World natives – the Floridian and a Brazilian from Aldrovandi’s collection.7 Divided into three sections, the study questions why and how Aldrovandi’s artist (or artists) produced these images. The first section explores Aldrovandi’s interest in the Americas in relation to his conception of the documentation of its nature. Then, the essay defines Aldrovandi’s use of the term al vivo as it is used to define representations of the New World, ultimately showing that an al vivo representation need not be produced from life. Indeed, in the sixteenth century, the term al vivo did not always necessarily mean that a figure was painted “from life” in the sense of having been made in the presence of its object, but rather functioned as a rhetorical claim asserting the authority of such an image as a record of what it 4

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Giuseppe Olmi, “La Bottega artistica di Ulisse Aldrovandi,” in De piscibus: la bottega artistica di Ulisse Aldrovandi e l’immagine naturalistica, ed. Enzo Crea (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1993), 9–31, 17. While Aldrovandi cites many of the artists who worked with him in documents, the drawings in the albums are unsigned and no systematic study has been done to identify different hands. Lodovico Frati cites a letter from Aldrovandi to Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1588 that lists the abundance of drawings in his possession: “I pittori che adiuvarano Ulisse Aldrovandi,” Erudizione e belle arti 11–12 (1905): 174–6, 174. The smaller collection of extant drawings, located in albums at the Biblioteca Universitaria of Bologna, are now available online for consultation: www.filosofia.unibo.it/aldrovandi/pinakesweb/main.asp?language=it. There is just one image of an unlabeled European male within the albums. While these two works on paper have been illustrated and discussed in relation to Bologna, the New World, and featherwork, no study has taken into account their formal qualities in relation to Aldrovandi’s conception of image making and of the Americas. Most recent studies that touch on these images include: Bronwen Wilson, “Visual Knowledge/Facing Blindness,” in Seeing across Cultures in the Early Modern World, ed. Dana Leibsohn and Jeanette Favrot Peterson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 97–123, 102; Giuseppe Olmi, “‘Things of Nature’ from the New World in Early Modern Bologna,” in Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, ed. Alessandra Russo, Diana Fane, and Gerhard Wolf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 229–38, 233.

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depicts.8 Finally, similarly to Christian Feest’s work on the people of Calicut and Daniel Margóscy’s essay on early modern representations of unseen animals, this study demonstrates that Aldrovandi’s drawings of native Americans were produced using a variety of sources, in this case actual feather objects, images of natives, and ethnographic information about the Americas gleaned from texts.9 Aldrovandi’s depictions of natives deviate from the “ethnographic realism and exotic portrait” Peter Mason describes in relation to images of natives by artists who saw them firsthand.10 Instead these drawings embody the concept of “autotopic imagination” that Anthony Pagden uses to characterize the works of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Michel de Montaigne, and other sixteenth-century armchair writers, who assimilated multiple texts to produce what were thought be “truthful” accounts of the Americas.11 ALDROVANDI AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE NEW WORLD

As Massimo Donattini and Davide Domenici show in this volume, late sixteenth-century Bologna was a city fascinated by the New World. Within this context, Aldrovandi collected, studied, and documented naturalia and artificialia from newly discovered lands, displayed them in his collection, and discussed them in correspondence with other collectors, naturalists, princes, scholars, and religious men throughout Europe. His research, writing, and collecting bridged the worlds of art theory and proto-scientific analysis. He wrote in his Discorso that he wished to send an expedition of artists to the Americas so that they could draw newly discovered plants and animals.12 8

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Scholarship on the term in the early modern period has shown the inadequacy of its literal translation: Claudia Swan, “Ad vivum, naer het leven, from the life: defining the mode of representation,” Word & Image 2 (Oct.–Dec. 1995): 353–72; Boudewijn Bakker, “Au vif-naar ‘t leven- ad vivum: The Medieval Origin of a Humanist Concept,” Aemulatio (2011): 37–52; Noa Turel, “Living Pictures: Rereading ‘au vif,’ 1350–1550,” Gesta 50 (2011): 163–82; Robert Felfe, “naer het leven: Eine sprachliche Formel zwischen bildgenerierenden Übertragungsvorgängen und ästhetischer Vermittlung,” in Ad Fontes! Niederländische Kunst de 17. Jahrhunderts in Quellen, ed. Claudia Fritzsche, Karin Leonhard, and Gregor J. M. Weber (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2013), 165–96. Dániel Margóscy, “The Camel’s Head: Representing Unseen Animals in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboeck 61 (2011): 62–85; Christian Feest, “The People of Calicut: Objects, Texts and Images in the Age of Proto-ethnography,” Boletim do Musey Paraense Emilio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 9, n. 2 (2014): 287–303. See chapter 2, “Ethnographic Realism and the Exotic Portrait,” in Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 42–61. See chapter 2, “The Autopic Imagination,” in Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 51–88. BUB, Ms. Aldrovandi 91, 538r and Pattaro 208; Aldrovandi also mentions his interest in traveling to both the “l’Indie occidentali et forse orientali” in a 1560 letter to Luigi Leoni transcribed in Alessandro Tosi, ed., Ulisse Aldrovandi e la Toscana: Carteggio e testimonianze documentarie (Florence: Leo S. Olschki editore, 1989), 56. The following represents a brief bibliography specifically on the topic of Aldrovandi and the New World: Mario Cermenati,

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Here he speaks of the “universal use” of such images and speaks of himself as a second Columbus, thus evoking both the importance of autotopic experience and representation from life. Aldrovandi neither made the trip nor sent an expedition of artists to the New World, but his desire for firsthand documentation was likely inspired by others who did. From 1570 to 1577, Francisco Hernández was in the Americas, charged with documenting flora and fauna on behalf of King Phillip II. In two separate instances, in 1586 and again in 1599, Aldrovandi sought to acquire copies of Hernández’s drawings archived in the Escorial, indicating that he knew well of Hernández’s project.13 While his efforts to obtain copies of Hernández’s work were in vain, Aldrovandi was able to gain information about the Americas through other means.14 He possessed a vast library that held nearly every text published in Europe about the New World, including various editions of the works of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, Girolamo Benzoni, Pedro Cieza de León, López de Gómara, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, as well as Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s compilation.15 From these sources, Aldrovandi even picked up some Nahuatl (native Mexican) names for plants.16 Aldrovandi’s museum housed

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Ulisse Aldrovandi e l’America (Rome: Tipografia Enrico Voghera, 1906); Laura Laurencich–Minelli, “Bologna und Amerika vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert,” in Mythen der Neuen Welt, Zur Entdeckungsgeschichte Lateinamerikas, ed. Karl–Heinz Kohl (Berlin: Frölich & Kaufmann, 1982): 147–54; Laura Laurencich–Minelli, “Oggetti americani studiati da Ulisse Aldrovandi,” Archivio per l’antropologia e la etnologia 113 (1983): 187–206; Maurizio Serra, “Ulisse Aldrovandi americanista e i suoi manuscritti, le Antille,” Master’s thesis, Università degli studi di Bologna, facoltà di lettere e filosofia, 1985–6; Sandra Tugnoli Pattaro, “La filosofia naturale di Ulisse Aldrovandi: l’America,” in Bologna e il Mondo Nuovo, ed. Laura Laurenich–Minelli, exh. cat. Bologna, Museo Civico Medievale, February 15–April 12, 1992 (Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1992): 31–6; Andrea Ubrizsy, “La Biodiversità Americana nell’opera di Aldrovandi,” in L’Erbario dipinto di Ulisse Aldrovandi: un capolavoro del Rinascimento, ed. Antonella Maiorino, Marcella Minelli, Anna Letizia Monti, and Barbara Negroni (Vernasca: Ace International, 1995), 75–104; Laura Laurencich–Minelli, “Le culture del Nuovo Mondo,” in Il teatro della natura di Ulisse Aldrovandi, ed. Raffaella Simili (Bologna: Editrice Compositori, 2001): 90–4; Raffaella Stasi, “L’interesse di Ulisse Aldrovandi verso la Mesoamerica, collezioni e fonti,” Master’s thesis, Università degli studi di Bologna, Storia e civiltà precolombiane dell’America, 1997–8. In a letter to Francesco dated 1580, Aldrovandi asks if the duke is able to procure copies of the drawings in Spain, and then in a 1599 letter to Girolamo Mercuriale, he inquires again after the possibility of the duke sending an artist to Spain to copy the drawings; Tosi, Ulisse Aldrovandi e la Toscana, 272, 428. For the afterlife of Hernández’s project, see Mackenzie Cooley’s essay in this volume. See Stasi, “L’interesse di Ulisse Aldrovandi verso la Mesoamerica” (250–64) for an inventory of the books about the New World in Aldrovandi’s collection. In a 1577 letter to Duke Francesco, he uses Nahuatl and describes: “Cua muchil Colorado, et fructa. Questo arbore nasce parimente nell’America et fa le silique simile all’acacia seconda, et non è spinose. . .. Qua huxilorl et fruta, come pepine y comese cozido o asado. Questa piñata al mio giuditio è una sotte di ecumar abroeo . . . et nell’America la magnano a lesso, et fritte, come noi mangiamo le zucche.” Tosi, Ulisse Aldrovandi e la Toscana, 230–1.

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American plants (alive and dried), animals (many taxidermied), and objects, such as featherwork and stonework.17 In 1581, Aldrovandi wrote a response to his friend Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti’s yet unpublished treatise on painting, Discorso intorno alle immagine sacre et profane (1582), that clearly shows how the naturalist’s knowledge about the New World inspired his conception of art and nature. In the essay, Aldrovandi condemns the “ancients” for not depicting the natural specimens described by Alexander the Great, Aristotle, and others. Later in the essay he exalts an Incan leader of Cusco in Peru for his use of art to replicate nature: Guaynacapa, King of Cusco, was a man of great spirit and he took so much pleasure in the things of nature that in his collection, amidst an infinite number of enormous gold statues that seemed like giants, he had life-size figures of all the four-legged animals that had come to his attention and all the birds and all the trees and plants that the earth produces . . . if a barbarian prince had so much spirit that he wanted to form in gold and silver all of the natural things that God in His Greatness produced for man’s use, how much more should it be incumbent on Christian princes . . . to realize in painting all of the things that nature continually produces in their dominions!18

Using language reminiscent of contemporary art theory, Aldrovandi advocates for the political importance of depicting plants and animals and encourages Christian princes to emulate this Incan practice of having nature “painted.” Aldrovandi’s description of Guaynacapa informs his motivation for commissioning drawings and his conception of naturalism as connected to the accurate reproduction of nature. Here, Aldrovandi copied a description of this king of Cusco from López de Gómara’s 1556 Historia or quite likely from the Italian translation that similarly describes the figures as al proprio naturale e tanto grandi.19 This phrase, as well as Aldrovandi’s use of grandezza 17

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About Aldrovandi’s museum, see: F. Rodriguez, “Il museo Aldrovandiano della Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna,” L’Archiginnasio XLIX–L (1954–5): 207–23; Laura LaurencichMinelli, “Museography and Ethnographical Collections in Bologna during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985): 17–23; Maria Cristina Tagliaferri and Stefano Tomassini, “Microcosmos naturae,” in Hortus pictus: dalla raccolta di Ulisse Aldrovandi, ed. Enzo Crea (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1993), 45–54. This letter, today conserved in the BUB as Ms Aldrovandi, 124, vol. 6, T3, is transcribed in Paola Barocchi, ed., Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, fra manierismo e Controriforma, vol. II (Bari: G. Laterza, 1960–2), 511–17, 514. Marzia Faietti engages with this text in “Dentro alle ‘cose di natura’: Lo sguardo di Jacopo,” in Jacopo Ligozzi: “Pittore universalissimo,” exh. cat., eds. Alessandro Cecchi, Lucilla Conigliello, and Marzia Faietti (Livorno: Sillabe, 2014), 39–45, 39. Here Aldrovandi is nearly citing verbatim a description of this king of Cusco from López de Gómara’s 1556 Historia where the Italian translation similarly describes the figures: Francisco Lopez de Gómara, La Historia generale delle Indice Occidentali, con tutti li discoprimenti, & cose

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naturale, translated here as “life-size,” alludes to the figure’s fidelity to nature and reality. Aldrovandi’s recounting of Guaynacapa’s collection reveals a concern with comprehensive representation, as well as an interest in size as a criteria for accuracy in reproduction, perhaps also for the idea of images made al vivo. ALDROVANDI’S USE OF “AL VIVO” AND HOW TO DRAW THE UNSEEN NEW WORLD

The term al vivo likely possessed multiple meanings for Aldrovandi. Claudia Swan has argued that for Aldrovandi, “images done al vivo stand in for actual specimens by virtue of their iconic correspondence with the real.”20 In addition, as Rebecca Zorach has shown, Aldrovandi used the phrase al vivo even to describe images physically made by nature in stones: the phrase therefore conveyed naturalism and perhaps even the representation of something within nature, as in the case of an image seen in the stone.21 Feathers, another natural material, could produce an al vivo representation as well, according to Aldrovandi. In his Ornithologiae, Aldrovandi wrote about Pope Sixtus V’s astonishment with a feather painting of St. Francis, stating: “It was impossible to make him believe that bird feathers could be put together in this way to convey an ad vivum image of that saint so excellently.”22 In this case, the feathers seem to possess more agency than the feather artist himself. Drawings of New World nature and people in Aldrovandi’s collection suggest additional meanings for al vivo representation beyond nature. Aldrovandi’s conception of al vivo likely derives from Vasari, who Aldrovandi cites in his Discorso naturale, as well as from his friend Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, with whom he corresponded frequently. Vasari used the phrase al vivo when discussing depictions that were particularly lifelike or derived from nature, and employed dal vivo to describe portraits of specific individuals done from life, indicating that they were drawn or painted in person before the sitter. Vasari cites both terms – al vivo and dal vivo – with much greater frequency in the second edition of his Lives: thirty-one times in the 1568 edition as opposed to only seven times in the 1550 edition. This increase likely reflects the influence of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, an institution

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notabili, che in esse sonno succese da che si acquistorno fino ahora, scritta, per Francesco Lopez de Gomara in lingua spagnuola & tradotta nel volgare Italiano per Augustino de Cravaliz (Rome: Valerio & Luigi Dorici, 1556), 115. Swan, “Ad vivum, naer het leven, from the life,” 370–1. Rebecca Zorach, “‘A Natura ad Vivum Effigiatum’: The Artistic Agency of Nature in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” paper presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, May 2015. The citation is from Aldrovandi’s Musaeum metallicum (Bologna: Typis Nicolai Tebaldini, 1642), 753. Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae (Bologna: Franciscum de Franciscis Senensem, 1599), 656.

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devoted to the instruction of drawing.23 The implication therefore is that drawing as a medium is somehow inherently associated with accuracy of representation. In his Discorso, Cardinal Paleotti also frequently used the phrase al vivo. Paleotti explains in Book I of his Discorso that “since our imagination is used to receiving such impressions, there is no doubt that there is no instrument more strong and effective than an image made al vivo, that they almost violate the unwary senses.”24 Vasari’s increased use of the term indicates heightened interest in naturalism, while for Paleotti, al vivo representations transcended nature in their ability to disrupt the human senses. When Aldrovandi uses the term al vivo in relation to Medici court artist Jacopo Ligozzi’s drawings of naturalia, he relies on both Vasari’s and Paleotti’s conceptions of it. While Aldrovandi makes little mention of the artists he hired, his letters indicate that he particularly admired Ligozzi. In a 1581 letter to Paleotti, Aldrovandi explained that Duke Francesco de’ Medici gave him a few drawings of birds from the Indies – drawings quite likely by the hand of Jacopo Ligozzi.25 In a short appendix to his autobiography from the year 1577, Aldrovandi uses al vivo three times when describing Ligozzi’s work, at one point recalling Paleotti’s writing, when he notes that Ligozzi’s al vivo drawings “do not lack spirit.”26 In his Discorso naturale, Aldrovandi praises Ligozzi for his ability to produce a “simulachrum of nature that would capture the eyes of the observer.”27 Aldrovandi’s ideal of representation therefore combined the real as well as a spirited or lively quality. Ligozzi’s drawing of a pineapple (Figure 13.1) for Duke Francesco embodies an al vivo representation that is both naturalistic and iconic and likely also actually painted “from life,” as pineapples made their way to Italy. Trained as a manuscript illuminator in Verona, Ligozzi painted numerous works on paper of natural specimens that possess microscopic detail. At the same time, like the majority of animals and plants depicted by Ligozzi as well as the natives discussed here, the pineapple has been decontextualized and removed from any natural setting; it floats in space.28 The fruit remains on its broken stem, however, and the image incorporates the various hues of green, brown, and yellow of the leaves and spikes and conveys the tactility of the fruit. This faithfully drawn pineapple contrasts sharply with others represented 23

24 25 26 27 28

Florian Härb, “‘Dal vivo’ or ‘Da se’: Nature versus Art in Vasari’s Figure Drawings,” Master Drawings 43 (2005): 326–38. On Vasari and “al vivo,” also see Joanna Woods–Marsden, “The Sitter as ‘Guest’: Reception of the Portrait in the Renaissance,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. Machtelt Israëls and Louis Waldman (Florence: Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2013): 152–8, 154. Barocchi, Trattati, 230. Ibid., 514: “alcune figure d’uccelli venuti dall’Indie, donatemi da S.A. Serenissima.” Tosi, Ulisse Aldrovandi e la Toscana, 205. Olmi, “La Bottega artistica di Ulisse Aldrovandi,” 17; BUB, ms. Aldrovandi 91, 557. Joy Kenseth describes these sheets as such in: “Jacopo Ligozzi: Pittore-Miniatore,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1975, 8.

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13.1 Jacopo Ligozzi, Pineapple, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, ca. 1570. With permission from the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo.

in contemporary printed texts – among them, the abstract rendering of a pineapple in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535) (Figure 13.2).29 Ligozzi’s drawings supplemented Aldrovandi and Francesco’s study of texts such as Oviedo’s history and at 29

Much has been written about the simplicity of Oviedo’s pineapple. See Juan José, “Fernández de Oviedo’s Pineapple and Cultural Authority in Imperial Spain,” Monographic Review XXI (2005): 26–39; José 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 immagini, eds. Giuseppe Olmi, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, and Attilio Zanca (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2000), 163–88.

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13.2 “Pineapple,” in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, Seville, 1535. William H. Scheide Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

times clearly surpassed them in terms of the level of information they provided. Several of the drawings in Aldrovandi’s collection in Bologna are copies of works that Francesco commissioned from Ligozzi (now located in the Gabinetto dei disegni e stampe in the Uffizi in Florence). For example, Aldrovandi’s copy of Francesco’s pineapple (Figure 13.3) survives in the albums of the Biblioteca Universitaria in Bologna. The collections in Florence and Bologna each house depictions of a coniglio dell’Indie and a lepri dell’Indie associated with Ligozzi as well. The sheets in Bologna were likely painted by

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13.3 After Jacopo Ligozzi, Pineapple, Tavole di animali di Ulisse Aldrovandi, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ca. 1570–90. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna.

Ligozzi himself or by someone in his workshop.30 When Aldrovandi could not commission drawings directly after specimens in Bologna, duplicates of drawings from Florence would have to suffice. Since these were copies of drawings, which presumably had been created from life, it did not matter that they themselves were not the products of direct observation. Aldrovandi likely conceived of his copies as al vivo depictions. Depicting New World plants and animals from life was a challenge in Europe. Access to specimens required maneuvering and negotiations and was often tied to political or diplomatic exchange. Plants grown in Mexico would not always successfully grow in Italy and ephemeral items brought across the Atlantic would often decay or die in transit. Aldrovandi participated in an 30

On these copies see Jacopo Ligozzi: “Pittore universalissimo,” exh. cat., ed. Alessandro Cecchi, Lucilla Conigliello, and Marzia Faietti (Livorno: Sillabe, 2014), 90.

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active network, extending across Europe, through which information about the New World was exchanged.31 This exchange included the movement of New World objects. Drawings of specimens and their copies, however, often proved easier to circulate than specimens themselves. Like Aldrovandi, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II’s court in Prague employed artists to document nature from around the world. Some of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s drawings in Rudolf’s collection in Prague appear to be copies of Ligozzi’s sheets in Florence.32 In a 1599 letter, Aldrovandi suggested that German miniature painter Daniel Froeschl, who documented naturalia both in Pisa and Prague, copy Hernández’s renowned New World drawings in Spain.33 When it was impossible to acquire specimens or images of specific plants and animals, Aldrovandi explained that textual accounts could be used to help render them visually. For instance, in a 1580 letter to Duke Francesco containing an incredibly detailed description of a Brazilian tapir, Aldrovandi wrote, “I wished to briefly describe this tapir from Brazil so that your Highness could have this animal painted al vivo.”34 As this explanation clearly demonstrates, the characterization of an image as al vivo could apply not only to the product of direct observation, its copy, or a copy of a copy, but also to representations of things unseen. With firsthand experience of natives in Europe even more rare than firsthand experience with American flora and fauna, this was true as much for people unseen as for plants or animals. ALDROVANDI’S NATIVES

While Paleotti’s Counter-Reformation Discorso is devoted to demonstrating the necessity of accurate representation of religious iconography and is mostly concerned with how to represent unseen religious figures, particularly saints, he also comments on the depiction of exotic peoples. In the chapter titled “on monstruous and prodigious paintings” (delle pitture monstrose e prodigiose), he writes that “he who represents things from Africa or the lands newly discovered, can blamelessly paint various monsters, humans and feral animals, narrated by authentic writers about those places.”35 For Paleotti, textual sources “by authentic writers” – and by this he likely means eyewitness travel 31

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Paula Findlen, “Inventing Nature: Commerce, Art, and Science in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Paula Findlen and Pamela Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 297–323; Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Also see more generally Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). On Arcimboldo’s nature studies, see chapter 5 of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). On Arcimboldo’s drawings after Ligozzi, see Jacopo Ligozzi: “Pittore universalissimo,” 91. Tosi, Ulisse Aldrovandi e la Toscana, 428. 34 Ibid., 272. 35 Barocchi, Trattati, 420.

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accounts – can inform and even inspire representations of these faraway places, things, and peoples. Paleotti’s words recall Aldrovandi’s description of the Brazilian tapir, where a verbal account, likely culled from a printed source about the New World, could be used to produce an authentic representation, or an al vivo image. To depict something accurately required firsthand experience with nature, or at least knowledge taken from firsthand accounts. This final section considers what sources Aldrovandi’s artists used to create these images of natives and why these images may have been understood as al vivo representations of Americans. It also examines the ways in which their transfer into print in Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae (1599) and Monstrorum historia (1642) may have transformed their al vivo quality. In Aldrovandi’s albums, the Floridian woman and Brazilian man are catalogued according to their dress, specifically their feathered headdresses. Their characterization and categorization recalls the natives in printed costume books discussed in this volume by Ann Rosalind Jones. Yet Aldrovandi’s figures are nestled among pages of plants and animals and not with other people and corresponding text, as is the case in Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo (1598). In Aldrovandi’s album, the materiality of the native’s dress is emphasized, not their place of origin. While an abundance of sixteenth-century images of natives of the New World survive, few are drawings, making Aldrovandi’s sheets particularly intriguing. John White’s drawings of Floridians (Figure 13.4) and Virginians at the British Museum and the Drake manuscript at the Morgan Library and Museum are two rare sets of drawings of natives likely to have been produced from life in the New World. While White’s drawings were reproduced in print and disseminated widely at the end of the sixteenth century in Theodor De Bry’s America volumes (1590–6), the Drake manuscript remained unknown for centuries.36 Christopher Weiditz’s extraordinary, detailed drawings of natives of the New World who visited the Spanish court in the early sixteenth century are not known to have circulated.37 Other drawn and painted images of natives can be found on maps and in codices produced both in the New World and in Europe, but again, few of these manuscripts traveled throughout Europe.38 36

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On the Drake manuscript, see Charles Pierce, Patrick O’Brian, Verlyn Klinkenborg, and Ruth S. Kraemer, Histoire naturelle des Indes: The Drake Manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York: Norton, 1996) and on John White’s drawings, see Paul Hulton, America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). See Christopher Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance: All 154 Plates from the “Trachtenbuch” (New York: Dover, 1994). See William C. Sturtevant, “First Visual Images of Native America,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, Volume 1, ed. Fredi Chiappell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 417–54. Also see Stephanie Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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13.4 John White, Indian Woman of Florida with Ear Ornaments and Painted Marks or Tattoos, Pen and Brown Ink and Watercolour over Graphite, with Bodycolour, Touched with Gold and Silver. Inv. PD 1906,0509.1.23, British Museum, 1585–93. © The Trustees of the British Museum/ Art Resource, NY.

Unlike Aldrovandi’s pineapple and the many other images of plants and animals in his collection, his drawings of natives do not derive from one single specific, identifiable (pictorial) source and could not have been painted from life.

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In the drawing of the Floridian (Plate 9), heavy contours frame her face, body, and dress, as well as the plant she holds, while the headdress and the detail of it at left were painted with finer softer brushstrokes in greater detail, suggesting that the artist might have painted from life the close-up depiction of the feathers at left. Aldrovandi’s colleague, Antonio Giganti, who in 1572 moved to Bologna with his vast collection of objects from the New World, owned a feather headdress described in his inventory as being for a woman from Florida.39 The inventory inscription corresponds precisely with Aldrovandi’s Floridian: “a headdress, that is worn by women of a high status in Florida, and that falls down the back, made of red feathers from a parrot.”40 In this case, then, inspiration for the image of this Floridian would seem to derive from Giganti’s feather headdress. The existence of this object in Giganti’s collection helps to explain why Aldrovandi’s artist emphasized the headdress in the glyph-like depiction at left. The translation into print (Figure 13.5) of the image of the Floridian within both Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae and Monstrorum historia is an object lesson in what a drawing can accomplish that a woodcut cannot. Though the woodcutter has rendered her body more proportionally and given her a more ideal contrapposto stance, much is lost from the drawing. The quality of the feather specimen is diminished in the print. The woodcut medium cannot render the materiality of the featherwork item, whereas the drawing endeavors to convey its iridescent quality and its construction, making it more tangible. Aldrovandi’s textual description of the woman in the Monstrorum historia makes no mention of the dress or the feathers, but instead describes elaborate fishbone earrings (not visible) and belted bells that jingle when she jumps, which must be the device attached to her back.41 In the Ornithologiae, however, Aldrovandi describes Giganti’s feather headdress in relation to the print in order to make up for its lack of color and detail: “The feathers with which the neck is covered, seem to come from the back, just as those that follow, from the tails or wings. However, all of them are interwoven over a certain net [made of] threads of the 39

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See Gigliola Fragnita, “Il museo di Antonio Giganti da Fossombrone,” in Scienze, credenze occulte, livellli di cultura, Convegno internazionale di studi (Florence: Olschki editore, 1982): 507–34. Laura Laurencich-Minelli refers to this connection in “Ogetti americani studiati da Ulisse Aldrovandi,” Archivio per l’antroplogia e la etnologia 113 (1983): 187–206. Maria Christina Tagliaferri reiterates this in Bologna e il Mondo Nuovo, ed. Laura LaurencichMinelli (Bologna: Grafis edizioni, 1992), 140; Laura Laurencich–Minelli, “Flights of Feathers in Italian Collections from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, ed. Alessandra Russo, Diana Fane, and Gerhard Wolf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 218–27, 223. The inventory transcribed from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Ms. S. 85, ff. 233–53 in Fragnita (28–51) lists: “un’acconciatura, che portano le donne in capo alla Florida, et le pende giu per la schiena, è di penne rosse di Pappagallo, ò altro uccello legate insieme, che di dentro par una rate, lunga, 2 piedi et mezzo” (246v). Monstrorum historia, 105.

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13.5 “Floridian” in Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia, Bologna, 1642. Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

cotton tree of a chestnut color, by which no doubt the reeds of the feathers are bound to the net in the way that the picture shows. The color of the entire headdress was of the most elegant scarlet.”42 Much of the figure’s attire is lost in the black and white print, particularly the scarlet headdress and the blue Spanish moss dress. The representation of the blue Spanish moss dress on Aldrovandi’s Floridian was inspired by both text and image. Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues 42

Ornithologiae, 657.

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documented his experience in Florida with drawings (now lost) and a text that was ultimately published in Theodore De Bry’s Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida (1591), which includes a discussion of “Spanish moss” that corresponds with Aldrovandi’s drawing:43 The queen and her maidens adorned with belts worn at either shoulder or at the waist, made of a kind of moss that grows on the trees. This moss is wove into slender threads of a bluish-green color and is so delicate in texture as to be mistaken for a fragment of silk.44

A printed image in De Bry (Figure 14.6) is based on John White’s drawing (Figure 13.4) of a Floridian that is thought to be after a lost Le Moyne prototype. It is possible that Aldrovandi’s Floridian is based on the De Bry print or some other image now lost. The representation of the body and dress seem to derive from these images and from Le Moyne’s description, while the depiction of the featherwork was based on an actual example of a headdress. As with the Floridian, there is a disjuncture in the image of the Brazilian in the album (Plate 10) between the abstract figure and the detailed featherwork. Scholars have commented both on the tactility of the work represented at lower left and the “highly realistic” figure itself.45 But the refined representation of the feathers, in fact, contrasts greatly with the Brazilian itself, rendered ambiguously in such a way that it remains difficult to discern its gender. The figure lacks a sense of mass – its dainty feet seem to float on the simplistically rendered green ground. The sharp black outline contrasts with the artificial pink flesh tone. But the meticulously represented featherwork recalls the Tupinamba feather robes in European collections in these same years.46 In fact, an extant feather robe in the Museo Nazionale di Antropologia in Florence likely formed part of the Medici collection in the sixteenth century and could have been seen 43

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I thank Ann Rosalind Jones for bringing the dress into question in relation to Le Moyne. On Spanish moss, see Max Carocci, “Clad with the ‘Hair of Trees’: A History of Native American Spanish Moss Textile Industries,” Textile History 41 (2010), 1–27. This translation is cited in Carocci’s “Clad with the ‘Hair of Trees’” (9) from Stefan Lorant, The New World: The First Pictures of America Made by John White and Jacques Le Moyne and Engraved by Theodore de Bry, with Contemporary Narratives of the French Settlements in Florida, 1562–1565, and the English Colonies in Virginia, 1585–1590 (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965), 113. Theodore de Bry, Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida America (Frankfurt: Theodore de Bry, 1591), xxxix. Bronwen Wilson, commenting on this sheet, writes, “Separated on the page from the nude and the headdress of which it is a part, the detail of overlapping feathers solicits the viewer’s sense of touch by calling attention to its texture,” in “Visual Knowledge/Facing Blindness” (102). Giuseppe Olmi writes of the Brazilian: “The image is highly realistic: the only detail that is out of place is the pair of European shoes,” in “‘Things of Nature’ from the New World in Early Modern Bologna” (233). Amy J. Buono, “‘Their Treasures Are the Feathers of Birds’: Tupinamba Featherwork and the Image of the America,” in Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, ed. Alessandra Russo, Diana Fane, and Gerhard Wolf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 178–89.

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by Aldrovandi during his visits there.47 The drawing’s inscription also points out the significance of the feathers and informs us of the figure’s gender: “Wild man dressed in a feather cap setting out for war, from the New World.”48 The inscription on the drawing informs us that the feathered New World “wild man” represents a warrior, while Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum historia elucidates that the figure’s nudity relates to his identity. In Aldrovandi’s description of the male figure, he draws on the work of André Thevet, the cosmographer to the king of France, who wrote of his experience in Brazil. According to Thevet, the “forest men” of the Americas conceive of garments as impairments. Aldrovandi writes, For they teach, as says Thevet, that garments are impediments to them, that they prevent them from conquering the enemy, indeed that they serve as an aid to the enemy, making them [the Forest men] easier to seize. For which reason we show an image of the forest man crowned with a feather cap: for arrayed in this manner, and armed with a stick, they set out to war.49

Aldrovandi’s citation of Thevet in relation to the Brazilian and his dependence on Le Moyne in the case of the Floridian recalls Paleotti’s instructions to turn to textual sources that reflect firsthand experience when representing foreign figures. While Aldrovandi and his artist used Thevet as a textual source and a feather object as an ethnographic source, they employed a printed image for the depiction of the so-called Brazilian. Its close resemblance to an image of a “Savage” in François Despres’s costume book (Figure 13.6) indicates that the artist studied this print or perhaps used a shared source as a model.50 The pose, the footwear, calf decoration, and staff or weapon of the figure are strikingly similar in print and drawing. Ligozzi similarly employed prints from costume books and travel writing in composing a series of detailed drawings of Turks.51 Here Aldrovandi’s artist has taken Despres’s figure and undressed him to show his knowledge of Thevet and to demonstrate the customs of these natives. The woodcut after Aldrovandi’s warrior designed for his Monstrorum historia (Figure 13.7) transforms the South American native again – this time into a warrior with classical proportions wearing a feather headdress. The printed 47

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Sara Ciruzzi, “Gli antichi oggetti americani nelle collezioni del Museo nazionale di antropologia e etnologia,” Archivio per l’antropologia e la etnologia 113 (1983): 151–65. “Homo sylvestris plumario Indutus/ pileo ad bellum profuiscens ex novo orbe.” Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia, 110. Sara Shannon, ed. and trans., François Deserps: A Collection of the Various Styles of Clothing: A Facsimile of the 1562 Edition (Minneapolis, MN: James Ford Bell Library, 2001), 136. The spelling of Despres here in Shannon is a misprint. Haydn Williams, “Additional printed sources for Ligozzi’s series of figures of the Ottoman Empire,” Master Drawings 51 (2013), 195–220; Sakiko Wada, “Nota sui ‘disegni con costumi dei Turchi’ di Jacopo Ligozzi,” Critica d’arte 8 (2004), 28–34.

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13.6 “Le Sauvage en pompe,” in François Despres, Recueil de la diversité des habits, Paris, 1562. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1940 (40.129).

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13.7 “Brazilian,” in Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia, Bologna, 1642. Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

image in the book creates a distance between the viewer and the native and its medium remains prominent between them.52 Like the costume book, from which the print originally derives, Aldrovandi’s book was designed to categorize the “monsters” of the world and to integrate the New World into this type of 52

Michael Gaudio’s analysis of the engraved savage resonates with Aldrovandi’s woodcut native, since it too is a “a confrontation with medium, a struggle – never complete – to make meaning out of matter”; Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xxii.

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13.8 Artist unknown, Peruvian Satyr, Tavole di animali di Ulisse Aldrovandi, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ca. 1570–90. With permission from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna.

encyclopedic source. Clearly these images went through a process of aestheticization and in print their al vivo quality and attention to detail is diminished. A third drawn native in Aldrovandi’s album (Figure 13.8) cannot be connected to a specific textual account, object, or image, as of yet. However, its inscription suggests that the image was based on an eyewitness account. Here we see a hairy satyr with a long tail waving his right hand as if to greet the viewer. The inscription next to him reads: Wild man A sea monster caught in Peru

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On the nineteenth day of August 1557 It is a species of satyr; they live on the islands Called satyrs of the ocean by authors.53

The specificity of the date (1557) and the location on islands off of Peru recalls the use of the term contrafactum in reference to early sixteenth-century printed images and contrafare in Vasari’s life of Michelangelo.54 Like Dürer’s rhinoceros and Michelangelo’s chimera, this Peruvian satyr is a “counterfeit,” derived from hearsay. When the figure is reproduced in Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum historia and catalogued among other satyrs, it is simply called a “satyr of another species.” His New World origin has been erased. Perhaps further knowledge of Peru caused Aldrovandi to rethink the description of this figure. For Aldrovandi, knowledge, documenting foreignness, and image making were intimately tied. He wrote: There is nothing on earth that seems to me to give more pleasure and utility to man than painting and above all paintings of natural things, because it is through these things painted by an excellent painter, that we acquire knowledge of foreign species, although they are born in distant lands.55

Yet Aldrovandi’s drawings of natives, catalogued among natural things, were not necessarily produced by an “excellent painter” and are strikingly different from Ligozzi’s al vivo renderings of plants in the way that they create a composite image based on various sources. Though they were not drawn from life, they might have been conceived of as being al vivo in the way they bring together information from textual accounts and from the study of feather objects. When transferred into print, the New World natives become more idealized and proportional, but lack the immediacy and tactility of their drawn models. These drawings functioned in multiple ways. They were models for prints, but also records of foreign people for gaining knowledge of those “born in distant lands” and unseen. Though not represented from life, the detailed construction of these images based on a variety of sources connected them to the idea of al vivo. The disjunction pointed out at the start of this chapter 53

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“Homo agrestis,/ Monstrum marinum in Peru captum/Die 19 Augusti 1557/Est satyri species habitant insulas/Oceani satyrides ab autoribus dictas.” Peter Parshall, “Imago Contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance,” Art History 16 (1993), 554–79; Claudia Swan, “Counterfeit Chimeras: Early Modern Theories of the Imagination and the Work of Art,” in Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alina Payne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 216–37. Claudia Swan and Carmen Niekrasz, “Early Modern Art and Science,” in Cambridge History of Science. Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, eds. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 773–96, 795. Giuseppe Olmi, L’Inventario del mondo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 24. BUB, MS Aldrovandi 6 vols, vol. I, fol. 35.

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between Aldrovandi’s description of al vivo representations and his images of unseen natives of the New World can only be explained through close analysis of his use of the word al vivo in relation to his conception of the documentation of the Americas. When firsthand experience with the nature or people of the Americas was not possible, an al vivo image could be produced through the use of the “autopic imagination.”

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

C E S A R E V E C E L L I O ’S F L O R I D I A N S IN THE VENETIAN BOOK MARKET: BEAUTIFUL IMPORTS Ann Rosalind Jones

V

enetian costume-book artist cesare vecellio frames his sixth woodcut of the Timucuan Indians of Florida with a description of the apparel and body art of a leader on the battlefield: “This combination of clothing is even more beautiful than the last. On their heads these leaders wear a lion skin and colored feathers; they cover themselves all over with this kind of skin . . . and they paint themselves in various ways.”1 Where we might expect astonishment or horror at the battle dress of a New World warrior, we find surprising admiration of his fur and feather garments and his artfully colored body. Vecellio balances foreign exoticism and appealing physicality: his

I gratefully acknowledge the stimulating suggestions given me by Liz Horodowich and Lia Markey in the course of writing this chapter. Thanks also to the many cultural historians and organizers of lectures and conferences whose audiences have led me to a clearer understanding of Vecellio’s construction of the New World, including David Wallace at the University of Pennsylvania, Francesco Erspamer at Harvard University, Maureen Quilligan at Duke University, Albert Ascoli at the University of California, Berkeley, Penny Jolly at Skidmore College, Cristelle Baskins at Tufts University, Colette Winn at Washington University, and the members of the Comparative Literature Program at Smith College. As always, I am indebted to Margaret F. Rosenthal for her collaborative generosity and discerning eye. 1 “Principale del Campo,” Habiti antichi et moderni: La Moda nel Rinascimento (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2010), translated by Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones in The Clothing of the Renaissance World (Europe, Asia, Africa, America): Cesare Vecellio’s “Habiti Antichi et Moderni” (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 503. Page numbers refer to those in the original text as reproduced in the London translation and in the Venice facsimile.

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Timucuan dressed to kill is also a man dressed as beautifully as his Venetian readers can imagine. Vecellio’s interpretation of news from the Americas in his 1598 costume book, Habiti antichi e moderni di tutto il mondo, was shaped by the audience appeal he and his publishers designed the book to have, translated through his use of ancient models for representing bodies and apparel. Through these filters, he produced six woodcuts based on the drawings of a French artist, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, who had participated in an expedition of Huguenots to Florida in 1564. Le Moyne’s paintings and narrative of the expedition in French, lost after Frankfurt publisher Theodor de Bry bought them, had themselves been filtered through De Bry’s Latin translation, illustrated with forty-three engravings of Timucuans and French soldiers and printed as Americae Pars II (1591) in his series India Occidentalis. Vecellio departed from De Bry’s visual format by representing Amerindians as single figures removed from their Timucuan habitat in order to present them to his European audience as sights both marvelous yet comprehensible. My approach to his Floridians is to contextualize his woodcuts and commentary in relation to the costume book as a genre, his selective reworking of De Bry’s text and engravings in collaboration with his publishers to attract diverse audiences, and the place of Habiti di tutto il mondo in the loop of high-cultural visual traditions circulating in late sixteenth-century Venice. The strange and the familiar, alterity and assimilation: these were the poles, profitably intriguing, of his adaptation of De Bry. Vecellio was a member of the clan of painters headed by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio). Born around 1530 in the hinterlands of Venice, he died in Venice in 1601.2 After painting portraits and altarpieces in his birthplace, Cadore, as well as other towns in the Dolomites, he went to Venice about 1570 to work in Titian’s studio. There he entered the world of print, producing two massive costume books, Degli Habiti antichi e moderni di diverse parti del mondo, in 1590 and a second, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo in 1598. Vecellio’s collaborator, Christophe Chrieger, cut 421 blocks for the first book and 503 for the second; for the first book, Vecellio wrote more than 200 pages of commentary. The second edition, expanded by eighty prints, ended with a new Book XII on the dress of the peoples of the Americas. Hence the new title: Habiti . . . di tutto il mondo. One way Vecellio transformed the images he found in De Bry was by adapting them to the conventions of the sixteenth-century costume book. First published in Venice and Paris in the early 1560s, by the 1590s, the genre had become a long-standing apparatus for categorizing and representing human beings according to what they wore.3 A costume book was a geographically 2

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Tiziana Conte, “Note biographiche,” in Cesare Vecellio 1521c.–1601, ed. Tiziana Conte (Belluno: Amministrazione Provinciale di Belluno/Tipografia Piave Srl, 2001), 13–22. Venice was the city in which one of the first two printed costume books was published, Omnium Feré Gentium Nostrae Aetatis Habitus (1563) with drawings by Enea Vico, engraved and

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ordered set of captioned prints by a single artist purporting to represent the dress worn by people around the world at the time the book was printed. Each figure was a type: it stood for all the other people in the same city, region, or nation, occupation, rank, and gender system that the artist was illustrating. In fact, the claim to be up to date was less than truthful. The books enclosed multiple temporalities: through tracing and copying, they juxtaposed images from earlier books with newly invented prints, though they presented all their illustrations as depicting traditional dress worn at the time they were published. Their claim to total world coverage was more misleading. Starting with the clothing worn in the city where they were produced and moving outward to the rest of Europe, then Asia and Africa, libri di costumi sometimes included a few figures from the East Indies and the Americas, but they often excluded vast regions of the world or described their inhabitants according to the fantasies of previous writers and artists – for example, the hairy wild man and woman of European myth set by François Despres (of whom more later) among his prints of New World peoples. It’s not surprising that the genre was sent reeling by the importation of actual people from the Americas, which stimulated reports of their sightings in Europe and put firsthand images of them into circulation. A symptom of this shock is the contradiction between text and image in Vecellio’s 1590 book, in which he writes a description of the world according to the Ptolemaic three-part division – the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa – while his title page shows allegories of four continents, adding America.4 Although Vecellio used learned sources to write his texts – collections of travel narratives such as Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s Decades and Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi – he shared a second- or third-hand understanding of the New World with his fellow Venetians, who, like him, had never been there. Inevitably, their responses included ways of seeing and not seeing that Walter Mignolo attributes to Europeans looking through cartographically trained eyes at Mesoamerican cities: “That perspective necessarily imposes an outsider’s view . . . enabling an estranging gaze which allows the observer to behold mere objects to which he has no intimate connection.”5 An example is Joan Blaeu’s 1665 map of America, in which a Mexican couple

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printed by Ferdinando Bertelli. For an overview of the genre, see Ulrike Ilg, “The Cultural Significance of Costume Books in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” in Clothing Culture, 1350–1650, ed. Catherine Richardson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004). On images of imported Americans, see, for example, Christophe Weiditz’s colored ink drawings of the Aztecs brought by Cortés to the court of Emperor Charles V, painted around 1530 and circulating in print form by the 1560s. For Vecelllio’s 1590 and 1598 title pages, see Rosenthal and Jones, The Clothing of the Renaissance World, 49 and 553, Italian facsimile, 49 and 555. Walter Mignolo, “The Movable Center: Ethnicity, Geometric Projections, and Coexisting Territorialities,” The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2003), 199.

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with no landscape or other cultural indicators except their clothing and a caption is set amid other specimens of race and nation in a vertical row of boxes on each side of the map, according to the “logic of the grid,” as Valerie Traub characterizes it, exemplifying “the style of reason whose epistemology is spatial and committed to abstraction . . . without particularizing.”6 But the gaze of a costume-book reader could be more complex. Vanita Seth argues, using Foucault’s categories in The Order of Things, that Europeans believed they could understand other cultures by interpreting new data in relation to what they already knew: “Similitude offers a conceptual scheme premised on the familiar, a scheme that weaves the world into a complex tapestry where every thread intertwines and complements the whole.”7 Anthony Grafton pithily sums up this mindset: “Traditions clung to the New World like ivy to brick.”8 When Vecellio fitted a new image of an Amerindian into the print schema he had used throughout his book, including an intricate, scrolling frame of the kind designed by his fellow citizen Giacopo Sansovino, and depicted each figure in his own classicizing style and Italian prose, he produced a complex interplay of New World content and familiar form.9 His American figures were intended to startle and fascinate his viewers, but by inserting them into the format of his preceding prints of European dress, he implicitly reassured them that these people too could be understood through a Venetian structure and perspective. In a study relating costume prints to atlases and herbals, Bronwen Wilson proposes that their uniform, symmetrical framing of their human specimens produced a double effect. On one hand, the structural resemblances – figures set in a grid of squares, a horizontal row, or a series of similarly designed pages – invited viewers to notice differences in apparel. But such schemas also encouraged them to recognize the figures as belonging to the same category – that is, as resembling one another: “In the wake of discoveries of worlds unknown to Europeans, and in striking contrast to the regional variations in flora and fauna, the contours of the human body unexpectedly . . . appeared to be universal.”10 Claudia Swan, writing about scientific collections, makes a further point relevant to Vecellio’s sequenced woodcuts, into which he fits each American with no change in format or perspective: “The grid or tabular model of organization is artificial and schematic, but it is not necessarily hierarchical. 6

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Valerie Traub, “The Nature of Norms in Early Modern England: Anatomy, Cartography, King Lear,” South Central Review 26, 1–2 (2009): 59, 67. Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 46. Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 153. On the Sansovino frame, see Nicholas Penny, National Gallery Catalogues: The SixteenthCentury Paintings, 1 (London: National Gallery Company, 2004): 176–7, 179–80. Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 77.

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It is, rather, serial.”11 European framing, then, would not necessarily distance a costume-book viewer from an inhabitant of the New World. Familiarized by the repeated format of the book, a wearer of strange American garments could draw a European viewer more or less seamlessly into new information, if not a transformed vision, about how dress defined region and rank on the other side of the world. Vecellio’s 1590 and 1598 books targeted different audiences. The 1590 book was published by Damiano Zenaro, who aimed for literate, science-oriented readers: he had published books of emblems, maps, and astronomy, all illustrated with woodcuts.12 The 1590 book offered history and marvels alike. Vecellio opened each geographical section with a preface and followed each woodcut with a commentary, sometimes as long as five pages, on the history and culture to which a figure belonged. The woodcuts, on the other hand, were intended to fascinate the reader: some were of splendidly dressed nobles, others of criminals, warriors, and semi-nude Asians and Africans. Intricately detailed, the images were followed by head-to-toe descriptions of the dress they depicted. His second publishers, the Sessa brothers Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Bernardo, worked to appeal to visually oriented buyers whose response to his Americans would range from horrified curiosity – “gawking wonder” – to aesthetic admiration.13 Radically cutting the historical and cultural information of the 1590 text to fit onto half a page allowed the Sessas to position each print on the left of each opening, directly across from the Italian and Latin commentary, a layout that emphasized the image equally with the text – over it, in fact, because what commentary they retained from the 1590 edition consisted mainly of descriptions of dress. This was a book to look at, to consume visually. By the late 1590s, however, books of a more scholarly 11

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Claudia Swan, “From Blowfish to Flower: Classification and Its Images, circa 1600,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 128. On Zenaro’s publication of Girolamo Ruscelli’s Le Imprese illustri (1566), see Angela Nuovo, The Book Trade in Renaissance Venice, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Library of the Written Word, no. 26 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 158, fn 38. On the Sessa publishing clan, see Edwin Eliott Willoughby, “The Cover Design,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 2 (1932): 422–3, and Nuovo, 186–8. The online catalogue of the exhibit held at Notre Dame and the Newberry Library from 1993–4, “Renaissance Dante in Print, 1472–1629,” includes a discussion of the Sessas’ three editions of the Commedia with multiple commentaries: doi www.italnet.nd.edu/Dante/text/1564 .venice.html. On “gawking wonder,” see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park’s translation of Decartes’s “astonishment” in Les Passions (1649). They summarize Descartes’s attitude to two kinds of wonder – “admiration” and “étonnement”: “The very attractions of wonder threatened to decouple it from curiosity and attention. . .. He recognized the utility of wonder ‘in making us learn and hold in memory things we have previously been ignorant of’ but warned against ‘stupefying astonishment’ (estonnement) . . . extreme caution must be exercised lest wonder become habitual and indiscriminate, ‘the malady of those who are blindly curious, that is to say, those who seek out rarities only to wonder at them, and not to understand them’” (316–17).

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kind such as atlases and herbals were replacing picture books as sources of information about the Americas. Michiel van Grosen suggests that the De Brys’ dramatic illustrations and their claim to provide information as strange as true was more characteristic of popular writing than of the scholarly books that intellectuals and collectors in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were coming to prefer.14 This may be why the Sessa brothers arranged to have the shortened Italian texts translated into Latin by Sienese humanist Sulstazio Graziliano and set below the Italian: to forestall any perception that theirs was merely a picture book for the ignorant. Even so, the abbreviated text and greater number of prints in their edition provided more astonishment at surprising images than comprehension derived from written commentary. Another way to understand the appeal Vecellio and his publishers wanted for their books is to think of them as two-dimensional curiosity cabinets. Daniel Defert, astutely analyzing the costume book in relation to global ethnography, makes this connection, pointing out both the estranging and normalizing effect of such collections: “On one hand, they are presented to the reader as printed curiosity cabinets and substitutes for travel. On the other hand, they offer readers a familiar grid of classification,” that is, a system of region, rank, and gender identical to the categories of European social hierarchy.15 This possibility of two different responses – astonishment at the new and recognition of what is presented in a familiar structure – is the topic of Stephen Greenblatt’s comparison of the contrasting effects on viewers of two techniques of museum display: “wonder” – awe at something strange, marvelous, “outlandish,” versus “resonance” – informed understanding of how an artifact fits into its time, place, and culture: “By resonance I mean the power of the displayed object to evoke in the viewer . . . the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged. . .. By wonder I mean the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to . . . convey an arresting sense of uniqueness.”16 Elaborating, he defines the wonder-effect of a single spotlight on an object set in a freestanding case: “the so-called boutique lighting that has become popular in recent years – a pool of light that has the surreal effect of seeming to emerge from within the object itself” (49).17 14

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Michiel van Groesen, The Representation of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 320. Daniel Defert, “Un Genre ethnographique profane au XVIe: les livres d’habits (essai d’ethnoiconographie),” Histoires de l’anthropologie (XVIe–XIXe siècles), ed. Britta Rupp-Eisenreich (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984), 27. Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 42. For further discussion of Daston and Park’s argument for wonder as an element of evolving science in the Renaissance, as of the costume book, see Ann Rosalind Jones, “Ethnographer’s Sketch, Sensational Engraving, Full-Length Portrait: Print Genres for Spanish America in Girolamo Benzoni, the De Brys, and Cesare Vecellio,” JMEMS 41 (2011): 138–9.

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Resonance, on the other hand, created by juxtaposing an object to captions, commentary, and similar images nearby, was emphasized in Vecellio’s 1590 book by his history and thick description of cities and the changes in their clothing from Roman to medieval and contemporary times. The omission of historical context from his 1598 prints gave them far less resonance, suggesting that his publishers were targeting readers more interested in wondrous images. Vecellio’s own response to news and artifacts from the Americas certainly included wonder, which he promised to share with his readers. At the end of his notice “Ai Lettori,” in his 1590 book, he alluded to a sequel: If I find that [this present attempt] is well received, I am ready to add to this work other styles of dress that I have already collected, but not yet organized well enough to be able to publish; and others still, which I am continually seeking out from the New World and other little known places. Accept these from me, then, for the time being . . . and expect others more bizarre and more surprising.18

Vecellio’s “bizarre and surprising” (“estravaganti et novi”) also includes the beautiful. In the opening of his “Discorso” on the history of dress, set at the beginning of his 1590 book, he ends his list of the fabrics from which clothing has been made since the beginning of time with the glorious feather textiles of the Aztecs. The high point of world clothing has been reached, he writes, with America’s beautifully woven garments decorated with feathers of different birds, skillfully and artfully made, in such a variety of well matched colors that they can be considered the most delicate and sumptuous clothing to be found anywhere. And these are worn by the Indians of America and in other places very far from our country.19

Whether Vecellio means Aztec featherwork or Tupinambá feathered capes, he is indeed describing beautiful apparel. Had he actually seen such garments? Quite likely. They could easily have ended up in curiosity cabinets in Venice, given how highly collectors in the rest of Europe valued them. To Spain at the end of the fifteenth century, Cortés brought Aztec captives wearing feather headdresses and capes; in Florence by the mid-sixteenth, the Medici grand dukes possessed featherwork from Mexico and Peru; André Thevet took a headdress of toucan feathers from Brazil to Henri III for his curiosity cabinet; from Brazil, Portuguese Jesuits sent Tupinambá feather capes to the Vatican.20 18 20

“Ai Lettori,” 55. 19 Vecellio, 59. For Cortés’s feathered Aztecs, see the facsimile of Christophe Weiditz’s drawings and captions, Das Trachtenbuch des Christoph Weiditz, von seinen Reisen nach Spanien (1529) und den Nederlanden (1531/2), with English commentary translated from the Spanish of José Luis Casado Soto and Carlos Soyer D’Hyver de las Deses (Valencia: Ediciones Grial, 2001). On the Medici feather capes, see Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence

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By 1599, the excitement over New World featherwork had reached as far north as London, where German traveler Thomas Platter visited London merchant Walter Cope’s Wunderkammer, which included a collection of “beautiful Indian plumes” and “a Madonna made of Indian feathers.”21 It’s understandable, then, that Vecellio, a historian of European dress who started his first book with ancient Greece and argued that the ancient Roman toga was the source of the gowns worn by Venetian magistrates, was also a student of world dress, capable of being deeply impressed by Americanmade textiles. A similarly admiring attitude shapes his treatment of New World peoples in general: Mexicans, Peruvians, Virginians, and Floridians. Vecellio had seen images of the inhabitants of these four regions of the New World, but as was the case with other Venetians of his time, this sighting took place in a noncontact zone. Vecellio’s temporal, physical, and linguistic distance from Le Moyne’s New World encounter helps to explain his particular point of view: not that of a merchant, explorer, missionary, or colonist, but of a painter and costume-book artist who interpreted dress as a distillation of regional character and paid attention to the texture, color, and fall of garments. This perspective led him to set his Americans, detached from their lives in a world being transformed by exploration and conquest, into a sphere of crystallized beauty to be admired by a European audience. Much wonder, less resonance? Not entirely. Vecellio’s artistic style insistently evokes the classical past venerated in Renaissance Europe. His drawings are less linear and his figures more three-dimensional than those of most costume-book artists. He based his New World prints on Greek and Roman models, including public sculptures in Venice. In his enthusiastic description of the doge’s palace, he focuses on statuary above the doorway on the courtyard side: “those marvelous ancient statues of Adam and Eve, beautiful in their proportion and design.”22 Likewise, in his account of the new offices of the Procurators to be built according to Vincenzo Scamozzo’s plan, he speaks as a connoisseur of Greek and Roman architecture: “This building will have columns of three orders, the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, with so many . . . statues of the finest Istrian stone that it can . . . equal the most famous ones of

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(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 32–34. On Tupinambá capes sent from Brazil to Rome, see Amy Buono, “Tupi Featherwork and the Dynamics of Intercultural Exchange in Early Modern Brazil,” in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence: The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2009), 293. On Thevet’s gifts to Henri III, see Nicole Pellegrin, “Vêtements de peau(x) et de plumes: La nudité des Indiens et la diversité du monde au XVIe siècle,” in Voyager à la Renaissance: Actes du Colloque de Tours 30 juin-13 juillet 1983, edited by Jean Céard and Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 1987), 517. On Cope, see Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 33. Ibid.

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antiquity.”23 In his woodcuts, he invites a sense of recognition from his audience by assigning the dignified stillness of classical figures in marble to his Amerindian subjects. Earlier costume books had exhibited less respectful attitudes. The particularity of Vecellio’s treatment of New World peoples can be seen by comparing his Habiti to one of the first costume books, published in Paris in 1562: the Recueil de la diversité des habits qui sont de present en usaige tant es pays d’Europe, Asie, Affrique et Illes Sauvages (Collection of the Variety of Clothing Presently Worn in the Countries of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Savage Islands, all Realistically Depicted).24 Those “savage islands” belong to a vague geography that turns out to include Brazil. The title of the Recueil tells us a good deal about the effect publisher Richard Breton and his writer-illustrator François Despres intended to produce: to appeal to their countrymen’s curiosity about wild people and strange customs across the Atlantic. Despres says in his dedication to the reader that he has based his prints on images he acquired from an artist who accompanied a French explorer to New France and on information from a Portuguese sailor who had traveled around the world.25 This claim to factual reportage might have added to the appeal of the book, but its main attraction was the thrill of looking at eye-popping strangers, such as Ethiopians with strongly racialized features – thick lips and tightly curling hair – and sea monsters, the monkfish and the sea bishop satirically likened to corrupt clergymen, as well as the wild man and woman covered in hair. The Recueil is a much smaller and simpler book than either of Vecellio’s. It consists of 121 woodcuts joined to rhymed quatrains below. The size of the prints, about five by three inches, and, in the first edition, the civilité typeface, which imitates the handwriting taught to children at the time, give the book a pamphlet-like quality. I want to look briefly at three woodcuts from this book before I go on to Vecellio, because Despres’s interpretations of Americans are mocking or Euro-centered in a way that Vecellio’s are not. Whatever suspicions the “wild islands” in the title of the Recueil might arouse are amply confirmed in an early woodcut that gives the reader a generic savage depicted with contempt both visually and textually (See Figure 13.6). The figure is given no regional identity, and his dress is a comical hodgepodge of Eskimo hood, Eskimo or Aztec feather cape, a Brazilian maraca, and shoes from nowhere on earth, though they might have reminded viewers of the slippers of court 23 24

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Vecellio, 210. A facsimile edition of the Recueil is François Deserps [a misprint for Despres], A Collection of the Various Styles of Clothing Which Are Presently Worn in Countries of Europe, Asia and the Savage Islands: All Realistically Depicted, ed. and trans. Sara Shannon (Minneapolis, MN: James Ford Bell Library/University of Minnesota Press, 2001). For a study of the Recueil, see Ann Rosalind Jones, “Habits, Heterologies, Holdings: Populations in Print in a Sixteenth-Century Costume Book,” Yale French Studies 110 (2007): 92–121. On the informants claimed by Despres, see Jones, “Habits,” 96.

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jesters in Europe. The title itself, “Le Sauvage en pompe,” is deprecatory, linking the wild indigene incongruously to the word “pompe,” typically applied to the splendid dress and ceremonies of the French elite. The Savage in Grand Array When the savage dresses up for show, This is exactly what he’ll wear. If you don’t believe the picture, go To his land and see his clothing there.26

The image emphasizes the foolish vanity of the promenading savage while the text dares the skeptical European reader to travel to whatever fantastic land he inhabits in order to see him in the flesh. But the poem hardly provides a road map: neither it nor the caption gives us any information about where this absurd figure might have been seen, or by whom. The governing gaze here is condescending, to say the least. So is the title of the print, which assigns the figure to a general category of New World primitivism rather than giving him a specific identity: any native equals any other native. Titillating and amusing as it may have been, this entry in the Recueil invites neither wonder nor resonance. Resonance, however, is the political agenda of a pair of prints later in the Recueil. In contrast to the woodcuts, the poems align an indigenous Brazilian couple with French traders by locating them in the time and geographical circuit of European commerce in Brazil. In the context of the other images in the Recueil, up to this point mostly of European figures elaborately clothed, these Brazilians’ nudity comes as a shock. The format of the book normalizes them to some extent by setting them on two facing pages, the usual placement of couples in the book. But the decorative frames isolate each figure, as do their opposed profiles (Figure 14.1). In her innocent nudity and long, flowing hair, the “Brésilienne” could be a New World Eve. The quatrain, however, defines her as a participant in the modern global market: she sells exotic animals to foreign buyers: The Woman of Brazil Women there are dressed the way This portrait shows you in detail. Monkeys, there, and parrots, too, To foreigners they put on sale. Recueil, G7v27

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Recueil, G6v. This woodcut is from the first edition (1562); the following two, in Roman font, are from the second edition of the Recueil, 1564. My (loose) translation. The French quatrain reads: “Quand le Sauvage est en bravade ou pompe,/ Il est ainsi habillé proprement,/ Si tu as peur, que ce pourtrait te trompe,/Va sur les lieux pour voir son vestement.” “Ces femmes là sont vestues ainsi,/ Que ce pourtrait le monstre et represente,/ Là des Guenons, et perroquets aussi/ Aux estrangers elles mettent en vente.”

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14.1 “Bresilienne” and “Bresilien” in Francois Despres, Recueil de la diversité des habits, Paris, 1564. (Typ 515.64.734), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The print, though, positions this merchant in a way that contradicts the activity the quatrain attributes to her: she is turned away from the viewer and carries her small child in both arms, not a pose in which she could sell anything to anyone. What’s happening here is a visual culture clash: a French sense of feminine propriety – the modest mother concealing the front of her body from the viewer – works against what the text tells us she actually does: bargain face to face with Frenchmen in her local market. Conventions of European representation translate her into a delectable sight, giving the viewer a pleasurable view of her long fluttering locks (not the straight black hair of Tupi women) and bare buttocks and then surprising him with the enduape, the feather roundel (in fact, worn only by Brazilian men) on her thigh. The text meanwhile points to the glamor of new commodities: native animals, parrots and monkeys, sold for export to satisfy Europeans’ taste for exotic pets. In this gap between visual and verbal message, the active middle-woman drops out of sight. Despres’s Brésilienne looks like a graceful young mother, more manageable by far than the hard-bargaining Tupi woman a French trader was likely to confront on the shore of Brazil. The image and text of the Brazilian man assimilate him more forcibly to French participation in the global economy. At first glance, he is startling in his

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nudity and his fierce weapons: the long bow and arrows and the knife tied at his neck. But Despres gives the viewer a mixed message here, too. This man may look like a warrior, but the quatrain reassures us that he is a woodsman instead; he harvests the trees prized in Europe for the red dye derived from their bark. The text accomplishes a different sleight of hand for the man than for the woman. The Man of Brazil A man of the land where brazil-wood grows Looks as he here appears before your eye. Their natural labor takes the form Of chopping brazil [wood] to sell and to buy. Recueil, G8 r28

What does it mean to say that the “naturel exercice,” that is, the innate activity of such men, is to cut brazilwood? If this is their nature, all the French trader has to do is leave them to get on with the activity they have been made for. This time the text rewrites the Brazilian’s work by assigning it to a pre-contact world. In fact, Brazilians were cutting down brazilwood not because of their “nature,” but because of a massive change in their culture: the arrival of Europeans with the gleam of profit in their eyes. The implicit message of the text, against the image, is that Brazil is a safe haven for French traders: they need not fear any resistance here, or refusal to hand over local goods. Resonance denies difference, assimilating the Brazilians into what appears to be a timeless circuit of global exchange. The Recueil, then, denies cultural specificity to a generic savage, and subsumes its Indians into a trading system dominated by the French, whose interests they are born to serve. Vecellio’s attitude toward his Americans of Florida is different. He is evenly respectful of the figures he represents; at times he praises their culture in contrast to European ways of life. He avoids De Bry’s scenes of infant sacrifice, brutal executions, and cruelty in war, as well as his depiction of French soldiers looking on at the Floridians’ activities. Yet by leaving this context out, he positions his Floridians in a timeless, conflict-free zone that exemplifies the argument made by critics of anthropology such as Johannes Fabian that the focus only on taxonomy – the here and now of custom and costume in an indigenous culture – maintains a European sense of superiority: “We live in a complex, forward-moving history; they inhabit only a simple present.”29 This 28

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“L’homme du lieu auquel le Bresil croist/ Est tel qu’icy, à l’oeil il apparoist, /Leur naturel exercice s’applique/ Coupper Bresil, pour en faire trafique.” For Fabian’s argument that the gaze of the ethnographer denies his coevalness with the observed other – “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of discourse” – see Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), especially 21–5.

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focus on people observed in their here and now is a generic feature of costume books, whatever region they treat. Rather than being integrated into an ongoing history, each print defines a moment of sartorial identity in the present: “This is the wife of an Augsburg merchant, this is a black Moor of Africa.” Wilson makes a similar point: by the “repeated use of frames . . . the figures are cut from any narrative context in which their actions or movements could be interpreted.”30 Vecellio’s New World woodcuts invite both wonder and resonance. He often opens with a thrilling image of foreign strangeness and then moves to a title or commentary that modifies the viewer’s direct confrontation with the new by setting it into a European frame of reference. This process, with the emphasis on wonder, is especially clear in his treatment of the Centurion of Florida (Figure 14.2). The woodcut, set on a page about six inches in height and four and three-quarter inches in width, gives us an astonishing sight: lacking any caption or background, a muscular man stands firmly in a wide stride, with a large bird on his head and a thick striped tail between his legs. Carrying a long club, he wears a circular object on his chest, a loincloth with strange discs around its hem, and bracelets above his elbows and beneath his knees. Looking more closely, we see that the bird is attached to his head by its claws, which pierce his ears; a scowl line rises above his right eye. The Sansovino frame surrounding him belongs to another world, in which two satyrs can be placed on curving scrolls and a tiny satyr’s or devil’s head can be seen at the center of the patterned strips above and below. What sense could a first-time viewer make of this startling and incoherent image? The source of Vecellio’s print is De Bry’s large engraving of a war scene between two Timucuan tribes, set on a folio about fourteen inches high (Figure 14.3). In the foreground De Bry presents three Timucuan military leaders moving to our left; in the background a mass of foot soldiers is positioned in a huge, dense square surrounding their chief, Outina, whom the French helped to defeat his rival, Saturiwa. The triumphant leader is identified by a caption as Holata Outina, translated as “chief of many chiefs.”31 The commentary under the print explains Outina’s victory as the result of his careful planning and the discipline of his soldiers, assisted by the musket fire of the French. De Bry’s leader beckons calmly to the other two warriors to follow him. In contrast, just behind the leaders and on the hill behind them, we see small, scattered soldiers, Saturiwa’s men fleeing the scene in disorder. 30

31

Bronwen Wilson, “Reproducing the Contours of Venetian Identity in Sixteenth-Century Costume Books,” Sources in Iconography 25 (2004): 245. Quotations from De Bry’s Latin version of Le Moyne, Americae Pars II, Brevis Narratio eorum quae in Florida . . . Gallis acciderunt are from Neil M. Cheshire’s English translation in Paul Hulton, The Work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues: A Huguenot Artist in France, Florida and England (London: British Museum Publications, 1977), 1:117–52. Cheshire’s translation of Le Moyne’s comment on Outina’s name is on 144.

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14.2 “Habito del Centurione,” in Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo, Venice, 1598, Private collection, Leverett, Massachusetts.

From this complex engraving with its multitude of figures set in close and distant perspective, Vecellio selected the figure of the man on the right. The title of his woodcut signals that we aren’t only in Florida: “Habito del Centurione.” Nowhere in Le Moyne’s narrative as translated by De Bry is the word “centurion” used, although they mention that when Outina rested before battle, he was

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14.3 “Outina’s Military Discipline,” in Theodor De Bry, Brevis narratio eorvm qvae in Florida Americæ provı̃ cia Gallis acciderunt, Frankfurt, 1591. Robert Dechert Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

guarded by ten squads of ten fighters each.32 By employing this ancient term, Vecellio adds the prestige of Roman military vocabulary to the print. Yet to the extent that the classical allusion brings the warrior closer to the European viewer, it distances him from his own history of intertribal conflict. In his woodcut, Vecellio aims for wonder. He poses his centurion, like Greenblatt’s single object in a in a spot-lit case, isolated and standing still, without the context of a specific battle. He eliminates two of the three striped animal tails De Bry shows the warrior wearing, making it possible to think that the remaining tail is part of his body, and his description of the man’s dress de-familiarizes him further: he admits that he has no language adequate to explain it. His puzzlement about the disc on the warrior’s chest leads him to call it, with atypical vagueness, “una certa cosa,” and in his Latin translation, Graziliano intensifies the uncertainty by writing “nescio quid” – “I know not what:” Centurions wear certain skins of birds on their heads, with their beaks and feet through their ears; they do this to look more terrifying. On their chests they wear a certain object of copper or silver. They cover their private parts with skins, from which tails hang down; they have discs of copper at their thighs, and they also wear chains around their legs and arms. In their hands 32

De Bry, trans. Cheshire, 114.

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14.4 “The Ceremony in which His Chosen Wife is Brought to the Chief,” in Theodor De Bry, Brevis narratio eorvm qvae in Florida Americæ provı̃ cia Gallis acciderunt, Frankfurt, 1591. Robert Dechert Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

they carry a staff, which, at the top, is like a blade edged with nails, which they use to strike dangerous blows; and in this way they go into battle.33

The headdress, the strange breastplate and jewelry, and the club thrillingly distance the warrior from any idea Vecellio’s European audience might have of warfare. These are the habits of war, in the sense both of action and traditional dress shared by a community, but the woodcut shows none of those activities going on. Vecellio’s woodcut from De Bry’s illustration of a royal wedding has a different effect (Figure 14.4). For his woodcut, Vecellio extracted the fancarrying page from De Bry’s central foreground, where he is positioned in a three-quarter turn toward the bride’s litter. This time, Vecellio’s revision of the engraving looks as if it is motivated less by an aim to startle his viewer than to demonstrate his own interest in drawing a beautiful body and displaying it like a statue visible from different angles. The print is a good example of the use of classicizing visual conventions in images based on written descriptions of New World peoples. Joan-Pau Rubiés points out that copper-plate engravings such as those made by the De Brys belonged to a new medium that “quickly became associated with the aesthetic conventions that united a group of artists

33

Vecellio, “Centurione,” 502.

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14.5 “Habito dei paggi,” in Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo, Venice, 1598. Private collection, Leverett, Massachusetts.

and their elite audiences.”34 Less elite viewers, too, could enjoy this image: Vecellio shows his page with his head in profile and his body in a rear view (Figure 14.5). In addition to giving his viewer a clearer view of the page’s face 34

Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Texts, Images and the Perception of ‘Savages’ in Early Modern Europe: What We Can Learn from White and Harriot,” in European Visions: American Voices, ed. Kim Sloan (London: The British Museum, 2009), 124.

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and buttocks, Vecellio’s print makes him less strange by replacing the two long animal tails descending from the back of his head in De Bry’s version with a single long plume resembling the ostrich feathers Europeans had imported from Africa since the Middle Ages. He omits the shorter animal tail hanging down along the left thigh of De Bry’s page and further streamlines his figure by deleting the inner right arm with which De Bry’s page holds the long handle of the fan. The text likewise concentrates on the young Floridian’s physique, recognized, as it would be in Europe, as the sign of a healthy life: “This page is one of those who . . . precede the king with this fan made of feathers, to protect him from the sun. They are robust men and do not lead soft lives, and so they live a long time.”35 The woodcut illustrates a body that is indeed robust. Muscular masculine beauty is the visual pay-off here, a freestanding sculptural form rather than the page’s participation in the wedding ceremony that will make a political difference to the Floridians by producing a new royal couple. Vecellio is an artist of the physical body, not a historian of the Timicuan body politic. He is also a historian of Christian time conceived as unchangingly and universally present, into which he inserts the newly married queen. De Bry’s thirtyninth engraving, the third in the marriage series, depicts the couple relaxing on a walk after their elaborate marriage ceremony (Figure 14.6). The king’s two attendants cool him off with the long-handled feather fans we have been shown earlier; one humbly holds up his long deerskin cloak. His tattoos, easily representable in the fine-scale technique of engraving, are shown clearly, and he stands in a confident contrapposto with one hand on his hip, elbow pointing outward. His bride, with three attendants, turns shyly toward him, offering him a handful of leaves; the three women hold more leaves and a basket. This is a scene of royal power presented in European terms, including proper gender relations between the regally posed king and his modestly backward-leaning queen. De Bry’s text tells us that the leaves she holds come from a local bush. This was probably indigo used for tattoos. Although he doesn’t name the plant explicitly, he translates Le Moyne’s explanation that it produces a juice used by the Floridians to dye decorative patterns permanently into their skin. He also describes the queen’s clothing as made of an admirably fine mesh composed of the blue-green moss that grows on trees in the Floridian forest, what we now call Spanish moss.36 In his woodcut (Figure 14.7), Vecellio removes the context of the post-wedding stroll by dividing the king and queen into separate prints and omitting their attendants. 35 36

Vecellio, “Habito del paggio,” 568. Le Moyne, comment on Plate 39, trans. Cheshire, 151. A later engraving of “A Queen of the Island of Florida,” dressed in a skirt of moss and holding a plant specimen and a basket, was included in the first volume of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae (1599). See New World Wonders: European Images of the Americas 1492–1700, ed, Rachel Doggett with Monique Hulvey and Julie Ainsworth (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1992), 91. For more on this image, see Lia Markey’s essay in this volume.

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14.6 “The King and the Queen Set Out on a Relaxing Stroll,” in Theodor De Bry, Brevis narratio eorvm qvae in Florida Americæ provı̃ cia Gallis acciderunt, Frankfurt, 1591. Robert Dechert Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

In his print of the queen, her posture, though it reproduces the contrapposto of De Bry’s bride, is even more modest. She looks down to our right, focusing her gaze not at the king, as De Bry’s does, but on the fruit she holds in her hand. The surprise here is that Vecellio’s queen holds not the local indigo leaves but an apple – a fruit that radically changes the meaning of the woodcut. What is Vecellio signaling by this substitution? To give the Floridian queen an apple is to extract her from Timucuan territory and insert her into the visual language of European Christianity. In spite of her tattoos, to Venetian viewers, this isolated figure would recall Eve before the Fall, with the long, flowing hair of the first woman in Christian creation. Yet Vecellio, playing it both ways, also gives her the posture of a Greek Aphrodite holding a fruit, hybridizing this classical sculptural tradition into a figure also representing the Edenic perfection that explorers attributed to the peoples of the New World.37 Eve’s apple, however, complicates the message: the Fall is just around the corner. When Vecellio describes the queen’s attire, he unnervingly familiarizes her by reinterpreting the fabric she wears. She is dressed in the leaves of trees: “They take 37

For a discussion of De Bry’s inclusion of an engraving of Adam and Eve at the beginning of Book 1 of America Occidentalis, see van Groesen, Representation of the Overseas World, 139, and Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008), 15–18.

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14.7 “Habito della Regina,” in Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo, Venice, 1598, Private collection, Leverett, Massachusetts.

great pleasure in painting their bodies; they cover their shoulders and private parts with tree leaves.”38 Not moss, but fig leaves. This is a radical assimilation of De Bry’s Floridian into the founding European story in which Eve was not a newly married American queen surrounded by attendants but an anti-heroine 38

Vecellio, 566.

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alone with Adam in Paradise. Against the fetching image, the text resonates with the missionary discourse whereby the Indians would be damned if they did not accept the salvation promised by Christianity.39 To sum up what these images show: in contrast to Le Moyne’s narrative and De Bry’s engravings interpreting it, Vecellio’s Floridians occupy a complex hybrid position between Venetian takes on classical and Christian culture. But they also inhabit a historical void, abstracted from any location in a living culture under the stress of European exploration. They are beautiful. In his words as well as his images, Vecellio insists on the beauty of their bodies and their apparel. But this beauty is a Venetian corporeal ideal that stands outside the history Le Moyne witnessed and De Bry illustrated. Vecellio’s America is a gallery of Amerindians labeled and framed in European style for European pleasure, a display of strange people manageably spaced and ordered like the rare, curious and beautiful objects in a Wunderkammer. Is it reasonable to draw a parallel between the capture of actual Americans and their capture in these closely focused prints, between the twenty-four Aztecs Cortés took back to Spain, plucked from their indigenous habitat and history and turned into entertainers at the Holy Roman Emperor’s court, and the Floridian warrior and queen Vecellio displayed to his Venetian public? The analogy may seem strained. After all, beautification in print is not equivalent to colonization by warfare, and Vecellio sets these figures in the same sequence and the same frames he uses for the Europeans, Asians, and Africans he assembles in his book. But the book was a commercial product that depended on European sight lines – techniques of astonishment and familiarization – to transport these Americans, like statues, into niches of Italian making. On the other hand: to the extent that Vecellio’s printed book is a cabinet of wonders, it neither mocks its specimens, as Despres does, nor keeps them under lock and key except for privileged visitors, as the owners of curiosity cabinets did. Does he, rather, release them to a sense of wonder and admiration in their viewers and readers of the kind that Shankar Raman sees in French missionary Jean De Léry’s attitude toward the Brazilians he lived with in the 1550s? Raman writes, “Doubtless the unfolding of new worlds cannot escape the ideological frameworks inhering in the European observer’s perception; . . . nonetheless, even the anamorphisms these perceptions produce can open into . . . potentialities that these strangers and their even stranger worlds express.”40 39

40

Grafton argues that De Bry would have interpreted such a New World Eve as irredeemably fallen unless the Amerindians accepted Christianity as salvation, 128. See, however, Jeannine Guérin dalle Mese, who interprets the figure as a laicized Greek Aphrodite rather than a Christian sinner, in L’Occhio di Cesare Vecellio: Habiti e costumi esotici nel ‘500 (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998), 222. Shankar Raman, “Learning from De Bry: Lessons in Seeing and Writing the Heathen,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 41 (Winter 2011): 48.

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The ethnic type as colonial synecdoche, or the timeless icon with aura? Neither take on the New World is historically innocent. The first effaces differences and conflict among indigenous peoples, presenting them to the European viewer as legibly unchanging types rather than social or political agents in their own culture. Against such resonance through simplification, Vecellio’s figures, whether startling or sweetly appealing, invite an marveling gaze: the ferocious warrior and the tattooed bride would have certainly have struck the eye by their difference from their Venetian viewers, clothed from head to foot and placed in an intricate social hierarchy. Vecellio’s New World page, however, occupies a middle ground between wonder and resonance. In contrast to Despres’s comical savage, this Floridian is elegant in both his dress and undress, dignified by his headdress and poise, admirable for his physical health and his role in a royal procession. A noble savage, or a participant in ceremonies like those performed by Venetians in patrician weddings and the coronation of their doges and dogaresses? Vecellio’s presentation of a strangely beautiful man holding a royal fan keeps both possibilities afloat, synthesizing them in a stylized vision that invites awe and recognition alike.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

BAROQUE ITALIAN EPIC FROM GRANADA TO THE NEW WORLD: COLUMBUS CONQUERS THE MOORS Nathalie Hester

A

lthough the popularity of epic poetry in early modern Europe began to wane after the sixteenth century, in Italy, the epic remained prominent during the following century.1 Antonio Belloni’s 1893 study of works that followed Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581) includes a list of nearly 100 titles published between 1582 and 1700, several of them in multiple editions.2 Notable among these is a group of poems on the Americas, some complete, and some that consist only of initial cantos.3 For seventeenth-century Italian poets, especially those at pro-Spanish courts, narrating in epic form the European encounter with the New World had notable precedents. Alonso de Ercilla’s y Zúñiga’s Araucana (1569–89), 1

2 3

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See David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 10, for a consideration of reasons behind this decline. Antonio Belloni, Gli epigoni della Gerusalemme liberata (Padua: Angelo Draghi, 1893). Examples of partial and complete epic poems on the Americas include Giulio Cesare Stella, Columbeidos (1585); Giovanni Giorgini, Mondo nuovo (1596); Giovanni Villifranchi, Colombo (1602); Raffaello Gualterotti, L’America (1611); Tommaso Stigliani, Mondo nuovo (1617, 1628); Giovanni Battista Strozzi, L’America (unpublished); Agazio di Somma, I due primi canti dell’America (1624); Giovanni Maria Vanti, Mondo nuovo (unpublished); Alessandro Tassoni, Oceano (1622); Guidobaldo Benamati, Tre libri del Mondo Nuovo (1622); Girolamo Bartolomei Smeducci, L’America (1650); Girolamo Graziani, Il Conquisto di Granata (1650). For an overview of this corpus, see Carlo Steiner, Cristoforo Colombo nella poesia epica italiana (Voghera: Successori Gatti, 1891). Virginia Cox has recently called attention to a previously unstudied manuscript epic on the conquest of Mexico by Gerolamo Vecchietti, dating to the 1580s and entitled Delle prodezze di Ferrante Cortese.

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a Spanish recounting of the conquest of Peru, had enjoyed a great success, as had Luís de Camões’s Lusiades (1572), which celebrated Portuguese navigation. Contemporary themes of exploration and navigation had come to constitute apt modern echoes of the subjects of classical epic poetry. Both Ludovico Ariosto in Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532) and Torquato Tasso in Gerusalemme liberata (1581) mention early modern European navigation and Columbus’s first voyage in their works. Tasso specifically characterizes the transatlantic voyage as worthy of poetic recounting.4 In Counter-Reformation Italy, where the Gerusalemme liberata remained the dominant model for epic poetry, the voyages of Columbus and Vespucci were enticing material for a narrative of Catholic expansion and triumph, and Columbus in particular could be fashioned into an epic hero as a holy conqueror.5 Some of these New World poems elicited strong reactions, often concerning questions about the proper use of literary Italian and the adherence or not to Aristotelian precepts for heroic epic. These reactions were also part of the ongoing debate over whether Ariosto or Tasso had produced the most successful modern epic. Because these American epic poems addressed relatively recent history and colonial expansion, such aesthetic considerations were inevitably intertwined with concerns about proto-national identity and sovereignty. As David Quint reminds us, epic poetry, rooted in tales of conquest and military might, carries contemporary political meanings, and this is certainly the case in Italian poems about the Americas.6 These texts were explicit or implicit reminders that Italian city-states were not among the European powers colonizing the Americas and that Spain was an entrenched colonial presence on the Italian Peninsula. Indeed, the number of unfinished Italian poems on the New World suggests a certain ambivalence about celebrating Spanish conquests in the Italian literary vernacular.7 Girolamo Graziani’s (1604–74) well-received epic poem, The Conquest of Granada (Il Conquisto di Granata, 1650), represented a culmination in the genealogy of debates about New World Italian epic poetry, to which corpus the Conquisto belongs, despite its title, because Columbus is one of its protagonists. As with its epic predecessors, at stake in the Conquisto di Granata is not only the author’s reputation and pension, or the fitting praise of a princely family, in this case the Modena branch of the Este dynasty, but the international status of Italian letters at a time when deeds and facts – expansion, colonialism – 4

5

6 7

For a consideration of Tasso and New World poetry, see Sergio Zatti, L’Ombra del Tasso. Epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento (Milan: Mondadori, 1986), 146–207. As Mary Watts notes in her essay in this volume, Columbus represented himself as both an imperial and evangelical hero. Quint, Epic and Empire, 8–13. Zatti links the “late and limited expression” of New World poetry in Italian to Spain’s appropriation of the subject in its own national epic and to Italy’s increased marginalization vis-à-vis other European countries. Zatti, L’Ombra del Tasso, 149, n. 8.

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defined the glory of a European proto-nation.8 These epic works, ostensibly simply products of religious and literary orthodoxy, were also expressions of a desire to maintain Italy’s literary primacy. In the quest to make the case for Italy’s cultural reputation, the poetic project of the Conquisto centers on Columbus as the narrative and ideological link between Conquest in the New World and Reconquest in Spain. Furthermore, the poem can be seen as a response to an ongoing debate about the possibilities of producing a preeminent Italian epic version of New World exploration and conquest. Italian epic poetry about the New World prompted a wide variety of debates in literary circles: about the relationship between history and poetry; about the Iliad or the Odyssey as pertinent models; and about the fundamental nature and characteristics of the epic hero. At stake in these works and the discussions that surrounded them was Italy’s international prestige, the viability of its vernacular poetic tradition, and on a deeper level, Italy’s fraught relationship to Spain and unclear place on the transatlantic stage in the seventeenth century. Discussions about American poetry became especially heated with the publication of Tommaso Stigliani’s New World (Mondo nuovo, 1617, 1623). Stigliani (1573–1661), born in Matera, spent fifteen years at the pro-Spanish Farnese court in Parma. He was a bitter rival of Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), who founded the marinismo school of poetry and achieved international success with the publication of his epic poem Adonis (Adone, 1623). Stigliani, following the publication of the first edition of the Mondo nuovo, which included thinly veiled jabs at Marino, found himself the target of numerous attacks on the part of Marino loyalists. Stigliani’s revised edition, expanded from twenty to thirtyfour cantos, fared no better. His marginalia in his own copies of the 1617 and 1628 editions offer a meticulous and indignant defense against criticism by other literati, much of it regarding lexicon, appropriateness of linguistic register, and uses of figurative language.9 It is perhaps the ideas of Alessandro Tassoni, however, that left the greatest mark on the epic poems about the New World that followed. Tassoni 8

9

For a consideration of the relationship of the Italian literary tradition to travel and Italian identity in the medieval and early modern periods, see Theodore Cachey Jr., “An Italian Literary History of Travel,” Annali d’Italianistica 14 (1996): 55–64. Stigliani’s notes to the second edition reveal his intentions to produce a new version of the poem. He had counted on the epic poem ensuring his poetic reputation, and the final octaves of the Mondo nuovo include a call to his son Carlo to emulate him by writing a poem about Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico. Stigliani’s marginalia express bitter disappointment at his son’s failure to follow in his father’s footsteps. His comments deserve to be quoted as they provide insights into the intensity with which Stigliani took on his American poetic projects and the gains, both in terms of material wealth and in literary fame, that he was convinced the poem(s) would bring him: “Carlo, the author’s son, in the end turned out for the worse and, in addition to never having wanted to learn letters, was a traitor to his father, and attempted three times to kill him (poison him), twice with poison, and the last with a blade.” Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma, 71.2.A.113. 1011 verso. All translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.

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(1565–1635), who was at the court of Modena in the early part of Girolamo Graziani’s career, was virulently anti-Spanish and supported the liberation of Italy from foreign domination by the house of Savoy. Like Stigliani and Marino, he was a member of the Accademia degli Umoristi in Rome, and he wrote the first mock heroic epic, The Stolen Bucket (La secchia rapita, 1622). Tassoni outlined the fundamentals of his conception of epic poetry about the Americas in a letter to Agazio di Somma, a Jesuit and member of the Accademia degli Umoristi who had sent to Tassoni his unfinished poem America in 1618. Tassoni reviewed the poem negatively and, in his missive to di Somma, raised both aesthetic and historical objections to Stigliani’s poem. Principally, Tassoni noted, Stigliani had not heeded Torquato Tasso’s admonition to avoid subject matter from recent history, so that the fantastical elements of the story – acceptable for Tasso, as long as the poem expressed a Christian truth – clashed too obviously with what were well-documented events. According to Tasso, in the second book of his Discourse on the Heroic Epic, “Treating modern events brings great ease and convenience regarding customs and practices, but it excludes almost completely the license to invent and to imitate, which is so necessary to poets, especially epic poets.”10 For Tasso, the recounting of contemporary events necessarily impeded the unfurling of the poetic imagination. Stigliani, however, was more concerned with adhering to heroic and chivalric epic precedents and, in addition to narrating Columbus’s navigation and exploration, had populated his New World with vast pagan and European armies and had added a cast of European women to fit the requisite roles of warrior women and love interests of the Christian heroes.11 Tassoni, well aware of the Spanish massacre of indigenous populations, rejected the possibility of casting Columbus as an exemplary warrior hero, and asked: “Why create a warrior hero, where it was not possible to wage war? Or, if it was waged, it was waged against men who were unarmed, naked, and timorous?”12 For Tassoni, a story of Spanish conquest, even with an Italian protagonist, would ultimately evoke Italy’s subservience to Spain.13 Columbus’s most convincing claim to fame lies in his reaching a new continent. Tassoni continues: 10 11

12

13

Torquato Tasso, Prose, ed. Ettore Mazzali (Milan: Ricciardi, 1959), 541. The fantastical moments in the narrative include numerous subplots of loves lost and found, a descent into hell, and battles with giants and Amazons. Although Stigliani claims not to know of Giovanni Giorgini’s poem, it is likely that the dramatic scenes of Giorgini’s Mondo nuovo (1596) served as a reference point. The predominance of imaginary tales in these poems does not mean their authors were not acquainted with American histories, chronicles, and travel accounts. There is evidence in their works that poets such as Tasso and Stigliani had read and studied available textual and cartographic sources. Alessandro Tassoni, La secchia rapita, l’Oceano e le rime, ed. Giorgio Rossi (Bari: Laterza, 1930), 262. For a detailed treatment of Stigliani’s and Tassoni’s notions of New World epic poetry, see Nathalie Hester, “Failed New World Epics in Baroque Italy,” in Poesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds, special issue of Hispanic Issues, vol. 39, ed. Anthony Cascardi and

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Furthermore, the introduction of more Europeans in the Indies, other than Columbus, that battle him, is the greatest error that one can make, since it goes against history and takes away from him what was his real heroic deed, which was to be the unquestionable first to attempt to and to discover the new world.14

If Columbus is to be praised as an epic hero, it can only be as a navigator and explorer, and the appropriate poetic model is the Odyssey, not the Iliad. Thus Tassoni challenges poets to create a different kind of New World epic that will both adhere to historical facts regarding Columbus and ground his heroism in his navigational abilities. Poems that followed, such as Girolamo Bartolomei Smeducci’s America (1650), dedicated to Louis XIV and replete with anti-Spanish undercurrents, took into account Tassoni’s warnings. Indeed, Smeducci’s mention of Alessandro Tassoni is evidence that Tassoni’s view held particular sway in literary academic circles to which Italian New World poets belonged and suggests that Italian poets were conscious of the aesthetic and political aspects of treating this subject matter. Bartolomei sides with Tassoni by proclaiming in a lengthy preface that America takes after the Odyssey and, for a Florentine eager to praise the Medici dynasty, that Vespucci is the bestsuited protagonist of an allegory of Catholic spiritual searching, not of military endeavors: Some of our own Tuscans did the same [used the Iliad as a model], singing heroically of the New World, certainly, but in the pathetic genre, imitating, as Tassoni admonished, more the Aeneid of Virgil than Homer’s Odyssey. I then dedicated myself all the more willingly to the terrain of the Odyssey, when I saw it so abandoned by others.15

In Bartolomei’s version, Vespucci’s heroism stems from his actions as navigator and Dante-like spiritual seeker, and Bartolomei adopts and adapts episodes of contact with the underworld that are central to the Divine Comedy and are also found in Stigliani’s Mondo nuovo.16 One scene, in which the soul of an indigenous tribal leader tells of mistreatment at the hands of the Spanish, directly addresses Tassoni’s commentary

14 15

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Leah Middlebrook (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), 201–23. Tassoni writes one canto of an epic poem, Oceano, which focuses on Columbus’s navigation. Tassoni, Oceano, 263. The emphasis is mine in the translation. Girolamo Bartolomei Smeducci, L’America (Rome: Lodovico Grignani, 1650), “Al benigno e saggio lettore,” a verso-a2. By “our own Tuscans” Bartolomei is most likely referring to Raffaello Gualterotti (1544–1638), who wrote initial cantos of a poem, L’America (1611), Giovanni Villifranchi (d. 1614), who published two cantos of a poem titled Colombo, and perhaps Giovanni Battista Strozzi the Younger (1551–1634), who wrote a Vespuccian epic of which only one canto survives. Sergio Zatti emphasizes the complex layers of intertextuality and citation in Italian epic poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in L’ombra del Tasso, 148–50.

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about the uneven battlefield for poorly armed indigenous peoples. The scene also serves to combine aesthetic concerns – the suitable telling of a heroic tale – with political ones – the terrible consequences of Spanish colonial conquest. In Canto 4, Vespucci and his men come to an island with an active volcano. At night, Vespucci enters the volcano only to see armies of damned souls fighting each other. There he listens to a cacique, Guacaganari, tell of his humiliation and torture at the hands of a particularly vicious Spaniard.17 The cacique’s tale is a retelling of the fate of the La Navidad settlement on Hispaniola between Columbus’ first and second voyages, when indigenous peoples killed the Spaniards who had stayed behind and faced terrible retaliation upon Columbus’ return. Guacaganari’s lament of the difference in military might between the two groups is in part a response to Tassoni’s admonitions. The cacique explains his attempts at fighting off the Spanish: I gathered ten thousand warriors, and proceeded then with people thus deployed. I assembled a large army of archers; but of what use is the number of soldiers, if the enemy ranks are powerful, and the battle is not equal in arms? I sent the naked to battle the armed, so that the metal clad men seemed all the stranger.18 (Accolsi diecimila combattenti, e mossi poi con tai schierate genti. Oste grande adunai di turbe arciere; ma di soldati il numero, che giova? Se poderose le nemiche schiere, e se non sia con arme egual la prova? . . . Io gl’ignudi mandai contro gli armati; si che strani sembraro huomin ferrati.)

Bartolomei inserts into the narrative Tassoni’s objections about building an epic around the massacre of the poorly armed, and Guacaganari’s speech represents both a lesson about Spanish colonial cruelty and about epic poiesis. The reflective, observant Vespucci, an exemplary subject of the Medici family, is thus a witness to but not a perpetrator of violence in the New World. Although Graziani’s Conquisto di Granata focuses primarily on the battle of the Spanish Catholic kings against the Moors in southern Spain, Columbus and the New World are also crucial elements in the poem. The Conquisto, as does America, also incorporates a creative response to Tassoni’s letter to Agazio di Somma, and in some ways Graziani’s work represents the conclusion of the debates provoked by Stigliani’s Mondo nuovo. Graziani, both an accomplished 17

18

Guacaganari is a composite figure probably drawn from a variety of sources, as is the cruel Spaniard, modeled after Francisco Roldán or Alonso de Ojeda. Columbus remains free of blame in the cacique’s narrative. Girolamo Bartolomei Smeducci, L’America (Rome: Lodovico Grignani, 1650), 47 (Canto 4, octaves 91–2).

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poet and diplomat, spent his entire career at the Este court in Modena. He published his first book of poetry at the age of sixteen, and was a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti of Venice and the Accademia dei Gelati of Bologna.19 His published works include poetry, panegyrics, and two epic poems, La Cleopatra (Venice: Sarzina, 1632) and Il Conquisto di Granata, which had five editions in the seventeenth century. It was reprinted in the eighteenth century and amply praised for its clarity and restrained use of figurative language.20 It was also a model for Giacomo Leopardi’s play Consalvo (1833). Graziani’s last published work was a tragedy, Cromuele (1671), about Oliver Cromwell.21 In his diplomatic career, Graziani was embroiled in court polemics and changing alliances with Spain and France. After being forced to leave the Este court in 1641 for supporting Francis I’s brother Obizzo instead of Rinaldo to become cardinal, Graziani was finally allowed to return to Modena and, in 1647, he was appointed secretary of Alfonso, son of the Duke of Modena, and charged with the task of enlisting the help of France in fighting the Spanish.22 He helped establish close diplomatic ties with the court of France, especially as of the 1650s, when the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, Laura Martinozzi, became the new Duchess of Modena. He was awarded a pension by Louis XIV in 1666.23 The Conquisto di Granata, in Graziani’s retelling, becomes, unsurprisingly given Modena’s pro-Spanish alliances in the years Graziani was writing it, as 19

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Graziani dedicated one of the sonnets of his Rime to Tassoni. See Ida Malfatti, “Girolamo Graziani,” La Rassegna Nazionale 123 (1903): 203–20. Girolamo Tiraboschi relates that it was Alessandro Tassoni, after reading Graziani’s Cleopatra, who suggested that Graziani write another epic poem. Girolamo Tiraboschi, Biblioteca modenese. Tome III of VI (Modena: Società tipografica, 1783), 20. A nineteenth-century play about Alessandro Tassoni depicts Girolamo Graziani as his devoted ally. See Giovanni Sabatini, Alessandro Tassoni alla corte di Francesco I d’Este, quadro drammatico del secolo XVII (Modena: Andrea Rossi, 1846). Modena, 1650; Naples, 1651; Paris, 1654; Milan, 1666; and Venice, 1684. It was also reprinted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, unlike much baroque poetry, garnered poetic appreciation throughout the centuries. Antonio Belloni states that Graziani was considered among the best poets of his time. Belloni, Gli epigoni, 322, n. 1. The play focuses on Cromwell’s decision to support Charles I’s execution in 1649 and on the reason of state. Graziani had to tread carefully at the Este court of Modena. A fellow Modenese diplomatpoet and his predecessor as secretary, Fulvio Testi (1593–1646), was anti-Spanish and proSavoyan, and ended up in prison, where he died in 1646, after being accused of building a rapport with Cardinal Mazarin and the French. Testi’s anti-Spanish poetry, known as Pianto d’Italia, had already gotten him into trouble with the Duke of Modena in 1615. Although Graziani began writing the Conquisto much earlier than 1650, by the time it was published, Modena was allied with the French. Piero Di Nepi notes the distinct wave of “anti-court polemics” throughout the Conquista di Granata, in particular in the speeches of both Muslim and Christian leaders. Piero di Nepi, “Il Conquisto di Granata e l’epica del Seicento,” Il Veltro 20 (1976): 98–100. Fabio Tarzia, “Girolamo Graziani.” Dizionario bibliografico degli italiani, vol. 58. www.treccani .it/enciclopedia/girolamo-graziani_(Dizionario-Biografico)/.

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much a tale of Modenese and Italian glory as of Spanish victory against the domination of the Moors. This local and Italian glory includes Columbus’s endeavor of converting the world to Christianity but also, on a meta-textual level, the significance of the poem itself, written in literary Italian, the ideal poetic medium for telling a story of triumph. The presence of a major Italian player in the narrative depends on a convenient reworking of the historical timeline, whereby Columbus returns to Spain from his first voyage to the Americas in early 1492, in time to fight the Moors and play a decisive role in their defeat. Columbus’s importance as a figure that both legitimizes Christian conquest and its recounting in literary Italian is clear because, although he appears primarily toward the end of the epic, he is present at two major turning points in the narrative that signal Christian Spanish success: in Canto 19, when Queen Isabella receives a prophecy of victory from Saint James, and in the final two cantos, Cantos 25 and 26, when the Moors are finally defeated. Furthermore, most of Canto 22 comprises first-person narration of Columbus’s first voyage. The blatant invention of Columbus’s fighting the Moors allows him to connect and embody Conquest and Reconquest. Echoing Stigliani’s ideas about poetic imagination, María José Vega notes that while for Spanish and Portuguese representations of the Americas, historical facts related to the conquest become essential to anchoring the representation of imperial domination, in the Italian context, those facts are less meaningful to the poetic project than questions of form:24 [In Spain and Portugal], neoaristotelian questions are not as important as the political necessities of empire and the perception of the existence of a history that is already heroic before being told and that can be made into poetry. Unlike what occurs in Italian poetics, and in contrast to the misera nazione of Italy – this is Guicciardini’s adjective – on whose present a heroic vision cannot be built, Spanish authors claim to live in an exceptional moment that has nothing to concede to Classical authors.25

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Giorgini’s Il Mondo nuovo (1596) offers a compelling example of the rewriting of New World history. In the poem, King Ferdinand travels to the Americas, and Columbus fights alongside Cortés. A discussion by Agostino Campano follows the poem and celebrates its creativity, underscoring the positive aspects of a poem that remains free of factual constraints: “It [the poem] is also enjoyable for its wonderful inventions of armed battles, crushing defeats, the deaths of infidels, liberations from prison. It is also enjoyable because it moves the emotions in various ways.” Agostino Campano, “Brief and General Discourse on the New World” (“Discorso breve et generale sopra il Mondo Nuovo”), in Giovanni Giorgini, Il Mondo nuovo (Iesi: P. Farri, 1596). María José Vega, “Idea la épica en la España del Quinientos,” in La teoría de la épica en el siglo XVI (España, Francia, Italia y Portugal), ed. María José Vega Ramos and Lara Vilà (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2010), 107.

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Italian poets took greater liberties with the historical record and could not frame the American encounter in terms of contemporary proto-nationalism; however, they had to contend with an established Spanish tradition that did. Considering the early modern Spanish literary context, Barbara Fuchs underscores the “calculated mimetization of one conquest into the other [Conquista, Reconquista] as a sixteenth-century strategy to encourage Spanish efforts at expansion and cultural homogenization on both the American and the Mediterranean fronts.”26 For writers like Graziani, this mimetization plays out according to different terms. The project of the Conquisto, which foregrounds an Italian protagonist, implies that, although the Conquest and the Reconquest are glories of the Spanish, they make up a tale best told in the literary language that has dominated European vernacular poetics. Furthermore, as we shall see, Graziani’s quotations of the Divine Comedy serve as reminders of prestigious Italian poetic origins in a story of spiritual travels. The question of literary language, and the connection to Italian identity and prestige, remain fundamental elements in New World epic poetry. The Conquisto, in its foregrounding of Catholic providence and using elements from chivalric romance and heroic epic, echoes both Ariosto’s and Tasso’s masterworks.27 It is dedicated to Duke Francis I (1610–58) and begins in medias res, as the Moorish leader of Granada, Baudele, faces devastating assaults by the Christian Spanish armies in a conflict that has gone on for ten years. He awaits assistance from the emperor of Morocco, who has sent troops, and decides to enlist the help of Almansorre, a nobleman turned brigand. Hernando, one of the two principal Christian warriors, happens to be at the Moorish court. He is in love with Elvira, Baudele’s daughter, and lives at the court disguised as a lady in waiting.28 Plot elements are the kind that readers of Ariosto and Tasso would have expected and include an array of demons, wizards, enchantresses, cross-dressers, prophesizing hermits, patron saints, well-timed conversions to Christianity, and reunifications of couples. King Ferdinand and his army finally conquer Granada, and Baudele and his wife become Christian. These events very loosely recall the nine-month siege of Granada from April 1491 to January 2, 1492, when Sultan Abu Abdullah Muhammad XII of Granada 26 27

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Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8. For an overview of the intertextual aspects of the Conquisto and the Gerusalemme liberata, see Belloni, Gli epigoni, 320–44, and Gian Piero Maragoni, L’onda e la spira (Rome: Bulzoni, 1989). Belloni also identifies allusions to Petrarch and Marino, among others. The poem praises Spanish domination of the Americas and Italy, and the hero Hernando is a projection of Hernán Cortés (who was about seven years old at the time of the fall of Granada). Di Nepi notes parallels between Il Conquisto and the Gerusalemme liberata and identifies allegorical elements that take after those of the Orlando Furioso. Di Nepi, “Il Conquisto di Granata,” 101–4. Tancredi Artico, in the prefatory material to his forthcoming edition of Conquisto di Granata (Mucchi editore), also identifies references to Marino’ Adone in Graziani’s poem. Elvira, as it will turn out, was actually born to a noble Christian family, and it will, after many vicissitudes, be possible for her and Hernando to marry.

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(King Boabdil) surrendered the emirate of Granada, the city of Granada, and the Alhambra palace to the Catholic kings, and eventually settled in Fez.29 In his preface to Il Conquisto di Granata (1650), publisher Bartolomeo Soliani anticipates criticism of Graziani’s manipulation of history: It is good to understand his particular attention to the narrative, which is the soul of epic poetry. In appealing both to his own imagination and the delight of history, he managed to distance himself from a certain superstitious rigor and form it in a way that would bring greater enjoyment, keeping suspended the mind of the reader with the novelty and variety of interwoven events.30

This apology acknowledges the Aristotelian imperative of a narrative unity that was still considered by many the gold standard for heroic epic. It also suggests that questions of historical documentation were of significant concern, perhaps especially in the case of recent history. Nevertheless, Soliani defends the fact that in Graziani’s work, historical accuracy is secondary to entertaining the reader and producing the Christian marvelous theorized by Tasso. The formal and poetic substance of the work then, unlike in Spanish or Portuguese epic, took pride of place over historical correctness. Although Columbus does not appear in the poem until Canto 19, he is immediately associated with Christian providence and the inevitability of Catholic victory over the Moors. Just after Queen Isabella ascends to paradise 29

30

Leonard Patrick Harvey, Islamic Spain 1200–1500 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 322–8. Christopher Columbus refers to the surrender in his diaries: “This present year of 1492, after your Highnesses brought an end to the war of the Moors who ruled in Europe and had concluded the war in the very great city of Granada, where in this present year on the second day of the month of January I saw the Royal Standards of Your Highnesses placed by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra, which is the fortress of the said city; and I saw the Moorish King come out of the gates of the city and kiss the Royal Hands of Your Highnesses and of the Prince my Lord.” Christopher Columbus (American Exploration and Travel Series no. 70), ed. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelly Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 17. Girolamo Graziani. Il Conquisto di Granata (Modena: Soliani, 1650), “The Printer to the Reader” (Lo Stampatore A Chi Legge): “E’ bene che si sappia che nella favola, la quale è l’anima dell’epopeia, è stato particolare il suo studio. In questa compiacendo al propio genio e all’amenità dell’historia, ha procurato di allontanarsi da certo superstitioso rigore e formarla in guisa che apporti maggior diletto tenendo sospeso l’animo di chi legge colla novità e varietà d’intralciati avvenimenti.” I have modernized the orthography and punctuation in the quotes from the text. The editor’s points recall Tasso’s recommendations in his Discorsi dell’arte poetica: “Here are, my most illustrious lord, the features that the judicious poet must look for in the subject matter. . . . But this, before it has become the artifice of epic, is called the subject matter: after it has been arranged and treated by the poet, and dressed by elocution, one makes the story of it, which is no longer the subject, but the form and soul of the poem; and it is considered thus by Aristotle.” (“Ecco, illustrissimo signore, le condizioni che giudizioso poeta dee ne la materia ricercare: . . . Ma questa, prima che sia caduta sotto l’artificio de l’epico, materia si chiama: dopo ch’è stata dal poeta disposta e trattata e con l’elocuzione è vestita, se ne forma la favola, la qual non è più materia, ma è forma ed anima del poema; e tale è da Aristotele giudicata.”) Tasso, Prose, 362.

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and receives a prophecy from Saint James, Columbus and his men are sighted on their way back to Spain from the New World. Columbus’s return denotes the movement of hope and victory from west to east, from New World to Old World. But perhaps more significantly because of the proximity of these two voyages – one vertical up to the heavens, one horizontal across the Atlantic – Columbus’ endeavors are implicitly connected to Dante’s journey and his contemplation of the heavens.31 Canto 19 forms the Italian core of the poem through its intertextual connections to the Divine Comedy.32 Specifically, Graziani links allusions to Paradiso 33 with the narrative of Columbus’s voyage, and in doing so uses the last canto of the Divine Comedy to legitimize the “discovery” as well the defeat of Muslim Granada. In this canto, Isabella, Ferdinand, and their Christian troops are near desperation after battling the Moors unsuccessfully for months. Isabella is taken into the heavens, where she contemplates the divine mysteries, and where she receives from Saint James a prophecy of victory and of her progeny in Italy (octaves 14–62). As expected, the prophecy is a vehicle for glorifying the Este branch of Modena, and in particular Graziani’s contemporaries, Francis I d’Este, the dedicatee of the 1650 edition, and his father Alfonso III, whose wife, Isabella of Savoy, was a direct descendant of Isabella of Castille.33 In the prophecy, Francis I acquires global fame not because of the geographical breadth of his deeds, but because accounts celebrating his deeds will be known worldwide: “Then it will happen that the most worthy pages will praise his glories and his ancestors, and that everyone from the Iberian to the Indian seas shall call the kingdom of the Este the true Pindus.”34 Indeed, posterity is reached through the proper recounting of people and events, and 31

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34

See Mary Watt’s essay in this volume. In Italian letters, the seventeenth century is known as “il secolo senza Dante,” the century without Dante, with only three editions published of the Divine Comedy (two of them published as La visione, 1613, 1629) and virtually no theoretical works dedicated wholly to Dante after Iacopo Mazzoni’s Della difesa della Comedia di Dante (1587). Typical criticisms of the Divine Comedy focus on the cacophonous sounds of the Inferno, grating rhymes, and archaisms in lexicon and grammar. Furthermore, certain aspects of the tale – namely, that of a living mortal rising to the heavens and contemplating the Godhead – were problematic in the context of the Counter-Reformation theology. In addition, Dante’s willingness to put popes in hell continued to stir up trouble, and his Monarchia was on the Index. Despite Dante’s apparent waning from early modern poetics, the drama and voyage in the Divine Comedy were powerful, if not always explicit, reference points for Italian epic poets, and some theorists considered the Divine Comedy a form of epic poetry. See Marco Arnaudo, Dante barocco (Ravenna: Longo, 2013). Marco Arnaudo analyzes Dantean aspects in several epic poems of the seventeenth century, including in Tommaso Stigliani’s Mondo nuovo. See Arnaudo, Dante barocco, 191–236. Isabella of Castille was the great-great-great grandmother of Isabella of Savoy (1591–1626), wife of Alfonso III d’Este and mother of Francis I d’Este (1610–58). The poem is dedicated to Francis I. Graziani, Conquisto, canto 19, octave 53: “Quindi avverrà che le più degne carte/ammirin le sue glorie e i suoi maggiori;/e che ciascun dal mare ibero a l’indo/chiami la reggia estense il vero Pindo.”

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the verses imply that the fame of the Este depends on Graziani’s poetic talents. In this way, Canto 19 inserts images of Italian prestige and virtuosity into the heart of the history of Spanish conquest. While other New World poems allude to the Divine Comedy by recounting somewhat similar storylines, imagery, and lexicon, they are generally loose adaptations and tend to favor the violence and dramatic features of infernal rather than heavenly travels. The Conquisto’s close citations of Paradiso represent a novel element in New World poetry and serve to reinforce the association between the Italian literary tradition and New World travel. The final verses of the last canticle are a principal source for Graziani’s geography of the heavens, for the narrative sequence of Isabella’s ascension, and for the poetic nuts and bolts of the episode. Like Dante, Isabella ascends through the Primum Mobile to the Empyrean, at the center of the nine circles of Paradise, where she is able to contemplate the Trinitarian Circle, and, with Saint James’s intercession and then the Virgin Mary’s, receive the divine inspiration needed to conquer the Moors. Saint James, before looking down from the heavens to watch Columbus and his ships sail back toward Spain, fills the role of Saint Bernard of Clairveaux in Paradiso 32–3. As in Paradiso 33, there is a prayer to the Virgin Mary, and Isabella’s guide urges her to look up at the mysteries, as Saint Bernard does with Dante (Paradiso 33, vv. 49–51). Isabella’s vision of the Trinity includes explicit reworkings of Dantean terzine, for example in octaves 37–8: She sees three clear circles in the deep splendor of the infinite, eternal essence. They are evidently distinct between them, and yet they seem to be only one, as with a rainbow; the third circle seems of fire, and reveals itself, breathed forth but never expiring. The three circles contain within them light itself, and a human form seems impressed only in one. As the Geometer attempts to study, tries to measure the circle and does not find anywhere the principle that he desires, so that it is vanity to study and measure it, so human nature, weak, cedes before the new and rare sight. Isabella, in awe before the great mystery, no longer dares to lend an ear or a thought.35 (Vede ne l’infinita eternal essenza del profondo splendor tre chiari giri. Son distinti fra lor con evidenza, e pure un solo appar, come fa l’iri. Di foco il terzo cerchio ha l’apparenza mostrando esser spirato, e che non spiri; i tre giri hanno in se la luce istessa, Sol pare in un l’umana effigie impressa. Qual meditando il geometra in prova il cerchio misurar studia e procura, 35

Graziani, Conquisto, canto 19, octaves 37–8.

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Nè il principio che brama unqua ritrova, ond’è vano lo studio, e la misura; tale a la vista inusitata e nova, cede l’umana debile natura; e stupida Isabella al gran mistero più non osa apprestar l’occhio o il pensiero).

The two octaves echo verse from some of the final terzine of Paradiso: Ne la profonda e chiara sussistenza de l’alto lume parvermi tre giri di tre colori e d’una contenenza; e l’un da l’altro come iri da iri parea reflesso, e ’l terzo parea foco che quinci e quindi igualmente si spiri. (vv. 115–20) Within the lofty light’s profound and clear subsistence there appeared to me three rings, of threefold color and of one content; and one, as rainbow is by rainbow, seemed reflected by the other, while the third seemed like a fire breathed equally from both. Qual è ’l geomètra che tutto s’affige per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova, pensando, quel principio ond’ elli indige, tal era io a quella vista nova: veder voleva come si convenne l’imago al cerchio e come vi s’indova. (vv. 133–8)36 Like the geometer, who gives himself wholly to measuring the circle, nor, by thinking, finds the principle he needs; ev’n such was I at that new sight. I wished to see how to the Ring the Image there conformed Itself, and found therein a place.37

As these two excerpts demonstrate, Graziani adopts from Dante’s Paradiso the rhyme (-enza, giri/iri/spiri, ritrova/nova), the lexicon (cerchio, misurar, studiar, chiaro), and the comparison of a mortal attempting to make sense of the mysteries to a geometer trying to square the circle (Qual..tal).38 36

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Dante Alighieri, Paradiso. ed. and trans. Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 378. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. Courtney Langdon. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2311. Graziani’s reference to the human form in the Trinitarian light, “Sol pare in un l’umana effigie impressa,” echoes Dante’s depiction: “mi parve pinta de la nostra effige” (v.131) (“to me seemed painted in our human form”). The inner turmoil of the pilgrim is completely absent here, as are Dante’s terzine on the impossibility of representing the Empyrean. While Dante ponders and contemplates, Isabella is literally shaken from her stupor by Saint James.

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This rather extensive quoting of the Divine Comedy in an epic poem about the New World deserves consideration. On one level, it represents the longstanding tradition of citation in epic poetry, an element that contemporary readers would have expected and enjoyed, and confirms that the Divine Comedy was still read and appreciated. On a broader, European level, however, if one thinks of Graziani as a court professional and a writer who was not averse to inserting a political dimension into some of his publications, then it is possible to think of the role of the Divine Comedy in other ways. The proximity of the references to the Divine Comedy and Saint James’s viewing Columbus from above suggests metaphorically a continuity between (Italian) ancients and moderns and their achievements, evoking a voyage of poetic distinction that equals the material voyages of Spanish transatlantic navigation. The almost word-for-word citations of Paradiso point to the lasting authority of Dante, the father of the Italian literary language, the ancient of an Italian genealogy of poetic achievement that remains a model for the French and the Spanish, among others. Furthermore, the fact that the quote comes from almost the end of Paradiso implies a finality, a conclusion legitimized and made more powerful through an association with Dante and his story. The end of Paradiso goes along with the end of the conflict and the triumph of Columbus, of the literary tradition, and the shared endeavors of Conquest and Reconquest. The textual borrowings from the Divine Comedy serve as a brief but firm reminder of Italy’s literary primacy at a time when Italy could not participate as a unified power in global expansion. After Isabella tells of her divine adventure to her consort, King Ferdinand is inspired, and his troops gain momentum. In the last octave of the canto, Saint James looks down from the heavens and sees Columbus on his way back from the New World: He left the Empyrean and took flight towards the wet fields beyond the signs of Alcides. Then he caught sight of where the rim of the sky seems to serve as a shore for the infinite sea. Here he catches sight of the conqueror of the new world, the victor of the Ocean of the Indies, the Ligurian hero who is a second Theseus, nearing his prow to our world.39 Lasciò l’Empireo, e a l’humida campagna oltre i segni d’Alcide il volo stese, Poi scorse dove al pelage infinito par, che l’orlo del ciel serva per lito. Qui scorge il domator del nuovo mondo, de l’Indio oceano il vincitore, il ligustico eroe Tisi secondo al nostro mondo avvicinar le prore. 39

Graziani, Conquisto, canto 22, octave 70.

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This moment signals the beginning of the end: Columbus the great navigator, the great conqueror, the great evangelizer, is on his way from Conquest to Reconquest and will help assure Spain’s victory in both hemispheres, so that Spanish glory is intimately connected to an Italian contribution. There can be no victory without the “Ligurian hero,” and it is the Este Duchy of Modena that will inherit the conquering legacy of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Erin McCarthy-Kind suggests that in some sixteenth-century Italian humanist circles, Columbus becomes a hermeneutical symbol, a representation not only of the new world map to which all of Europe must become accustomed, but of the polemics of language, communication, and interpretation. . . . Italians seek to affirm their identity on a newly expanded world map by plotting out their “cultural coordinates” with language.40

That the recounting of Columbus’s first voyage follows an episode with almost direct quotes from the Divine Comedy comprises an affirmation of Italian cultural coordinates, coordinates linking the geographical and the poetic. In Canto 22, Columbus’s narration of navigation, discovery, and conquest emphasizes his decisive role in global Christian conquest, a role he will take on from both sides of the Atlantic. In the beginning of the canto, which begins with Columbus and his crew still returning to Spain, Saint James fends off the demon Idragorre, who created a storm at sea. Columbus is able to land on an island, the same one where King Ferdinand’s bravest warriors have retreated after escaping from their Moorish captors. There Columbus recounts his voyage to the Americas (octaves 20–71). His narrative includes the commonplaces of the journey, also found in Stigliani’s Mondo nuovo, in which Columbus sets out to discover a new world and not to find a trade route to China. Typical elements include demons and storms at sea, near mutiny, arrival, timid peoples eager to convert to Christianity, the taking possession of the New World for Spain, and run-ins with cannibals, Amazons, and giants. While the canto has a dramatic charge similar to that of Stigliani’s Mondo nuovo, especially in the conflicts with fantastical tribes, several elements again suggest an attempt to address Alessandro Tassoni’s critique of Stigliani’s poem: namely, Tassoni’s concern that Columbus be heroicized for the correct reasons. First, the early part of the canto emphasizes Columbus’ role as a navigator, not as a warrior, and thus evokes the Odyssey paradigm preferred by Tassoni. The demon Idragorre expresses his rage against “The Ligurian Columbus,

40

Erin McCarthy-Kind, “The Voyage of Columbus as a ‘Non Pensato Male’: The Search for Boundaries, Grammar, and Authority in the Aftermath of the New World Discoveries,” in New Worlds and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Andrea Moudarres and Christiana Thérèse Purdy Moudarres (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 28–9.

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who took flight to tame the unknown pole.”41 When the old hermit who is with Ferdinand’s men sees Columbus approaching, he exclaims, “Our Columbus, a second Hercules, brings the riches and treasures of a New World. Here is the greater Theseus, the new Argo, pushed by a friendly sky to our shore so that, despite the terrible storm, she will take us back to our home nest.”42 And when Ferdinand’s heroes go to greet Columbus, he is once again described as a navigator: “They run to the shore, to which the warrior and tamer of the ocean is already descending.”43 Later on, when Columbus tries to convince a skeptical crew of the worth of their mission, he speaks of navigational ambitions: “I hope, when the hardships and the storms have been overcome, to overcome the seas and conquer the stars.”44 This declaration also recalls the Divine Comedy, each of whose three canticles ends with the word “stars” (stelle) and, once again, the recounting of Columbus’s voyage is linked to Dante’s voyage of spiritual and poetic triumph. Once Columbus is in the Americas, he sheds his role as navigator, and Graziani, seemingly responsive to Tassoni’s letter to Agazio di Somma, casts Columbus as a reluctant fighter, a benevolent leader who only uses violence to protect the easily converted Tainos from the aggressive, anthropophagus, and poison arrow-wielding Caribs. Columbus explains, “I took up arms in a general conflict against them [the Caribs] in order to lift up the oppressed. I broke their pride and repressed their surge, and I removed the afflicted people from their shameful yoke.”45 Here Columbus is a liberator of the oppressed and 41

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Graziani, Conquisto, canto 22, octave 8: “Il ligure Colombo, il quale il volo/stese a domar lo sconosciuto polo.” The rhymes and lexicon are similar to those of Tasso’s verses about Columbus: “Thy ship, Columbus, shall her canvas wing/Spread o’er that world that yet concealed lies,/That scant swift fame her looks shall after bring,/Though thousand plumes she have, and thousand eyes.” Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. Edward Fairfax. http:// omacl.org/Tasso/ (“Tu spiegherai, Colombo, a un novo polo/lontane sí le fortunate antenne,/ch’a pena seguirà con gli occhi il volo/la fama c’ha mille occhi e mille penne”) (canto 15, octave 32). Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, vol. 2, 457–8. Again, the rhyme and imagery recall the Ulysses episode of the Divine Comedy, when Ulysses urges his crew to go beyond the pillars of Hercules: “Hence, to the morning having turned our stern,/we with our oars made wings for our mad flight,/e’er veering toward the left as on we sped./ Night was already seeing all the stars/ of the other pole, and our pole so low down, /that from the ocean’s floor it never rose.” Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, trans. Courtney Langdon. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2311 (“e volta nostra poppa nel mattino,/de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo,/sempre acquistando dal lato mancino./Tutte le stelle già de l’altro polo/vedea la notte, e ’l nostro tanto basso,/che non surgëa fuor del marin suolo”). Dante, Inferno 26, vv. 124–9. In these poems Columbus is generally compared to Theseus or Hercules, and not Ulysses. Graziani, Conquisto, canto 22, octaves 16–17: “Porta il nostro Colombo, Ercol secondo,/le ricchezze e i trofei d’un nuovo mondo./Ecco il Tisi maggior, l’Argo novella/spinta dal cielo amico al nostro lido,/che malgrado de l’orrida procella/potrà noi ricondurre al patrio nido.” Ibid., octave 4: “Corron dunque a la riva, in cui già scende/de l’oceano il domator guerriero.” Ibid., octave 43: “Spero, vinti i disagi e le procelle, vincere i mari, e dominar le stelle.” Ibid., canto, octave 68: “Contra costoro a sollevar gli oppressi/ impugnai l’armi in general conflitto; ruppi l’orgoglio, e l’impeto repressi,/ e tolsi al giogo indegno il vulgo afflitto.”

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the defender of the weak and vulnerable. At the end of the canto, the wise hermit continues his praise of Columbus: Let marvelous Greece, before such a comparison, be silent of the deeds of the Argo and of Theseus, and not presume that such a brief voyage might equal the more glorious titles of Columbus. He has the honor of going beyond the seas. He flies, like the sun, around the radius, and discovers, for eternal lofty memory, a vast field and a new world for his glory.46 Taccia d’Argo e di Tisi opre vulgari la Grecia favolosa a tal paraggio, e del Colombo ai titoli più chiari non presume agguagliar breve viaggio. Questi ha l’onor di superare i mari, questi vola del sole emulo al raggio: e scopre con eterna alta memoria gran campo un nuovo mondo a la sua Gloria.

In this last encomium of the canto, Columbus is not characterized as a Spanish subject or instigator of the violence of the Spanish conquest, but an independent, powerful hero representing how the moderns outdo the ancients. When Columbus returns to the Iberian Peninsula, and is placed in a context where enemy forces are formidable, he can finally be the warrior hero protagonist that Tassoni declared unworkable. The enemy is not naked, nor using poison arrows. At the end of the poem, it is Columbus’s swift dispatching of Moorish hero Agramasso that marks the final triumph of the Catholic kings over the enemy and the victory of Christianity over Islam. The scene of Agramasso’s death functions as a response to Alessandro Tassoni’s views on what makes appealing New World epic poetry. Agramasso taunts Columbus, and their exchange is as much theatrical showmanship as meta-poetic commentary. Agramasso warns Columbus, “You are not waging war against winds and helmsmen. You are not confronting naked, dull-witted archers armed with slingshots and quivers. True wars you will have here. It would have been better for you to enjoy the gold of the Indies and die an old man.”47 Agramasso’s words are also a poet’s response to Tassoni: the heroic battle is between equally matched armies, not against unarmed indigenous Americans. Columbus replies, before plunging his sword through Agramasso’s torso: “You will see that I know how to fight on sea and on land, in the desert and in my own clime. Your areas are not the only ones that go to war, and our swords also know how to wound.”48 Columbus’s words once again help to reinforce associations between battles on both sides of 46 47

48

Ibid., canto 22, octave 94. Ibid., canto 26, octave 69: “Non guerreggi co i venti, o co i nocchieri. Qui di frombola armati, e di turcasso/stolidi non affronti, e nudi arcieri;/vere guerre havrai qui; ben ti era meglio/goder l’oro de l’India, e morir veglio.” Ibid., canto 26, octave 71: “Vedrai che so pugnare in mare, e in terra,/nel domestico clima, e nel deserto;/non guerreggiano sol le tue contrade,/ma sanno anco ferir le nostre spade.”

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the Atlantic, between Conquest and Reconquest. Agramasso and Columbus are not just actors in a Manichean battle between good and evil, between Christian and non-Christian, but also characters whose function it is to call attention to the successful representation of their battling. Thus Graziani’s Conquisto di Granata follows some of its Italian epic predecessors in asserting that Columbus can be represented as a modern European hero, a figure both cosmopolitan enough to exemplify Catholic fervor and local enough to be a proper “Italian” protagonist for poetry written in Italian. Graziani’s use of a bold anachronism allows Columbus to become central in the recounting of the Nasrid dynasty’s defeat in Granada. However, even Graziani cannot get around the facts of colonial history at a time when proto-national identity becomes closely linked to imperial endeavors.49 Indeed, the manipulation of chronology implies that, in order for there to be a salient “Italian” contribution to early modern European expansion and Catholic victory, fiction must trump fact. Italian global eminence can exist only in the poetic imagination. 49

Barbara Fuchs underscores the compelling aspects of imperium studies, which “challenges the self-sufficient histories of nation and empire by arguing for their imbrication and competition: only a plural history of the intersections among them can provide the full picture.” Barbara Fuchs, “Another Turn for Transnationalism: Empire, Nation, and Imperium in Early Modern Studies,” PMLA 130 (2015): 412–18.

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V I V A L D I ’S M O T E Z U M A : T H E C O N Q U E S T OF MEXICO ON THE VENETIAN OPERATIC STAGE Ireri E. Chávez-Bárcenas

He embarked from Ancona to Venice, a city which, had Columbus never appeared in the world, would still remain with no equal. Mercy to Heaven and to the great Hernán Cortés, who conquered the great Mexico, so that the great Venice has found an opponent. These two famous cities are similar in the streets, which are almost entirely of water: that of Europe, admiration of the old world, that of America, the terror of the new.1 –Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Licenciado Vidriera (1613)

Cervantes was hardly the first to note the resemblance between Venice and Mexico. Indeed, the similarity between the two had fascinated Venetian historians and cartographers since the publication of the map of Tenochtitlan included in the printed version of Hernán Cortés’s letters in 1524 (Figure 16.1).2 This woodcut, copiously reproduced in Venice and I want to thank David H. Colmenares for the numerous discussions we had about Motezuma and the influence of Spanish literature in Italy and for his judicious bibliographic suggestions. I am also grateful to Wendy Heller for her critical reading and sharp commentaries on drafts of this article and to Patrick Hajovsky for his input on Moctezuma’s portraits. I am especially thankful to the late Alan Curtis, who very generously sent me a copy of the edited volume of Antonio Vivaldi, Motezuma dramma per musica in three acts, RV 723, ed. Alessandro Ciccolini and Alan Curtis (Kassel: Bärenreiter-Urtext, 2010). 1 English translations by the author, unless otherwise specified. Migue de Cervantes Saavedra, El Licenciado Vidriera, ed. Florencio Sevilla Arroyo (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2001). 2 Hernán Cortés, La preclara narratione della Nuova Hispagna del Mare Oceano, al sacratissimo, & invictissimo Carlo di Romani Imperatore sempre augusto Re d’ Hispagna (Venice: Bernardino de Viano, 1524; and Venice: A. de Nicolini, 1524). This woodcut was also included in the Latin

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16.1 “Tenochtitlan,” in Frederick Peypus Arthimesius and Hernán Cortés, Praeclara Ferdinandi. Cortesii de nova maris oceani Hyspania narration, Nuremberg, 1524. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93-B9631).

elsewhere, depicts the capital of Moctezuma’s vast empire as supposedly seen by Cortés before the Conquest, revealing to the world the existence of another island city at the center of a lagoon, divided by canals and connected by bridges with impressive buildings, towers, and temples that appeared to rise up from the water. Most Western printers focused attention on the center of the woodcut, where a gruesome depiction of the Temple of Sacrifice that included a giant headless idol and racks of human skulls, perhaps prompting Cervantes’ terror of the New World, functioned as a reminder of the controversial religious rituals practiced in the Aztec capital. But Venetian authors such as Giulio Ballino, Benedetto Bordone, and Tomasso Porcacchi, fascinated by the similarities between Venice and Tenochtitlan, removed or modified references to human sacrifice and focused instead on the construction of magnificent temples, palaces, and the city’s central piazza.3 Porcacchi, for instance, in his

3

edition of Cortés’s letters printed in Nuremberg the same year. For complete discussions on sources and reproductions of the map, see Barbara E. Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524 Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, Its Sources and Meanings,” Imago Mundi 50 (January 1, 1998); Liz Horodowich, “Armchair Travelers and the Venetian Discovery of the New World,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 36:4 (2005): 1039–62; David Y. Kim, “Uneasy Reflections: Images of Venice and Tenochtitlan in Benedetto Bordone’s ‘Isolario,’” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 49/50 (2006): 80–91; Elizabeth Hill Boone, “This New World Now Revealed: Hernán Cortés and Presentation of Mexico to Europe,” Word & Image 27:1 (2011):34–8. I am grateful to Marina Brownlee for bringing Bordone’s Isolario to my attention.

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L’isole piu famose del mondo (1572), suggested that Temistitan (Tenochtitlan), “so famously known for its beauty and decorations and enriched by its writers, . . . is presented to us as another Venice in the world, founded by God, piously speaking, with his own blessed hands.”4 Such accounts implied that beyond the physical similitude of the two island cities, the sophistication of Moctezuma’s capital mirrored that of Venice. This idealized Venetian image of Tenochtitlan remained intact for more than two centuries as variants of the 1524 representation of the Aztec island city continued to appear in early eighteenth-century Italian prints.5 The special appeal of this image led Antonio Vivaldi, the most prominent Venetian composer of the time, to adopt it for the operatic stage. In 1733, after years of composing and producing operas in Prague and northern Italy, Vivaldi returned to the Teatro San Angelo in Venice as impresario and composer for the production of Motezuma with a libretto written by Alvise Giusti.6 As impresario at San Angelo, Vivaldi would have been in charge of every aspect of the theater’s autumn season, including all financial and artistic decisions. Vivaldi’s dramaturgical selection of Motezuma is therefore significant. Knowing of the historical appeal of representations of Tenochtitlan in Venice, he may have calculated that an opera about the siege of Tenochtitlan had the potential to draw audiences back to the theater, which was particularly important in a period in which Naples and Neapolitan-trained artists had begun to dominate opera on the Italian Peninsula. The idea of setting an opera in Venice’s “twin city” may also have been attractive to Vivaldi since from the very beginnings of the genre of opera, Venetian librettists and impresarii had aimed to see themselves reflected onstage, either mirroring the city and its society, or its history and politics.7 And indeed, the libretto’s descriptions of sets and stage directions call to mind Venetian depictions of the Aztec capital that emphasize the similarities between the two island cities. The production of Motezuma offered an opportunity to capitalize on current interests in antiquity and archeology, as well as a popular desire to 4

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Tommaso Porcacchi, L’isole piu famose del mondo descritte da Thomaso Porcacchi da Castiglione. . .. (Venice: Simon Galignani, 1576), 157. In 1713, this image was reproduced in Girolamo Saconarola’s Universus terrarum orbis (1713) and the reprinted Venetian edition of Porcacchi’s L’isole in 1713. See Richard Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 89–94. See Reinhard Strohm, Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 64. Venetian opera fascinated its audience for its bold musico-theatrical potentialities, which provided “a mirror in which a wide spectrum of society, not only Venetians, could see itself reflected.” See Ellen Rosand, “La finta pazza: Mirror of an Audience,” in Opera in SeventeenthCentury Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 124. See also Wendy Heller, “Venice’s Mythic Empires: Truth and Verisimilitude in Venetian Opera,” in Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, ed. Victoria Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 34–52.

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see heroic-historical subjects on the operatic stage. Vivaldi might well have imagined that choosing a more recent historical episode – more recent, that is, than episodes from classical antiquity – would more readily attract audiences, not only because Venetians had been historically so active in the production of European knowledge about Mexico and its history, but also because the Mexican saga had the potential to engage audiences in a discussion of Spain’s continued influence in global politics. What complicated Vivaldi’s task however, as well as that of his librettist, was the difficulty of combining conflicting historiographical depictions of the Conquest of Mexico and its protagonists with the conventional operatic treatment of heroic and historical subjects. In the early eighteenth century, drama theorists, critics, and creators envisioned opera seria as a vehicle for moral edification. They saw tragedy as a means to arouse either fear or compassion among spectators. Historical subjects were therefore preferable to mythological ones, since they offered allegorical representations of human nature and appeared “more human, more ‘psychologically’ motivated, [and] even more sentimental” than gods and goddesses, all of which was intended “to encourage the audience to identify with the heroes in their humanity.”8 As we shall see, perhaps considering the long-standing Venetian fascination with the Aztec capital, Vivaldi and Giusti shifted historical conventions to focus on Moctezuma as the main character of the opera, presenting Cortés instead as the tyrannical figure. Even knowing of this historical Venetian sympathy with Mexico, the production of an opera in which the audience was encouraged to sympathize with Moctezuma was potentially challenging. Vivaldi’s opera raises questions not only about the Venetian perception of both Moctezuma and Cortés in the early 1700s, but also about the expansion of the Spanish Empire after the recent dramatic changes in the European political space – including in the Italian Peninsula – caused by the War of Spanish Succession. This chapter analyzes the dramaturgical decisions of Vivaldi and Giusti in their adaptation of the Conquest of Mexico for the Venetian operatic stage. It first examines Giusti’s careful adoption of the conventions of eighteenthcentury opera seria, as well as his genuine effort to follow both historically and visually Antonio de Solís’s Istoria della conquista del Messico (Venice, 1704), the principal source of the libretto and the most current pro-Spanish chronicle about the Conquest printed in Venice.9 This chapter also studies how Giusti transformed Solís’s history by including in his libretto dialogs inspired by Bartolomé de Las Casas that criticize Cortés and the Spanish Conquest. Although Cortés reaffirms his role as the hero by the end of the opera, the 8 9

Strohm, Dramma per Musica, 18. Antonio Solís y Ribadeneyra, Istoria della conquista del Messico, trans. Filippo Corsini (Florence: Giovanni Filippo Cecchi, 1699), reprinted in Venice in 1704, 1715, and 1733. The first Spanish edition was published at Madrid in 1684.

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presence of both pro- and anti-Spanish narratives results in a politically ambivalent opera, one that leaves room for interpretation about the moral conduct of Cortés and Moctezuma during the Spanish Conquest, reflecting deeper political tensions between Venice and the Spanish Empire in the first decades of the eighteenth century.10 In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Venetian representations of Cortés and the Conquest were frequently tinged with avarice and tyranny. As Federica Ambrosini points out, Venetian diplomatic propaganda often highlighted the maturity and wisdom of the Venetian state by noting the discrepancy between Spanish wealth from the New World and the inadequate Habsburg administration, a discrepancy that ultimately led to the economic deterioration of the Spanish Empire.11 In the seventeenth century, Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) was received with overwhelming enthusiasm in Venice.12 Las Casas’s criticism of Spanish Conquest and colonialism in the New World was incorporated into various Venetian publications. Traiano Boccalini’s XC Ragguaglio di Parnaso, for instance, presented a mythological satire in which Apollo offers a list of reasons to refuse giving immortality to Columbus and Cortés, because while they pretended to be conducting a civilizing mission, their actions were only driven by avarice and ambition. The political pamphlet Avviso di Parnaso questions Spanish dominion of the Indies by arguing that Spanish colonialism had only served

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Giusti’s libretto had been previously analyzed by Maehder Jürgen, especially in the context of other eighteenth-century operas about the Conquest of Mexico such as the librettos by Frederick the Great and Cigna-Santi. Jürgen has investigated how these works were adapted to the conventions of opera seria, however, not until 2003, when the music manuscript of Vivaldi’s Motezuma was recovered, was a more general assessment of the musical conventions of eighteenth-century opera offered by Steven Voss. Reinhard Strohm has studied details about the production of Motezuma in the Teatro San Angelo and the role of Vivaldi as impresario, and Michael Talbot has discussed further biographical details about both Vivaldi and Giusti. The edited volume on Vivaldi’s Motezuma by Talbot includes a revised version of all these studies. See Michael Talbot, ed., Vivaldi, “Motezuma” and the Opera Seria: Essays on a Newly Discovered Work and Its Background (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2008). This chapter reexamines the adaptation of the libretto to the conventions of opera seria, and analyzes for the first time the libretto in close relation to both the Italian edition of Solís’s historical chronicle and the Lascasian influence in the Venetian intellectual and political spheres. See the essay by Ambrosini in this volume. According to Benzoni, Giacomo Castellani, the translator of Las Casas’s Istoria o brevvisima relatione della distruttione dell’Indie Occidentali (1626) and the alleged author of Avviso di Parnaso di Valerio Fulvio Savoiano (1621), contributed to the stigmatization of Cortés’s enterprise. In the prologue to Istoria o Brevvisima relatione, Castellani writes that among the main purpose of telling “the horrible story of the destruction of the Indies” is to raise a reflection about the excesses that threaten every instant in the exercise of power, about the thin line that separates good government from tyranny, and a just war from the slaughter of innocents. For a revision of the influence of Las Casas in Venice, see Maria Matilde Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico: storia di un’immagine da Temistitan all’indipendenza (1519–1821) (Milan: Unicopli, 2004), 148–61. See also the essay by Horodowich in this volume.

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“to remove the State of Natural Law depriving those peoples from their honor and possessions, and enslaving those that God had created free.”13 By the eighteenth century, Venetian diplomats such as Niccolò III Erizzo, optimistic about the accession of the House of Bourbon, admired the vigorous reforms promoted by Philip V and the new governmental system modeled by the French.14 Nonetheless, Venetian politicians and writers who tried to explain the effects of the War of Spanish Succession in the context of past historical events revived the seventeenth-century Venetian criticisms of the Spanish Conquest. Antonio Chiusole, for instance, continued to condemn Spanish violence against Native Americans, arguing that if conquistadors and creoles had behaved less barbarically, they might not have extracted so much wealth, but they would have left more resources with which to maintain imperial economic stability.15 Amidst these Venetian representations of Spain, Alvise Giusti took on the challenge of writing the libretto for Vivaldi’s Motezuma. Giusti was a classically educated lawyer from Padua who had previous experience writing historical dramas with exotic subjects.16 In the argomento – the section of the printed libretto where authors introduced the subject of the opera and justified major dramaturgical decisions – Giusti presents Fernando (Hernán Cortés) as the opera’s heroic figure, and praises his “prudent” and “courageous” actions during the Conquest of Mexico. He explicitly cites Solís’s Istoria as his principal historical source, acknowledging that some had questioned the emphasis Solís had placed on Cortés’s glory.17 In addition, Giusti explains that for the sake of brevity he was forced to confine his story of the Conquest to the period in which Cortés and his followers are received in the Mexican capital and the feigned peaceful relationship between the two peoples is broken, noting that his libretto only extended to the time of Moctezuma’s submission and did not cover the subsequent war and destruction of Moctezuma’s empire. In the final part of the argomento, Giusti notes that any additional incidents that depart from the traditional historical narrative about the Conquest of Mexico were added to meet the requirements of the stage. This allowed him to justify, for instance, an invented amorous story between Ramiro (Fernando’s brother) and Teutile 13

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Avviso di Parnaso cited in Benzoni, Cultura, 154–7; Traiano Boccalini, Ragguagli di Parnasso, centuria seconda (Venice: Barezzo Barezzi, 1613), Ragg. 90. Benzoni, Cultura, 237–8. 15 Ibid., 235–7. Although Venetian opera catalogs attribute the libretto to Girolamo Giusti, some argue that Motezuma was actually written by Girolamo’s nephew, Alvise Giusti. See Reinhard Strohm, “Vivaldi and His Operas,” 30. [Giusti, Alvise (Luigi)], Argomento to Motezuma (Venice: Marino Rossetti, 1733), 3r. In Italy, the Accademia della crusca pondered the rigorous historical method Solís used in his history and sponsored its translation and first Florentine publication. Solís’s Istoria was soon considered an authoritative book of reference about the Conquest of Mexico, which is probably the reason Giusti chose it as his principal source.

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table 16.1. Roles, Voice Types, and Premiere Cast in Vivaldi’s Motezuma (Venice, November 14, 1733) Role

Premiere Cast

Voice Type

Motezuma, emperor of Mexico Mitrena, Motezuma’s wife Teutile, Motezuma’s daughter Asprano, general of the Mexican armies Fernando, Spanish conquistador Ramiro, Fernando’s younger brother

Massimiliano Miler Anna Girò Giuseppa Pircker Marianino Nicolini Francesco Bilanzoni Angiola Zanuchi

Bass Soprano Soprano Soprano Castrato Mezzo-soprano

(Motezuma’s daughter) – both fictional characters – that functions as the opera’s subplot.18 Indeed, Giusti undertook a number of dramaturgical decisions in order to align the story of the Conquest with eighteenth-century Italian operatic conventions. His libretto reflects classical unities of time, place, and action; it leads to an inevitable happy ending – lieto fine – with both the triumph of the heroic figure and the reunion of the loving couple, cohesively uniting the main historical plot with the fictional subplot; the narration is divided into three acts and is adjusted to feature the standard six characters that provided the requisite variety of singers’ vocal types, ranges, and levels of virtuosity (Table 16.1). These conventions also demanded a precise distribution of aria types throughout the opera according to the characters’ dramatic needs and role hierarchies, which in turn affected the type and number of arias given to each singer. Finally, the libretto calls for a prominent number of conventional operatic scenes, such as a call to battle, a quarrel between three characters that resulted in a terzetto, the use of sea storm and shipwreck imagery as a metaphor for emotional distress, a mad scene intended for Anna Girò (whose dramatic ability was highly praised), and two final choruses, the first one to celebrate the great warrior genius, and the second to Imeneo, the god of marriage ceremonies. As the composer and impresario for this production, Vivaldi saw his expectations for opera seria fulfilled.19 Giusti took full advantage of the utopic images of Tenochtitlan that had long circulated in Venetian print culture. For example, his descriptions of sets and stage directions from the opening scene in Act I, and scenes 5 and 11 from Act III, are visually analogous to Ballino’s engraving of the Aztec capital (Figure 16.2). Descriptions of the scenery that recall details in the Ballino engraving include: “part of the Mexican lagoon that separates the Imperial Palace from the Spanish encampment, with a magnificent bridge 18

19

N.B. Through this chapter, the names Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés refer to the historical figures whereas Motezuma and Fernando denote the operatic ones. Motezuma in italics is used to discuss the opera production. For more about the conventions of opera seria, see Strohm, Dramma per Musica, 1–29.

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16.2 “Tenochtitlan,” in Giulio Ballino and Bolognini Zalterii, De’ disegni delle piu illustri città et fortezze del mondo, Venice, 1569. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (84-B32443).

joining the two shores” (I/1), “the temple in which the main back door is closed, to the side a statue of Uccilibos with the high altar adorned and ready for sacrifice” (III/5), and the “gran piazza of Mexico City” (III/11).20 Images of the Mexican lagoon, imperial palace, bridge, and main piazza that Giusti employed in the opening and final scenes of the opera bear a striking resemblance to Venice itself, but Giusti also followed the representation of other non-Venetian elements that appear in Ballino’s map, such as the altar of sacrifice. Giusti also borrowed from the engraved images and portraits in Solís’s Istoria. Like any other librettist, he had to think not only of the plot, but also of the potential for spectacle, since he was ultimately responsible for providing both the dialog and poetic texts for arias as well as scene descriptions that would then be used by the set designer (in this case Antonio Mauro). The Italian translation of Solís’s chronicle was first published in Florence in 1699 and it was reedited in Venice in 1704 and reprinted in 1715 and 1733; the last one appeared the same year as the production of Motezuma. In the Venetian edition, each of the five books that divide Solís’s Istoria was headed with an engraved plate by Alessandro dalla Via, modeled after the decorative “Head-and Tail-Pieces” that 20

Giusti, Motezuma, ff. 9, 51, 58.

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ornamented the pages of the Florentine edition. While these engravings appeared scattered throughout the Florentine edition, in the Venetian edition, they are arranged in a single plate placed at the beginning of each book. These plates functioned as a visual summary of the most remarkable events of the account and therefore heightened the awareness of the drama to the reader by transforming history into a series of dramatic scenes. Giusti must have studied these plates closely while writing the libretto, using them not only as a guide for designing the sets, but also as a visual incentive for the fictional events of the opera – occasionally conflating two different historical events into a single scene.21 For example, stage directions for the first scene of the third act indicate “a remote part of the city with a tower. One sees in front of the door to the tower some Mexicans lying dead.” This clearly reflects the combination of two images from Pag. 1, the first one depicting a scene of Spanish forces killing Indians at the door of a building, and the second one portraying a tower at the shore – although it represents a Spanish fort in a Caribbean port and not a tower in Tenochtitlan (Figure 16.3). Other examples include: “a group of soldiers climbs aboard the brigantines and sets fire to the canoes” (II/10), which resembles the fight scene in the water where Spaniards from their brigantines attack and set fire to Indian canoes (Figure 16.5); scenes that take place at battles and battlefields (Figure 16.4); and the portrayal of an Indian woman of noble descent (Figure 16.3), which might have inspired the character of Mitrena. Solís’s Istoria also includes portraits of Cortés and Moctezuma by Venetian nun Isabella Piccini. Perhaps surprisingly, Moctezuma is not portrayed as a tyrant in this engraving, but rather as a respectable and strong royal figure: an idealized native, uncorrupted by civilization, suggesting potential parallels between this sympathetic representation and Giusti’s construction of Motezuma’s character (Figure 16.6).22 Typical of an eighteenth-century opera, the plot of Motezuma is complicated with myriad twists and turns, betrayals, death threats, suicide attempts, heroic endeavors, an intricate love story, and an unexpected peaceful resolution toward the end, which – as usual – occurs after the intervention of a benevolent ruler. The opera begins in the aftermath of a devastating battle as a defeated Motezuma laments the fact that the gods favor the Spanish 21

22

For clarity I have numbered the five plates by Alessandro dalla Via in Solís’s Istoria from 1 to 5; only 1, 2, and 5 are reproduced in this chapter. Piccini’s portrait of Moctezuma is presented in the text as the first authoritative depiction drawn from an original Mexican painting, which tells us about the contemporary concerns for the use of reliable historical sources. The painting that served as the print’s source is located today in the Museo degli Argenti at the Pitti Palace, Florence. On the painting and the growing interest and reproduction of Moctezuma’s portraits, see Patrick Hajovsky, “Portrait of Moctezuma,” in Moctezuma, Aztec Ruler, ed. Colin McEwan and Leonardo López Luján (London: British Museum Press, 2009), 286–7, and “André Thevet’s ‘True’ Portrait of Moctezuma and Its European Legacy,” in Word & Image 25:4 (2009): 335–52.

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16.3 Alessandro dalla Via, “Pag. I,” in Antonio de Solís, Istoria della conquista del Messico: Della popolazione, e de’ progressi nell’America Settentrionale conosciuta sotto nome di Nuova Spagna, Venice, 1704. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93-B9622).

conquistadors. Motezuma reacts passively, erratically, and even cowardly through most of the opera. For instance, he asks his wife, Mitrena, and his daughter, Teutile, to commit suicide in order to avoid captivity (Act I/1), and instead of leading his army to defend his kingdom, tries to kill Fernando on

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16.4 Alessandro dalla Via, “Pag. 8i,” in Antonio de Solís, Istoria della conquista del Messico: Della popolazione, e de’ progressi nell’America Settentrionale conosciuta sotto nome di Nuova Spagna, Venice, 1704. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93-B9622).

several occasions, but does so timidly, in hiding, alone, and from a distance. However, after his second unsuccessful attempt, Fernando takes him prisoner and puts him in chains, thus exacerbating Motezuma’s misery and humiliation (Act 1/5, 14–15).

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16.5 Alessandro della Via, “Pag. 45i,” in Antonio de Solís, Istoria della conquista del Messico: Della popolazione, e de’ progressi nell’America Settentrionale conosciuta sotto nome di Nuova Spagna, Venice, 1704. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93-B9622).

Mitrena is a more combative character. From the beginning, she insists that Motezuma remain courageous and resist the enemy until the end (Act I/2–3). Later, in the second act, while her husband is held prisoner, she and Asprano (the Aztec general) are determined to restore their armed forces in order to

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16.6 Isabella Piccini, “Moctezuma,” in Antonio de Solís, Istoria della conquista del Messico: Della popolazione, e de’ progressi nell’America Settentrionale conosciuta sotto nome di Nuova Spagna, Venice, 1704. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93-B9622).

defeat the enemy (II/1). But most impressive is her arrival at the Spanish camp as a commander of an armed fleet to demand Fernando liberate her family and her land (II/4). Simultaneously, a private love story unfolds. Teutile and Ramiro, Fernando’s brother, are secretly in love, but they are both constrained to choose honor and duty over their feelings. This secondary plot stays within

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the archetypical story of love and heroic self-sacrifice, and the couple undergoes severe testing before they are happily reunited at the end. In the second act, for instance, Teutile informs Ramiro that the Aztecs are getting ready to take back their palace, and supplicates him to escape and save his own life, but Ramiro instead chooses glory over love and orders his soldiers to set fire to the enemies’ canoes; in doing so, Ramiro betrays his lover, but shows loyalty to his people by destroying the enemy’s forces (Act II/10). In the third act, however, when Motezuma, who had been asked to offer the sacrifice of his daughter and that of a Spaniard to the god Uccilibos (Huitzilopochtli), is preparing the execution of Fernando and Teutile, the heroic Ramiro not only saves his brother’s life, but also the life of his lover (Act III/1–2, 7–8). The opera ends with the celebration of the Spanish Conquest in the main piazza. There, the victorious Fernando proclaims that the conquered Aztecs must pledge allegiance to the Spanish king and be faithful to the Christian god. Motezuma and Mitrena, who are still reluctant to accept their destiny, make a last attempt to kill Fernando and Ramiro, but Asprano and Teutile, who have already accepted their new sovereign, prevent their actions. Motezuma and Mitrena get ready to receive their punishment, but Fernando, responding instead as a clement ruler, exonerates the couple and asks them to swear allegiance to his king, offering to allow his brother, Ramiro, to marry Teutile. Motezuma appears devastated, but Ramiro explains that their union will fulfill the sacrifice commanded by Uccilibos. A tormented Motezuma finally gives his consent, and then everybody celebrates the happy outcome (Act III/11). While Giusti followed both Solís’ Istoria and the conventions of opera seria, what is surprising is the fact that he named his opera after the Aztec ruler rather than the Spanish hero. Based on Venice’s perceived historical affinity to Tenochtitlan, perhaps Vivaldi as the impresario or Giusti as the librettist imagined that the figure of Moctezuma spoke more to Venetian audiences than Cortés. Such questions persist in the innermost layers of the libretto, since in the end, neither Fernando nor Moctezuma appear either entirely heroic or tyrannical. This in fact represents Guisti’s fundamental deviation from Solís’s historical text. While Solís valorized Cortés, Giusti’s operatic character Fernando is repeatedly accused of tyranny and lawlessness, and Fernando’s positive attributes – prudence and military audacity – are transferred to his fictional brother, Ramiro. Solís’s ambiguous portrayal of Moctezuma must have been more difficult for Giusti to work with. Solís initially depicts Moctezuma as the powerful tyrant ruler of a marvelous and vast empire, but eventually – even before the Spanish forces arrive – Solís’s Moctezuma becomes a melancholic prince distraught by the signs of his impending demise. While this depressive Moctezuma prevails in Giusti’s libretto, Giusti invented

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other Aztec characters to carry out heroic actions against the Spanish forces, as a means of representing Mexican valor; once again, perhaps to align with traditional Venetian sympathies for the Mexican capital. Furthermore, besides the invention of a subplot with fictional characters, Giusti adapts Solís’s Istoria to conform to the conventions of opera seria. Solís’s history is divided into five books, and the third and fourth are dedicated almost entirely to describing the close relationship between Cortés and Moctezuma. According to Solís, Moctezuma received Cortés and his people in Tenochtitlan and mutual feelings, both of respect and fear, quickly arose between the two leaders. However, in Solís’s account, months before the Spanish arrival in the New World, horrifying omens and portents announcing the ruin of the Aztec Empire prompted Moctezuma’s despair and in turn prevented him from acting rationally against the Spanish conquistadors. Solís typically depicted Moctezuma as angry, disoriented, and ultimately submissive before Cortés, to the point of yielding the Aztec throne and wealth to Charles V too easily. According to Solís, “[these] miraculous portents that were seen in Mexico and in other parts of the empire had fatally wounded Moctezuma’s soul, and had much astonished his counselors that when the second embassy with Cortés was held, they believed that upon them had already fallen the calamity and ruin that had been threatening them.”23 Moctezuma’s subjects, alarmed by his extreme passivity, tried to attack the visiting foreigners, but when Cortés discovered their plan, he had the rebellious leader killed and imprisoned Moctezuma. The Aztecs were terrified and disheartened to see their emperor in chains, but Moctezuma tried to keep them calm by insisting that he was taken voluntarily. Disillusionment arose among his people, however, and they asked him to renounce the crown, called him effeminate and cowardly, and injured him fatally with rocks and arrows. The fall of Tenochtitlan occurred almost a year after Moctezuma’s death. Since a happy ending was mandatory in eighteenth-century opera, Giusti could not possibly have staged Motezuma’s death. Instead, he had to resolve the opera’s conflict with a last-minute reconciliation between the two leaders to satisfy operatic convention, while all the while sustaining Motezuma’s emotional distress, confusion, and humiliation throughout the entire opera. Giusti’s most radical change to Solís’s Istoria, however, comes in the guise of anti-Spanish representations of Cortés and the Conquest relayed in the voices of Giusti’s fictional characters. Solís wrote his history while serving as chronicler of the Indies for the Habsburgs; and dedicated its publication to Charles II. In the introductory chapter, Solís explicitly states that his principal intention is 23

Solís, Istoria (1704), 98.

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to repair the “damages” and “offenses” committed against Cortés, and therefore make him the principal hero of his text.24 Here he refers to anti-Spanish rhetoric that has developed in the wake of Las Casas. According to Maria Matilde Benzoni, Solís had to reconfigure the Conquest as “the unmistakable proof of the ‘superiority’ of the European civilization, which is expressed through the free and creative use of reason, the sagacious manipulation of nature, and the art of war.” In contrast, “ancient Mexico appears . . . as inhabited by superstitious people” with a limited technological capacity to sustain the Spanish confrontation.25 These images became characteristic attributes of the two protagonists in Solís’s chronicle: Cortés is ingenious, prudent, and courageous whereas Moctezuma is immersed in the thoughts and fears of his inevitable demise as predicted by the oracle. To contrast Solís’s heroic narrative of the Conquest, Giusti used fictional characters to voice the most significant anti-Spanish remarks in his libretto. Giusti’s Mitrena, for example, contrasts with the languid portrayal of Motezuma by becoming a combative heroine who responds to the Spanish attack with an eloquent anti-Spanish diatribe. The female figure who served as model for Mitrena was Doña Marina (born Malinalli or Malintzin), a Nahua of noble descent who stood out among her people for her linguistic ability and ultimately became Cortés’s interpreter, advisor, and mistress. In the early stages of the Conquest, Doña Marina was the only person capable of maintaining the communication between Spaniards and Aztecs. Since she was present at every significant negotiation between Cortés and Moctezuma, she is traditionally depicted standing between the two leaders – an image that was indeed reproduced by Alessandro dalla Via in plate 2 where Doña Marina appears to be in the middle of a negotiation between conquistadors and Aztec rulers (Figure 16.4). Not surprisingly, Solís describes her as both beautiful and “sommamente necesaria alla conquista” (“very necessary for the Conquest”).26 However, he also acknowledges that sometimes during these communications she did not limit her participation only to that of a translator: “Doña Marina interpreted these speeches with a certain affectionate zeal, and added to them her own reasoned opinions, as a person who had been recently disenchanted and that had many motives for having been persuaded.”27 Giusti thus appears to have modeled Mitrena on Marina, endowing her with unusual eloquence and bravery. In the opera, Mitrena is the only character who questions the behavior of both Motezuma and Fernando, the former for his passivity and the latter for his cruelty. Her defiance appears at the opening of her second dialog with Fernando, when she presents herself as

24

Ibid., 8–9.

25

Benzoni, Cultura, 205.

26

Solís, Istoria (1704), 73.

27

Ibid., 307.

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a commander of an armed fleet demanding the liberation of her people and family: Motezuma. Act II scene 4. Mitrena28 Fernando, il gran momento s’avvicina fra noi. Sentimi ancora, ma con quella virtù che a me dettasti. Nell’animo contrasti fortuna o ambizion . . . Anche un momento rammenta senza pena, che Fernando sei tu, ch’io son Mitrena. (Si pone a sedere)

Fernando, the great moment has come for us. Listen to me yet again but with that virtue that you have imparted. In your soul, fortune and ambition are in conflict. . . . But reflect for a moment, without suffering that you are Fernando and I am Mitrena. (She sits down)

Mitrena then flatters Fernando for having crossed the limits of the world, as predicted by the Aztec gods, to “correct the errors of religious beliefs and customs” that deviate from “the norms of an advanced and decorous civilization.” Suddenly, however, Mitrena hurls a litany of accusations, to which Fernando listens reluctantly. At each of his interruptions, she responds with phrases such as “listen to me and be silent” (“m’ascolta e taci”), “be silent, cruel tyrant, and listen to the account of your infamy” (“taci, crudel, il tuo delitto indenti”), or “suffer just one moment, I am almost done” (“soffri ancor un momento, ho già compito”). First she mentions the massacre of the island of Cozumel, then reproaches him for being disloyal to her people, particularly after he had been received with such royal grace; her speech then continues with obvious borrowings from Las Casas – again, not found in Solís’s Istoria – particularly when she denounces the breaking of laws and the violent acts committed against her people, despite the fact that they had obediently embraced his Western customs: Motezuma. Act II scene 4. Mitrena . . . De’ tuoi precetti uso facemmo, e in apparenza onesta potesti usar tant’arte, che dell’intimo ancor restassi a parte . . . Alfin qualor in pace ammirando, viviamo, i tuoi costumi, senza tener de’ numi, veggo infranta ogni legge, e sento usarmi cento violenze, e la cittade in armi.

28

. . . We adopted your precepts, and with the appearance of honesty, sought to use all of your skills to gain part of our trust. If at last, we live in peace, admiring your customs, regardless of our own gods, I see the breaking of every law, the city up in arms, and I feel myself to be abused by a hundred violent acts.

This and the following examples are modified versions based on Aaron Carpené’s English translation of Giusti’s libretto. See liner notes to Antonio Vivaldi, Motezuma, Alan Curtis, Il Complesso Barocco (Deutsche Grammophon B0006490-02, 3CDs, 2006).

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In this central scene, Mitrena delivers the longest speech of the entire opera: one that harshly criticized Cortés and the Conquest. Teutile and Ramiro similarly express critical remarks about Cortés or the Spanish Conquest. At the beginning of the second act, for instance, Ramiro (Fernando’s brother and his most loyal supporter) prudently advises Fernando to reconsider the actions and decrees that make him look like a tyrant, such as imprisoning a king: Motezuma, Act II scene 2. Ramiro Si credono tiranni tutti i nostri consigli. Io non dissento ai giusti sdegni tuoi, ma che un monarca poi resti oppresso così, senza difesa, dura legge mi par, e grave offesa.

All our schemes are considered to be tyrannical. I do not dispute your justifiable indignation, but that a monarch should be so oppressed and defenseless seems to me a harsh decree and a grave insult.

Teutile’s criticism of the conquest is perhaps more personal than Mitrena’s since Teutile is also betrayed by her lover. Thus, when Ramiro and his men destroy the temple and with it Teutile’s last hope of overcoming the enemy, she directs her anger to Ramiro, her principal enemy. However, her remarks appear to foreshadow the slaughter and destruction of Tenochtitlan: Motezuma, Act II scene 11. Teutile Vanne crudel, distruggi con empio cor quest’infelici avanzi della nostra grandezza. Esca a torrenti dalle pubbliche vie misto di polve il sangue messican. Calpesta ingrato, i numi, i templi, e ogni ragion sconvolta, l’eccidio universal vanta una volta.

Away, cruel one, destroy with your treacherous heart the unhappy remains of our greatness. Let Mexican blood mingled with dust, flow in torrents through the streets. Ungrateful one, trample our gods and our temples, and destroy all reason, then you can boast about this universal massacre some day.

Despite these remarks, Fernando’s strong heroic figure does not vanish completely. He defends himself from every accusation, telling Mitrena, for instance, that he had only followed the interests of heaven and of the world (Act I/14), and that he had always conducted himself honorably, although if she threatens him so arrogantly with war, he will not refuse an occasion to increase his glory (Act II/4). Cortés’s heroic role is confirmed at the end of the opera, when everyone gathers for the celebration of the victory of the Spanish forces, praising him as gran genio guerrero, and listening to his speech:

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Motezuma, Act III scene 11. Fernando Popoli vinti, il cui destin vi porta nuovo re ad adorar, e nuovi numi. Con opre e con costumi più corretti, e più degni in avvenir pensate non meritar de’nuovi déi gli sdegni Quel soglio ove m’assido non è soglio per me. Or che lo prendo. alla Spagna lo cedo, e lo difendo.

Conquered people, whose destiny bestows on you, a new king and new gods to adore, with better and more worthy deeds and customs, take care in the future not to incur the anger of your new gods. This throne on which I am seated is not a throne for me. Now that I have gained it, I relinquish it to Spain and I defend it.

It is only at this moment that Fernando identifies himself as a loyal vassal of the Spanish Crown, and the civilizing and religious mission of the Spanish Empire serves one more time to justify his ambitions. The extent to which his speech sufficiently counteracts Mitrena and Teutile’s justified complaints is unclear. After Fernando has spoken, Mitrena and Motezuma still try to kill him, and Motezuma is tormented when he has to accept allegiance to the new king. Apparently only the promised marriage between Teutile and Ramiro appeases the Aztec royal couple, functioning perhaps as the needed bond between the two peoples for a promising peaceful future. After Motezuma has reluctantly accepted this marriage, his final words show a somewhat optimistic message: “Ne’ vostri dei gran verità si scorge. Cade il Messico è ver, ma poi risorge” (“Your gods reveal great wisdom: Mexico falls, it is true, but then it rises again”). While there is no way to measure audiences’ reception of the opera, the libretto suggests that Giusti’s adaptation of Solís’s Istoria went beyond simply adjusting Mexican history to eighteenth-century operatic conventions. An opera solely based on Solís’s version of the Conquest would have conformed perfectly to the early eighteenth-century European fascination for exotic opera subjects. Vivaldi, for instance, composed a number of operas with non-Western scenries, such as Teuzzone in China, Tamerlano in Turkey, Catoni in Utica (North Africa), or Armida al campo d’Egitto. The general underlying theme of these operas is “the superiority of the West in terms of moral behavior and military might . . . over Eastern despotism and tyranny” – an idea Solís also clearly supported.29 However, as we have seen, Venetian printers and editors had long disseminated images of ancient Tenochtitlan as a civilized urban center that physically and intellectually resembled their own Repubblica. Early modern images of Moctezuma influenced by discussions of the Noble Savage such as those by André Thevet and 29

See Ellen T. Harris, George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends (New York: Norton & Company, 2014), 101. Although this idea is introduced by Ellen T. Harris to discuss Handel’s Eastern operas in early eighteenth-century England, it can be fairly extended into a wider European context.

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Piccini (Figure 16.6) had suggested his potential to be a respectable emperor, and Cortés and other conquistadors were considered tyrants by Venetian intellectuals and diplomats influenced by Las Casas. Perhaps for all these reasons, Giusti decided to balance Solís’s chronicle to reflect traditional Venetian representations of Tenochtitlan and its ruler. Venetian sympathy with the Aztec Empire, as well as historic Venetian criticism of Spanish imperialism, also prompted Giusti to supplement his libretto with dialogues inspired by alternative historical sources; perhaps not surprising in a period in which Venetians were debating a new European order in the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession. Even further, it is possible that Giusti used the fall of Tenochtitlan as a reflection of the Venetian nostalgia for the loss of the overseas empire that, just like Motezuma’s, would never be recovered. Two decades after Vivaldi’s production of Motezuma, in his famous Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (1755), Francesco Algarotti wrote an enthusiastic description of the infinite possibilities for dramatic and musical exploration that an opera on the subject of the Conquest of Mexico had to offer. Algarotti assured his readers that if a talented composer were to include foreign instruments, melodies, modes, and canticles in an opera, he would transport the public to a new world. Algarotti even imagined the pleasing sound the combination of Spanish and American music might create for the ears of the audience.30 Although such elements were not among the aesthetic ideals of the eighteenthcentury, and composers rarely abandoned traditional Italian operatic style (including Vivaldi and his Motezuma), subsequent operas devoted to Moctezuma occasionally began to include certain features of musical exoticism.31 Algarotti also mentions numerous opportunities for spectacle, some of which were already included in Giusti’s libretto, such as depictions of temples and battles or the representation of “la natura e la magnificenza messicana.” Notably, in the following decades, a number of operas were produced in Europe on the subject of the Conquest of Mexico. However, the growing political influence of the Spanish Bourbons on the Italian Peninsula (which include the return of the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily to Spanish sovereignty in 1735), contributed to the Italian revalorization of the Spanish colonial enterprise founded on the idea of the Conquest as a legitimate instrument for 30 31

Francesco Algarotti, Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (Venice: Pasquali, 1755), 27–8. Among the elements of musical exoticism incorporated in Carl Heinrich Graun’s Montezuma (Berlin, 1755), for instance, are repetitive melodies, bare textures, static harmonies, and repeated rhythmic and melodic patterns. See Pierpaolo Polzonetti, “Montezuma and the Exotic Europeans,” in Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Pierpaolo Polzonetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 107–32, 120–7. For more about exoticism in music, see Ralph P. Locke, “Exoticism with and without Exotic Style,” in Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 43–71.

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civilization.32 Perhaps for that reason the fall of the Aztec Empire became a favorite operatic subject on the Italian operatic stage. The most successful opera libretto was Motezuma by Vittorio Amedeo Cigna-Santi, set to music from 1765 to 1789 for at least nine different productions, including two in Venice. Cigna-Santi’s approach to the subject was remarkably different than Giusti’s. While Fernando is decisively described as “a captain of great value and prudence,” Motezuma is defined as a tyrant, “against whom the Republic of the Tlaxcalans has rebelled, seeking the help of the foreign liberators.”33 But most significantly, a new attitude toward ancient Tenochtitlan would be apparent in the opening scene that featured a smoking altar with fresh human blood in a manner that was unambiguously barbaric.34 It became clear in subsequent productions that strayed from Vivaldi and Giusti’s Motezuma that Mexico was no longer a mirror in which Venetians sought their own reflection. 32 34

Benzoni, Cultura, 239. 33 Polzonetti, “Montezuma,” 130. Cigna-Santi’s Motezuma was set to music by at least seven eighteenth-century composers for various European opera theaters. Cigna-Santi’s Motezuma was produced in Venice in 1772 with music by Baldassarre Galuppi. Jürgen Maehder, “Alvise Giusti’s Libretto Motezuma and the Conquest of Mexico in the 18th century Italian opera seria,” in Vivaldi, “Motezuma,” 63–9.

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INDEX

Abbiati, Giovanni 139 n77, 141, figure 8.7 Abruzzo, Dionisio Vasquez dall’ 181 Acapulco 184, 187 Accademia degli Incogniti 276 Accademia dei Gelati 276 Accademia dei Lincei 25 n31, 30, 171, 185–9 Accademia del Disegno 231–2 Accademia Fiorentina 45 n53 Achillino, Giovanni 90 Acosta, José de 84, 116 Adam 38, 255, 266 n37, 268 Aeneas 35, 39–46 Africa 3, 20–2, 103, 109–10, 115, 123, 152, 156, 169, 181, 192–3, 198, 208, 236, 250, 252, 260, 265, 268, 306 agave 91, 94, 139 Agnadello 47 Agnano 198 Agostinetti, Giacomo 200 Alamanni, Vincenzo di Andrea 184 n67, 210 Alberti, Leandro 66–9, 75, 77, 83, 85, 87–94 Albizzi-Panciatichi, Eleonora degli 217 n48 Albuquerque, Girolamo 213 Aldrovandi, Ulisse 13, 15 n36, 25, 26 n31, 86, 98, 99, 199 n37, 226–47, 265 n36, plates 9 and 10, figures 6.1, 13.3, 13.5, 13.7, 13.8 Aleppo 5, 21 Alexander VI 23, 44 n46, 122 n16 Alexander the Great 230 Alexandria 21 alfalfa 190 Algarotti, Francesco 307 Algeria 123 Algiers 215 Alidosi de Mendoza, Rodrigo 213–15 Alighieri, Dante 11, 34–46, 212 n28, 252 n13, 274, 280–5 Álvares, Francisco 66 Álvares, Pereira Pedro 211 Amazons 273 n11, 284 Amazon River 209, 215, 218–21 Ambrosiana Library 103, 106, 108, 111 n34 Amedeo II, Vittorio 126 Amerindians 23, 51, 86–7, 110, 172 n7, 177, 181–3, 189, 209, 211, 249, 251, 256, 268, see also Indians, indigenous peoples, Native Americans

336

Ammirato, Scipione 212 Amsterdam 19 n1, 207 n5, 217 Andes 134 n55, 197 Antwerp 67, 217 Aphrodite 266, 268 n39 apocalypse 39, 43, 64, 83, 85 Apollo 292 Aquaviva, Claudio (Father General of the Jesuits) 157 n55, 159, 160 n72, 180 Aragon 29, 44 n46, 172–3 Arawak 94 Ariosto, Ludovico 42, 46, 271, 278 Aristotle 26, 148, 230, 279 n30 Armada, Spanish 53, 207 Arrighi, Giovanni 20 Arzareth 69 Ascelin of Lombardy 36 Asia 1, 23, 69, 103, 109–10, 115, 152, 157–8, 163, 169, 192–3, 198, 250, 252, 268 Asprano (operatic character) 294, 299, 301 Assisi 65 astrolabe 41, 43, figure 3.1 astronomy 26, 252 Athens 114, 139 Atlantic 3, 6–7, 10, 12, 14, 21, 23, 33, 36, 39, 55–6, 79, 143, 148, 152–3, 164, 175–6, 178 n36, 181, 187, 206–11, 214, 222, 235, 256, 280, 284, 287 Atlantic World see Atlantic Augsburg 196, 260 Augustinian Order 12, 119, 122, 124, 134, 144 Augustinian Recollects 121–3, 127–8, 130 n47 Averroës 26 Aztec/s 58, 69–70, 250 n4, 254, 256, 268, 289–91, 294, 299–308 Badoer, Federico 50, 54 n28 Bahia 30, 209–10 Ballino, Giulio 289, 294, figure 16.2 bankers, banking 20–2, 196, 208–10 Barbolani di Montauto, Asdrubale 220 n64 Barca, Pedro Calderon de la 139 Barcelona 50, 119, 121 St. Monica, Convent of 121 Bardi (family) 21 n8, 210 Baretti, Giuseppe 203–4 Baroncelli, Cosimo 217 n50

IN D EX

Bartolomei Smeducci, Girolamo 274 Basel 67 beans 94, 192, 198, 203 Beatrice 35–9 Behaim, Martin 40 n29 Bejarano, Francisco de 128, 130, 134, figure 8.2 Belém 218, 219 n59 Bembo, Pietro 65 Benzoni, Girolamo 32, 229, figure 8.6 Bermuda Triangle 117 Bertelli, Ferdinando 250 n3 Bertonio, Lodovico 197 Betanzos, Domingo de 68, 88–90, 98, 102 n48 Beudin, Cornelius 162–4, figure 9.4 bezoar stones 109 Bianco, Andrea 22 Bignami, Pietro Maria 204 Bilanzoni, Francesco table 16.1 Bitti, Bernardo 31 Black Legend 32–3, 59, 189 Black Sea 5, 21 blacks 36 Blaeu, Joan 250 Blanca, Pietro 181 Boccalini, Traiano 292 Bodin, Jean 116 Bologna 11, 13, 15, 25, 26, 47, 63–85, 89, 119, 130, 140, 180, 187, 225–47, 276 Bologna, Peace of 27 Bordone, Benedetto 2, 24, 25 n30, 100, 289 Borichen (Puerto Rico) 182 Borromeo, Carlo (Saint) 106–7, 110 Borromeo, Federico (Cardinal, Archbishop of Milan) 12, 103–17 Bosso, Francisco 176 botany 194, see also flora, plants Botero, Giovanni 32, 107, 109–10, 113–17 Bourbon, House of 293, 307 Brazil, Brazilian 2, 13, 30, 56, 111 n34, 112, 116, 158–9, 206–22, 227, 236–7, 241–2, 254, 255 n20, 256–9, 268, figure 13.7, 14.1 Brazilwood 207–8, 259 bread 191, 200, 203–4 Brescia 31, 190–1 briganteens 215 Bristol 21 British 56, 58, 100, 218 Bry, Theodore de 13, 24, 137, 237, 241, 249, 253, 259–68, figures 8.6, 14.3, 14.4, 14.6 buckwheat 191, 201, 205 Buenos Aires 108, 180 Byzantium, Byzantine 4, 11, 22, 128 Cabeza de Vaca 31 n52, 176 cabinets of curiosity 101, 253–4, 268, see also Wunderkammer Cabot, John (Giovanni Caboto) 19, 21, 42 Cabral, Pedro Álvares 2

Cabrera, Miguel 150, figure 9.2 Ca’ da Mosto, Alvise 22 Caetani, Francesco (Duke of Sermoneta) 124–7, 135 n60, 137, 140 Caetano, Ruggiero 118, 135–9 Calabrés, Antón Sánches 175 Calabrés, Juan 176 Calabria 175, 203 Calancha, Antonio de la 134 California 180 Calvinism 112 Canary Islands 39, 169 n3, 171, 180, 184, 187 Canerio (or Caveri) Map 2 cannibalism 116, 177, 182, 284 Canseco, Juan 176 Cantino, Alberto 1 Cantino Planisphere 2–3, plate 1 Capua 175 Caribbean 3, 14, 23, 41 n33, 57, 173, 296 Carletti, Francesco 184, 186–7 Carpi 65 Carrera de Indias 175 Cartagena 56, 57 n43, 180 cartography 1–2, 7, 22, 24–5, 36, 41, 250, 273 n11, 288, see also maps, mapmaking Casa de Contratación 175 cassava 192 cassia 57 Castelano, Angelo 176 Castellani, Giacomo 32, 292 n12 Castille (Castillian) 29, 40 n31, 44 n46, 56, 123, 130 n45, 147, 179, 280 Castrocaro, Francesco da 65 Cateau-Cambresis, Treaty of 27 Cathay 23 Catholicism, Catholic Church 12, 32, 41 n34, 45, 53, 67, 88, 103, 105, 109–10, 112, 114, 119–20, 126, 134, 137, 140, 153–4, 157–8, 162, 171–2, 212–13, 219, 271, 274–5, 278–9, 286–7 Cavalcanti (family) 210 Cavalcanti, Antonio 213–15 Cavalcanti, Filippo 212–13 Cavalcanti, Guido 34, 36 Cavalcanti (née Albuquerque), Donna Caterina 213 Cavalcanti (née di Vasconsalos), Lady Isabella 213 Cavalli, Marino 52 n15 Cavalli, Sigismondo 52, 53 n20, 54 n28, 57 n43 Cecilia, Martín de 176 centurion 260–3, figure 14.2 Cervantes, Miguel de 288–9 Cesi, Federico Angelo 30, 189 Charlemagne 42 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) 27–8, 47, 50–1, 65, 88, 173, 250 n4, 302 Charon 37 Chichimecas 80, 116 Chile 109, 175–6

337

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chili peppers 192, 203 China 3, 20, 108, 197, 284, 306 Chiusole, Antonio 293 Chrysoloras, Manuel 22 Cibo, Malaspina Lorenzo 198 Cigna-Santi, Vittorio Amedeo 292 n10, 308 Circignani, Niccolò 158 n61 circumcision 75, 90, 94–5 Cisneros, Father Bernardo de 146 n17, 147, plate 5 classical antiquity 3–5, 22, 109, 256, 291 Clement VII 26 n32, 47, 65–8, 88–9 Clement VIII 105, 160 Clerici, Giacomo 111 clothing 108, 128, 248–51, 254, 257, 265, see also dress, costume books Clusius, Carolus 187, figure 10.4 cochineal 57, 169 n3, 184 Cocytus, Lake of 37 Codex Vaticanus A 92, 94 n21, 101 collecting 8, 12, 25–30, 87, 98, 101–3, 111 n34, 185, 196, 199, 207 n4, 225–47, 251, 253, 255 Colombia (New Granada) 180 colonialism 7, 10–16, 19–21, 24, 27–8, 54–7, 81, 84, 86, 98, 101, 105, 116, 134, 143–8, 154, 157, 162–5, 172, 175–6, 189, 206–22, 268–9, 271, 275, 287, 292, 307 colonization see colonialism Colonna, Fabio 171, 185, 187 Columbian Exchange 3, 10, 16, 115, 192 Columbian Voyages 3, 4, 11, 14–15, 20–4, 31, 41 n34, 43, 86, 112, 115, 172, 175, 190–2, 271, 275, 280, 283 Columbus, Christopher 4, 13–14, 19, 22–3, 27–9, 32, 40–6, 64, 82, 112, 115, 171–2, 192, 229, 270–87, 288, 292 Columbus, Ferdinand 112 Cometti, Antonio 122 Cometti, Carlo 122 commerce 109, 116, 172, 208, 221, 257 Concepción 176 Constantinople 4, 21 Consumption 13, 53, 111–12, 177, 192–3, 201, 205 Contarini, Gasparo 51, 55 Contarini, Tommaso 100 conversion 12, 32, 69, 72, 79, 82–5, 90–5, 105–7, 114, 130, 134, 197, 278 Copacabana 12, 119–42, 144, plates 2, 3, 4, figures 8.1– 8.5, 8.7 Córdoba 40 n28, 108 corn see maize Corner, Francesco 51–2, 100 Coronado, Francisco Vázquez de 92 corsairs 44, 215 Corte-Real, Gaspar 1 Cortuso, Giacomo 196 Cortés, Hernán 14, 31 n52, 32 n57, 64, 72, 87, 97–101, 112, 174–7, 191, 250 n4, 254, 268, 272 n9, 277 n24, 278 n27, 288–307, figure 16.1

cosmology 41, 43 Cospi, Codex 26 n32, 102 n48 Cospi, Ferdinando 25, 26 n31, 86 costume books 237, 242, 244, 248–69, see also clothing, dress cotton 57, 94, 100, 240 Council of Italy 173 Council of the Indies 173 Counter Reformation 33, 43, 103–5, 143, 158, 236, 271, 280 n31 Coutinho, Vasco Fernandes 209, 211 Cozumel 304 Cracow 72 craft, craftmanship 89, 92–7, 100 crimson 57 Criollo 121, 134–40, 146 Crusades 4, 42, 45 Cuba 23, 57 n43, 174 cyclops 177 d’Anania, Giovanni Lorenzo 29, 182–3, figure 10.2 da Bologna, Francesco (Antonio di Gerolamo degli Allè) 63, 74–7, 79, figure 5.3 da Bologna, Michele 63, 73, 81–3 da Eboli, Bernardo Sylvano 29 da Faenza, Francesco (Francesco dal Busco) 77–9, figure 5.4 da Lecce, Matteo 31 da Udine, Giovanni 191 Damascus 5 Dávila, Padilla Agustín 88–9 Davies, William 215, 220–1 de Aguiar Coutinho, Francisco 212 de Aguirre, Miguel 123–4, 130, 137 de Córdoba, Gonzalo Fernández 29, 174 de Córdova, Juan 92 de Figueiredo, Jerónimo de Alarção 210 de Guzmán, Diego Ortiz 135 de Guzmán, Nuño 73–4 de Lares, Amador 174 de Lipari, Antonio 176 Della Porta, Giovanni Battista 183, 185 de Mesina, Francisco de 176 d’Eremita, Friar Donato 185 de Sousa, Martim Alfonso 209 d’Este, Ercole 1–2 de Ulmo, Fernão 40 n31 demonology 106, 112, 116 Dengel, Lebna (Da¯wit II) 66 Descartes 252 n13 Despres (Deserps, Desprez), Francois 242–3, 250, 256, 258–9, 268–9, figures 13.6, 14.1 devil 69, 89, 110–12, 116–17, 134, 181, 260 Díaz, Juan 100 Dioscorides 169, 184, 194, 196 diplomats 11, 48–59, 107, 110, 212, 217, 235, 276, 292–3, 307

IN D EX

discovery, concept of 5–7, 14–16, 20–2, 28, 35, 64, 86, 101, 105, 112, 284 disease 16, 172–4, 182, 201, see also epidemics disegno 136 Doação 209 Dominicans 12, 66–8, 87–8, 92, 96–7, 101 Donà, Leonardo 50 d’Orta, Carlo 180–1 Doria, Jacopo 36 n8 Dragon Blood Tree see Ezquahuitl Drake, Sir Francis 56–7, 112 n43, 221, 237 dress and regional character 95, 116, 119–23, 126–30, 134, 226, 237–42, 248–57, 262–3, 266, 269, see also clothing, costume books Dudley, Sir Robert (Earl of Leicester) 219–20 Durante, Castore 196–9 Dürer, Albrecht 116, 246 Dutch Republic (Dutch) 13, 215, 217–18, 222 East India Company (EIC) 221 Eden 35, 38–9, 41 n33, 43, 266, see also paradise eggplant 194–5, 199, 202 Eleonora of Toledo 125 Elizabeth I (Queen of England) 53, 112, 217, 219 Encomenderos / Encomienda 54, 84 Enduape 258 England (English) 4, 7, 19, 32, 44–5, 50, 56, 112, 154, 158 n61, 202, 204, 207, 209, 211, 214–21 ephemeral art 161–2, 235 epic poetry 28, 35 n3, 42–5, 271–80, 283, 286–7 epidemics 202, 210, see also disease Erizzo, Niccolò III 293 Eskimo 256 Espírito Santo 209, 211–12 Estado do Maranhão 218 Ethiopia (Ethiopians) 22 n17, 66–7, 159, 256 Etna 172, 177, 178 n36 Evangelization 12, 65, 69, 73, 82, 84, 88, 90, 95, 99, 105, 106 n8, 108, 124, 134, 143–6, 153–60, 164–5, 172 n7, 179, 181, 284 Eve 255, 266–7 Exodus, Book of 68 Ezekiel, Book of 39 Ezquahuitl 169, 171, 182 n61, 184, 187 Ezra, Book of 66, 68 famine 200–4 fauna 2, 115, 171, 182–4, 229, 236, 251 feathers and featherwork 67–8, 89, 93, 96, 110, 231, 239–42, 248, 254–5, 265 feitorias 208 Felici, Costanza 195, 199 Ferdinand I (King of Aragon) 51, 172, 277 n24, 278, 280, 283–5 Ferdinand III (King of Castile and Leon) 123 Ferdinando I de’ Medici 184, 206, 210, 212, 214, 217, 219 Fernando (operatic character) 293–4, 297–8, 300–8

Ferrara 1, 178 n36 Ferrufino, Giovanni Battista 109 Flaminio, Giovanni Antonio 65 n7, 77, 81–5 flora 2, 115, 171, 182–4, 229, 236, 251, see also botany, plants Florence 5, 11, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 34, 37, 171, 187, 193, 198, 206–19, 227, 233–6, 241, 254, 295 Florentine Codex 26 n32, 198 Florida 226, 238–41, 248–9, 259–66, figures 13.4, 13.5, 14.3, 14.4, 14.6, 14.7 food and food practices 13, 57, 160, 183, 190–205 Fonte, Father Juan del 146 n17, 147, plate 7 France (French) 7, 8, 10, 19, 24, 32, 44, 55–8, 112, 159, 172, 174, 177, 204, 208, 218–19, 242, 249, 256–60, 268, 276, 283, 293 Francis I (King of France) 42 n38, 276, 278, 280 Franciscans 11, 31, 63–85, 136, 144 n5, 146 n14–16 French Guiana 218, 221 Fuchs, Leonhard 198 Fugger, Hans 196 Funes, Martín de 108 Gaeta, Francisco de 176 Gaeta, Nicolás de 175 Galen 194–5, 199 Galileo 45 galleys 200, 215 Gallo, Agostino 190–1, 201 Garden of Eden see Eden gardens 26, 57, 160, 171, 185, 187, 191–9 Gavilán, Alonso Ramos 134, 136 gems 47, 54, 140 n83 Genoa (Genoese) 10, 19 n1, 20–1, 27, 29, 31, 36, 39 n25, 45, 113, 171, 175, 180, 207 n5, 220 geography 6, 10, 14, 22, 26, 29, 40, 105–7, 115–16, 171, 177, 205, 256, 281 Germany (German) 2, 7–8, 67, 105, 158, 227, 236, 255 Gianni, Lapo 34 Gibraltar, Straits of 36, 37 n16, 42, 216 gifts, gift records 12, 66–8, 86–102, 126, 255 n20 Giganti, Antonio 239 Giorgione (Giorgio da Castelfranco) 48 Giovio, Paolo 67, 113 Giraldi (family) 209–13 Giraldi, Francesco 211 Giraldi, Luca 209–10 Giusti, Alvise 290–6, 301–3, 306–8 Giustiniani (family) 86 glass/glassblowing 5, 31, 32 n57, 48 globalization 3–6, 86, 95 n24, 103–7, 115, 117, 124, 140, 144, 152–3, 156–9, 172, 180, 182, 207, 211, 253, 257–9, 280, 283–7, 291 Gois, Damião de 67 gold 1, 23, 43 n41, 46–60, 100, 115, 118, 135–40, 161, 174, 219, 220, 230, 238, 279, 286, figures 8.6, 13.4 Golden Chersonese (The Malay Peninsula) 23

339

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Gómara, Francisco López de 91, 96, 100–1, 174, 229–30 Gospel 72, 93, 98, 117 Gradenigo, Vincenzo 53, 56–7 Granada, Spain 278–80, 287 Grati, Giuseppe Ippolito Maria 127 Graziani, Girolamo 13–14, 271–87 Greece (Greek) 5, 110, 169, 255, 286 guaiacum 57, 182 n59 Guicciardini, Francesco di Agnolo 216 Guinea 210 Guyana 218 Habsburg 10, 13, 27–9, 47, 50, 55, 59, 122, 127, 178, 187, 208, 211–12, 221–2, 292, 302 Hakluyt, Richard 34 Handel, George Frederic 306 n29 Havana 57, 207 Hebrews 68 n22, see also Jews, Judaism Henri III (King of France) 254, 255 n20 Henry VII (King of England) 42 n38 herbals 183, 195, 251, 253 heretics 83, 112 Hernández, Francisco 30, 182–9, 229 Hispaniola 23, 81–2, 114, 176, 178 n36, 275 Homer 37, 42, 43 n42, 274 huaca 134 Huguenots 249 human sacrifice 89–95, 139, 177, 259, 289, 295 humanism 11, 103, 171, 194 Iberia (Iberian) 7, 15, 20–1, 24, 32, 56, 96 n24, 107, 113, 121, 123, 176, 181 n58, 208, 211, 218, 222, 280, 286 icon 127–30, 140, 269 idolatry 84, 94, 117, 121, 123, 134–40, 144 Ignatius of Loyola 144, 147–8, 153, 161, 162 n79 Ilhéus 210 Imperato, Ferrante 171, 185 Inca (Incan) 119, 130 n46, 134, 230 India 4, 36, 115, 190, 197–8, 211 Indian Ocean 14, 207–8 Indians 12, 59, 68 n22, 82 n73, 87–101, 110–14, 137 n75, 139, 143, 146–7, 156–61, 174, 188, 238, 248, 254–5, 259, 268, 280, 296, figure 13.4, see also Amerindians, indigenous peoples, Native Americans Indies 67, 88, 89, 172, 175 indigenous (peoples, knowledge, artifacts, culture) 7, 51, 59, 72–3, 75, 77, 79–80, 82–4, 88, 92–3, 96, 101, 119, 121, 134–5, 139–40, 143, 146, 219, 257–9, 268–9, 273–5, 286, see also Amerindians, Indians, Native Americans indigo 265–6 ingegno 88, 93–102 Inquisition 73, 77, 81, 83 n81 Ireland (Irish) 35 n5, 204, 218, 219 n59

Isabella (Queen of Castille) 277, 279–84, 296 Islam 4, 103, 107, 123, 286 Israel, lost tribes of 68 Italian Wars 66, 172, 174 Jalisco 73, 80 James I (King of England) 219 Jamestown 31 Jason 35 Jerusalem 38 n18, 39–45 Jerusalem artichokes 197 Jesuits 12–15, 26, 29–32, 107–9, 123, 127, 132 n49, 143–65, 172, 179–82, 189, 197, 202, 254, 273, see also Society of Jesus Jews 76, 90, 93–5, 173, see also Hebrews, Judaism João II (King of Portugal) 40 n31, 67 n18 John of Patmos 39 Joshua, book of 68 Judaism 107, see also Hebrews, Jews Judas 137 kermes 57 Kircher, Athanasius 25 Kusell, Melchior 162–4, figure 9.4 La Plata, Peru 123 La Profesa, Church of 152–3 Laestrygonians 177 Lagos, Portugal 21 Lake Titicaca 118, 128 Landino, Cristoforo 40 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 32, 40 n31, 96, 101, 113, 291 Latini, Antonio 202 Laurencich-Minelli, Laura 15 Le Gros, Pierre 119, 125 Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques 240–2, 249, 255, 261, 265, 268 League of Cambrai 47 League of Cognac 47 Leipzig 72 León, Gabriel de 136–7 León, Pedro Cieza de 195–6, 229 Lenzoni, Francesco di Girolamo 216–17 Léry, Jean de 268 Ligozzi, Jacopo 232–6, 242, 246, figures 13.1, 13.3 Liguria 42, 283–4 Lima, Peru 31, 123 Lippomano, Girolamo 53, 58 Lisbon 1, 56, 207–17 Livorno (Livornine) 13, 207, 214–21 logwood 57 London 21 n8, 24, 203, 214 n37, 215, 221, 255 Loyola, Ignatius 144, 147 lucerne (alfalfa) 190 Madeira 209 Madonna of Loreto 119, 121, 125, 128

IN D EX

Madrid 30, 54, 56, 119, 123–6, 182, 184, 210, 213, 216 College of the Incarnation 119 Convent of St. Augustine 119, 121 Maffei, Giovanni Pietro 106 n8 Magellan, Ferdinand 112, 175 Magini, Carlo 202 maguey 139 maize 3, 13, 57, 191–3, 197–205 mal francese 182, see also syphillis malaria 3, 36 n9 Malinalli Malintzin, Doña Marina (La Malinche) 303 Malocello, Lancellotto 39 Malta 45 n49, 215 Mancera, Marquis de 123 Manfredi, Manfredo 1 Manuel I of Portugal 1, 67 n18 maps, mapmaking 1–2, 19–28, 35, 39, 46, 86, 152, 182, 200, 222, 237, 250–2, 284, 288, 295, plate 1, see also cartography mappae mundi 36, 40 n26 maraca (Brazil) 256 Maranhão 219 Marañon, Gerolamo de 136 Marino, Giambattista 272–3 Mark, Gospel of 85 Marracci, Ippolito 122 n11, 130 n48, 131, figure 8.3 Martyr, Peter (Pietro Martire d’Anghiera) 72, 100 n41, 117 n73, 191, 229, 250 Martinez, Francisco 148 n28, 149, figure 9.1 martyrdom 12, 69, 74, 83, 127, 143–65, figures 9.1, 9.2, 9.4 martyrologies 162, 164 Masaya 177–8 masks 28, 88–90, 102 n48 material culture 4, 25, 29, 87–8, 94, 96, 101, 106 materiality 94, 102, 137, 237, 241 Matthew, Gospel of 72 Mattioli, Pietro Andrea 30 n50, 194–8 Mauro, Antonio 295 Maurolico, Francesco 29 Medici, family 5, 13, 28, 86, 194, 196, 206, 208, 210–22, 241, 254, 274–5 Medici, Cosimo I de’ 30 n50 Medici, Cosimo III de’ 31 Medici, Ferdinando I de’ (cardinal and duke) 184, 198, 206, 220 n64, 221, 227 n5 Medici, Francesco I de’ 232 Medici, Giovanni di Cosimo I de’ (Don Giovanni) 217 Medici, Giulio de’ see Clement VII Medici, Lorenzo (il Magnifico) 206 Medici, Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de’ 20, 41 medicine 169, 171, 182–4, 193, 201 Medina del Campo 72 Mediterranean 2–6, 10, 20–1, 36–7, 103, 123, 169, 171, 173, 178, 184, 200, 204, 206, 221–2, 278

Medoro, Angelino 31 Mendoza, Antonio de 73, 79–80 merchant, merchants 12, 14, 20–1, 58, 175, 182, 209, 216–17, 255, 258, 260 Messina 175, 178 n36, 180 Mexico (Mexican) 3, 11–13, 15, 26, 30–2, 51–2, 58, 64–5, 68–9, 72–4, 77 n53, 80–102, 110, 132, 143–65, 169 n3, 173, 175–6, 180, 182–7, 197, 229, 235, 250, 254–5, 270 n3, 272 n9, 288–308 conquest of 51, 65, 80, 91, 176, 270 n3, 288–308, see also New Spain Mexico City 2, 114, figures 5.3, 16.3–16.6, see also Temistitan, Tenochtitlan Michiel, Pietro Antonio 195–6 Michoacán 73–4, 77, 80 Milan (Milanese) 12, 25, 27, 32, 103–17, 124, 173, 177, 180, 200, 221 Minaggio, Dionisio 111 n34 mining 51–3, 115, 176, 220 ministers 58, 216 missionaries 11, 12, 16, 20, 23, 31–3, 63–102, 105–16, 127, 143–65, 180, 182, 197, 255, 268 Mitrena (operatic character) 294–306 Mixtec 28, 91, 94 Mocenigo, Alvise 60 Modena (Modenese) 2, 13, 271, 273, 276–7, 280, 284 Moluccas 97, 176 Monardes, Nicolas 115 n62 monkeys 257–8 monkfish 256 Montalboddo, Fracanzio da 24 Montanari, Massimo 205 Monte Corvino 183 Montecuccoli, Count 220 Monti, Urbano 110 n34 Moors 7, 14, 260, 275–81, 284, 286 Moranta, Father Gerónimo de 146 n17, 147, 157, plate 7 Morosini, Giovan Francesco 57–8 Montezuma (Motezuma, Moctezuma) 32 n57, 288–308, figure 16.6 Mussi, Antonio 200 Myth of Venice 48, 58–9 Nadal, Gerónimo 157–60 Nadal, Girolamo 157 n57, 162, 181 Nahuatl 94, 169, 229 Nani, Agostino 58 Naples, Kingdom of Naples (Neapolitan) 13, 29–30, 124 n23, 159 n67, 169–89, 202, 204, 221, 290, 307, see also Southern Italy Nápoles, Angel de 176 Nápoles, Felipe de 175 Nápoles, Juan de 175 Nápoles, Juan Vincencio de 175–6 Nápoles, Julián de 176 Nápoles, Nicolao de 175

341

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I ND E X

Napolitano, Antonio 176 Napolitano, Felipe 175 Napolitano, Luis 175 Native Americans 11–13, 15, 32–3, 51, 57, 59, 72, 82–3, 88, 92, 97, 101, 105–6, 111–15, 172, 189, 202–5, 221, 225–47, 293, see also Amerindians, Indians, indigenous peoples naturalia, naturalists 12–13, 15, 25, 30, 106, 171–2, 182, 185–8, 195, 202, 225, 228, 230, 232, 236 Navagero, Andrea 52 Navagero, Bernardo 52 Navarette, Francesco 136 navigation 59, 112 n43, 219, 271, 273–4, 283–5 nef 209 New Jerusalem 39, 43 New Mexico 92 New Spain 12, 15, 25, 32, 53, 56–7, 63–4, 73–4, 79, 82, 91–2, 98, 114, 143–50, 153–7, 160–5, 176–7, 180, 182, 194, 212, see also Mexico Nicaragua 172, 177 Nicolini, Marianino table 16.1 Noble Savage 24 n27, 269, 306 Nombre de Dios 175–6 Nova Reperta 43–4 Oaxaca 91–2, 153 n42 obsidian blades 89, 90, 93–4, 96, 98–9, figure 6.1 Ocaña, Diego de 123–4 Odyssey 37, 43 n42, 272, 274, 284 Olave, Antonio de 69, 72 n32 Old Testament 35, 68, 98 Olinda 212 Ophir 23 Orinoco River 41, 219, 221 Orona, Juan de 176 Orozco, Father Diego de 146 n17, 147, plate 5 Ortelius, Abraham 25 Ott, Hieronimus 196 Ottoman Empire (Ottomans) 5–6, 8 n14, 10, 117, 198, 242 n51 Outina 260–2 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de 172, 174, 177–8, 188–9, 228–9, 233–4, figure 13.2 Padilla, Augustín Dávila 88–9 Padilla, Juan 80 Padua 26, 187, 195–7, 200, 293 paganism 79, 107, 110, 158 Paleotti, Gabriele 95 n24, 230–7, 242 Palermo 154, 177, 180, 188 Palermo, Matteo de 176 Paradise 37–46, 181, 268, 279, 281, see also Eden Paraguay 32, 109, 112 n40, 180 Paris 249, 256 parrots 2, 67, 89, 239, 257–8 Paul III 114 n55 Peace of Bologna 27, 48 n1 pearls 47, 50 n9, 54

pellagra 201–2, 205 Pernambuco 209, 212 Peru (Peruvian) 12, 24, 31–2, 52–3, 56, 57 n43, 82, 97, 109–10, 116, 118–19, 122–6, 128, 137, 139–40, 144, 164, 173, 175–7, 195, 207, 226, 230, 246, 254–5, 271 figures 8.2, 8.3, 8.6, 8.7, 13.8 Petilio, Marco Antonio 185 Philip II (King of Spain) 3 n5, 19 n1, 28, 30, 50 n8, 52–4, 56, 113, 171, 182–3, 206 n1, 208 n9 Philip III (King of Spain) 52 n16, 54, 212, 218 Philip IV (King of Spain) 124 Philip V (King of Spain) 126, 293 Philippines 3, 105, 108 Piccini, Isabella 296, 306, figure 16.6 Piccolo, Francesco Maria 180 Pigafetta, Antonio 9 n28, 19, 26 pilgrim (pilgrimage) 35 n3, 36–40, 45–6, 119, 282 n38 Pillars of Hercules 37, 42 pineapple 232–5, 238, figures 13.1–13.3 piracy 55, 207, 211, 215, 221 Pircker, Giuseppa 294 Pisa 26, 187, 193, 198, 236 Pius IV 110 Pizarro, Francisco 24, 176 Pizarro, Gonzalo 174, 176 plant(s) 25–6, 91, 111, 117, 139, 171, 182–7, 190–206, 226, 227–30, 232, 235–9, 246, 265, see also botany, flora Pliny 177, 184, 194 Poland 22, 214 polenta 192 n10, 201, 204–5 Polo, Marco 4, 19, 23, 36 Pomponazzi, Pietro 26, 68 Popocatepetl 177 Popol Vuh 184 Porcacchi, Tomasso 289, 290 n4 porcelain 5 Portacoeli 130 Portugal, Crown of Portugal (Portughese) 1–2, 4–6, 13, 21, 40 n31, 44 n46, 56, 66–7, 106, 109, 113, 207, 208–13, 216–19, 254, 256, 271, 277, 279 Portuguese Law 216–17 potato 13, 192–219 Potosí 3, 81, 115, 135 n61, 137 Prague 236, 290 Pre-Columbian Americas 110 Prester John 36, 72 primogeniture 213 Priuli, Lorenzo 52 Propaganda Fide 31 n56, 105, 106 n8 Protestant, Protestant Reformation, Protestantism 32, 45, 65–6, 82, 112, 153–4, 158, 222, see also Counter Reformation Ptolemy 5, 10, 22 n15, 85 Pucci, Antonio Cardinal 77, 81, 83 Puerto Rico 58, 182, 219 Purchas, Samuel del 24

IN D EX

Querini, Vincenzo 51–3 Quilacoya, Chile (mines of) 176 Quiroga, Vasco de 73–4 race 251 Ramiro (operatic character) 293–4, 301, 305–6 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista 10 n31, 24, 67, 85, 91, 94 n20, 117 n73, 164 n82, 191, 229, 250 Recchi, Nardo Antonio 30, 169 n1, 171, 183, 184–9 Reconquest/Reconquista 7, 14, 43 n41, 272, 277–8, 283–4, 287 Reducciones 32 Reformation see Protestant Reformation, Counter Reformation relic(s) 108–9, 124, 152 retablo 152 Ribas, Andrés Pérez de 144 n6, 145–6, 150 n33, 152, 157 n56 Riccio, Pierfrancesco 193 n15, 198, 199 n33 Richeôme, Louis 154 n50, 159–61, figure 9.3 Rio de la Plata 31 n52, 175–6 Roman Empire 39, 41 n32, 43, 45 Rome (Roman) 12, 24–6, 30, 33, 39–40, 43, 45, 66–7, 85, 88–92, 100, 102 n48, 104–7, 113–39, 143–65, 177, 189, 191, 198–9, 202, 211 n20, 213, 273 Gesù 158, 161–2 Jesuit Curia house 154, 160 San Bernardino alle Terme 128 San Lorenzo in Lucina 118, 124, 135 Saint Peter’s Basilica 161 San Vitale 159–60 Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale 154, 158–60 Sant’Apollinare Rome 158 Santo Stefano Rotondo 158 SS. Ildefonso e Tommaso da Villanova 122 n12, 124, 126, 130 Villa Farnesina 191 Villa Medici 198, plate 8 Rubiera, Giustiniano da 69 Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor) 236 Sahagún, Bernardino de 198 sailor(s) 35, 38, 42, 256 Sala, Giovanni Domenico 197 Salem 45 Salerno 184 Salvatore, Michele del 130, figure 8.7 San Nicolás, Andrés de 124 n24, 135 n61, 137, 139–40, figure 8.4 Sansovino, Francesco 22 Sansovino, Giacopo 251 Santa Ana de Tzintzuntzan, convent of 74, 80 Santa María de las Parras (Coahuila) 148, 164 Santarén, Father Fernando de 146 n17, 147, 150–51, 157 n56, plate 6, figure 9.2 Santiago de Mexico, Dominican Province 88, 89 n8, 92

Santiago Papasquiaro (Durango) 146–7, 150, figure 9.2 Santo Domingo 56–7, 174–6, 178 n36 Santo Stefano, Order of 215 Sanuto, Marino 22, 50 n6, 51–2 São, Jorge dos Ilhéus 210 São, Vicente 209 Saraceni, Carlo 128 Saragozza 56 n36 Sardi, Gaspare 77 Sardinia 27, 173 satan 41 Saturiwa 260 satyr 227, 246, 260, figure 13.8 Savoia, Maria Gabriela di 126 Savoy 126–7, 280 Scamozzo, Vincenzo 255 science 6, 25, 105, 109, 113–14, 227, 252 scientific instruments 219 Scillacio, Niccolò 29 sea monsters 245, 256 seafaring 36, 175 seeds 26, 191–5, 203, 210 Segovia, Antonio de 81 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 97, 101 Sesmarias/Sesmeiros 209–10 Sessa, Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Bernardo 252–3 Settala, Manfredo 25, 86, 111 Seville 175, 178–9, 196 Sforza, Ascanio (Cardinal) 191 shipbuilding 48 shipping 209, 215 shipwreck 35, 37–9, 44, 55, 219, 294 Siciliano, Aruega and Juan 176 Sicily (Sicilian) 122, 154, 172–8, 181, 307 Siculo, Placido 122, plate 2 Sierra Leone 211 silk 48, 241 Silk Road 3–4 silver 3, 29, 47, 50 n9, 51–8, 115, 118, 125, 132, 135, 140 n83, 161, 178, 219, 230, 262 slavery, slaves 3, 16, 21, 79, 97, 107, 179, 188, 200, 209–10, 215 smallpox 221 smuggling 55 Society of Jesus 179–82, 189, 202, 254, see also Jesuits Soderini, Piero 42 Solís y Ribadeneyra, Antonio de 291–307, figures 16.3–16.6 soldiers 30, 45, 52, 173–8, 182, 195, 249, 259–60, 275, 296, 301 Solomon 23 Soranzo, Francesco 54–5 South America (South American) 3, 48, 56, 108–9, 119, 128, 218–22, 243 South Pole 41

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Southern Italy (Kingdom of Naples) 13, 30, 122 n16, 162, 169–89, 200, 205, see also Naples Spanish Armada 207 spiceries (spezierie) 185 Spoleto, Andrea da 69, figure 5.1 St. Alypius 123 St. Bernard of Clairvaux 38 n20 St. Brendan 35 St. Fulgentius 123 St. James 277, 280–5 St. Mary 38, 122–42, 281 St. Paul 39–46, 145, 158 St. Sebastian 148–9, figure 9.1 statue painting 12, 127–9 Stigliani, Tommaso 43–6, 271–84 Stradano, Giovanni 43, 45 n52, figure 3.1 Straits of Gibraltar see Gibraltar, Straits of Strozzi, Giovanni Battista 270 n3, 274 n15 Strozzi, Palla 22 sugar 3, 13, 21, 57, 91, 209–18 superstitions 109 Surian, Michele 52 n15 Suriname 218 sweet potato 3, 196–205 synecdoche 269 syphilis 57, 173, see also mal francese Tamerlane 306 Tanner, Matthias 162–4, figure 9.4 Tarahumara, (Chihuahua, Mexico) 162, 164 Tartane 220 Tarugi, Sallustio 212–13 Tasso, Torquato 28, 42–3, 46, 270–3, 279, 285 n41 Tassoni, Alessandro 272–86 Tastera, Jacobo de 73, 80 tattoos 265–7, 269, figure 13.4 taxes 107, 187–8, 209, 216–17 Temistitan, Tenochtitlan 2, 31, 58, 69, 73, 114, 143–56, 182 n61, 288–308, figures 16.1, 16.2, see also Mexico City tempests 34, 38 Tepehuan Revolt 143–62 Tesoro Messicano 169–89, figures 10.1, 10.3 textiles 5, 89, 254–5 Thevet, André 243, 254, 306 Thornton, Robert 220–1 thorny poppy (papavero spinoso, fico dell’inferno) 185 Tiepolo, Paolo 52 n15, 54 n28, 55 Timucuan Indians 248–9, 260 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) 48, 249 Tlaxcalans 308 tobacco 111, 198, 219 Toca, Yupanqui 134 Toledo 119 Toledo, Francisco de 173 Toledo, Pedro de 173 tomato, tomatoes 189, 193–205 Tordesillas, Treaty of 112

Torres, Bollo Diego 107–12 Torrid Zone 26, 116 tortillas 191 Toulouse 72 Tragonete, Leonardo 176 Trapani 175 Trevisan, Angelo 24 Trevisan, Domenico 51 Trinidad 218–21 truffles 196, 203 Tunis 215 Tupi, Tupinambá 241, 254, 258 Tupinkin 210 Turin 12, 31, 119, 126, 139–41, 152, 203 turkey 190, 198, 201 Turkish wheat 197–8 Turks (Turkish) 66, 114, 220, 242 Tuscany (Tuscans) 50, 140, 200, 206–22 Tutini, Camillo 188–9 Tututepec 91 Tyre 21 Uccilibos (Huitzilopochtli) 295, 301 Ulloa, Alfonso 92 n14 Ulysses 35, 37–46, 285 n41 United East India Company (VOC) 221 United Provinces 50, 56 Urlanda, Diego Bernardo de 176 Uruguay 180 vaghezza 135–6 Valadés, Diego 69, figure 5.2 Valencia 126–7, figure 3 Valencia, Martín de 65, 69, 72 n30, 75, 79, 121 Valladolid 51 n12, 52 n14, 55 n34, 100, 108 Valladolid debate 97 Valverde, Fernando de 128, figure 8.2 Vasari, Giorgio 136, 231–2, 246 Vatican 26, 254 Vecellio, Cesare 13, 237–69, figures 14.2, 14.5, 14.7 Vendramin, Francesco 53–4 Venezuela 2, 175, 218 Venice (Venetians) 2, 10–11, 14, 24, 28, 37, 47–60, 85, 91, 113, 171, 178, 190, 195–8, 200, 216, 220 n64, 249–67, 276, 288–308 San Marco 5 Teatro San Angelo 290, 292 n10 Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) see United East India Company Veritas Ipsa (Papal Bull 1537) 114 Veronese, Paolo (Paolo Caliari) 48 Verrazzano, Giovanni da 19, 27, 42 Vespucci, Amerigo 19, 27, 41–3, 46, 171, 219, 271, 274–5 Vesuvius 172, 178, 187–8 Veteromundanos 137 Via, Alessandro dalla 295–6, 300, figures 16.3–16.5

IN D EX

Vianna, Father Giovanni 180 Viceroyalty, Viceroyalties 114, 118, 153 n43, 164, 173 n10, 180, 207 Vinta, Belisario di Francesco 216, 219 Virgil 35 n3, 37, 38 n20, 41, 274 Virgin of Candlemas 122 Virgin of Cocharcas 119 Virgin of Copacabana 12, 118–42, 144, figures 8.1– 8.4, plates 2, 3, 4 Virgin of Guadalupe 122, 124, 132 Virgin of the Purification 123 Vitelleschi, Mutio (Father General of the Jesuits) 143–5, 154, 156 n52, 160 Vitoria, Francisco de 97, 101 Vivaldi, Antonio 14, 288–308 Vivaldi, Ugolino 36 Vivaldi, Vandino 36 volcano 116, 172, 177–8, 187–8, 275 Waldseemüller, Martin 2, 19 War of Spanish Succession 291, 293, 307 Weiditz, Christopher 237, 250 n4, 254 n20 West Indies 208 n10, 220 wheat 57, 191, 200, 202–3

White, John 237–41, 264 n34, figure 13.4 wilderness 43, 145, 178 wine 57, 85, 91, 194 n15 wonder 36, 100, 252–7, 260–2, 268–9 wood 57, 91, 109, 121, 207–8, 212, 218, 259 wool 48 World War II 29 Wunderkammer 101, 255, 268, see also cabinets of curiosity Yupanqui, Francisco Tito 119, 121, 123, 127–8, 133–7, figure 8.1 Zacatecas 73, 80–1, 176 Zalterii, Bolognini 295, figure 16.2 Zane, Matteo 52, 56 Zapotec 91–2 Zaragoza, Treaty of 112 Zeeland 217 Zenaro, Damiano 252 Zierikzee, Amandus of 72 Zinapécuaro 74, 80 Zucchi, Jacopo 198, plate 8 Zumárraga, Juan de 69–75, 79–81

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