1673 Engraving of a Figure Burning on a Stone Altar
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a figure burning on a stone altar appears in this excerpted leaf from the "New Spain" (modern-day Mexico) section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a figure lies on a stone altar engulfed in flames as black smoke billows across the sky. At right, a figure stands on a pedestal carved with a serpent, one arm raised, before a panel showing small figures with axes climbing a hill. Men in feathered headdresses kneel beside the pedestal and stretch their hands toward the fire, and at the far right, a man draped in a white cloth raises a broad blade. At left, a man in a feathered headdress pours something from a long-handled pan beside the logs of the fire as spearmen raise their arms behind him.
The engraving is uncaptioned and neither side of the leaf describes a burning like the one seen here. The text below describes the temple maidens of Mexico, whom it calls nuns. They are said to have risen at midnight with the priests to play flutes and conch horns, burn incense, and draw blood from their ears to smear on their faces. A rat running through a maiden's chamber or a bat flying through it was taken as a sign that she had broken her vow of chastity, for which she was condemned to a horrible death. Above them lived young men who kept the ever-burning fire before the altar of Huitzilopochtli, served by boys who strewed flowers in the temple and sharpened the priests' lancets. The reverse opens with the text's claim that the bloodshed of this worship had long horrified the people of New Spain, which it offers as the reason they accepted the Roman faith so readily. It then describes a procession in which the maidens shaped an image of Huitzilopochtli from amaranth seed and roasted maize mixed with honey, and young men ran with it to Chapultepec and Coyoacán before it was carried back to the city.
Arnoldus Montanus (ca. 1625–1683), a Dutch minister and schoolmaster, compiled De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld from earlier chronicles and travel accounts without ever crossing the Atlantic. The Amsterdam publisher Jacob van Meurs issued it in 1671 with a wealth of engravings. John Ogilby's English adaptation followed the same year, and Die Unbekante Neue Welt, the German edition attributed to Olfert Dapper, followed in 1673. Its illustrations were drawn by artists who had mostly never seen the Americas either. They mix reported detail with European invention, and they shaped how a generation of European readers pictured the New World.
CONDITION
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