1673 Engraving of a Human Sacrifice at a Stone Lion Idol
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a human sacrifice at a stone lion idol appears in this excerpted leaf from the America's Discoverers section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
Before a landscape dotted with idols on pedestals, a body lies across the shoulders of a great stone lion, its blood streaming into a stone trough as a pale standing figure leans over it. To the right, worshippers in feathered headdresses gather at a fire beside a towering crowned idol flanked by monkey-faced figures. Skulls, ribs and bones lie scattered in the foreground.
The scene follows the text below almost exactly: it describes a ritual wherein a lion stood among various idols with a man on its shoulders, his throat cut so that his blood ran into a stone trough, and an alabaster figure bent over the trough to look at the blood. The text says the victims were captives from neighboring lands, whose hearts were cut out and smeared on the lips of the idols. It then describes Potonchan, capital of the Tabascans, with more than five thousand houses of baked brick. The Spaniards marveled at how the Tabascans sealed alliances by drawing blood from their tongues, hands and arms, before the expedition returned to Cuba. The reverse turns to Bartolomé de las Casas, whom the text calls a bishop, and his failed colony at Cumaná, settled with three hundred Spanish farmers he had dressed as knights bearing red crosses. It closes with the opening of Magellan's voyage.
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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