1673 Engraving of a Rock Bridge and an Erupting Volcano
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a rock bridge and an erupting volcano appears in this excerpted leaf from the Peru section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a broad river pours over a waterfall beneath a long bridge of rough rock arches, where small figures with staffs and spears make their way across. Beyond it, flames and smoke burst from the summit of a volcano. At left, a man in a patterned tunic, his hair tied in a knot on top of his head, leans on a long staff and points toward the bridge. Facing him at right, a man in a feathered headdress, bead necklace, and armbands gestures toward the water with a patterned bundle slung across his back. Figures sit at the water's edge between them, and a group in long robes gathers among the trees at far left.
The engraving is uncaptioned and neither side of the leaf describes a rock bridge like the one seen here. The volcano may stand for the mountain near the castle of Takunga (in modern-day Ecuador), which the reverse says threw ash and great stones over the surrounding fields some years before, though the text does not confirm this reading. The text below describes the city of Quito, built on dry sandy ground and cut through by a ravine crossed by several bridges. It counts four markets, churches dedicated to Saints Sebastian and Blaise beside the main church, and some five hundred Spanish households, with more than five thousand Peruvians living around the city and paying tribute. It then turns south to the castle of Tomebamba, now mostly in ruins. The Peruvian kings are said to have built more than a thousand such storehouses for arms, food, and clothing along the royal road, and beside this one stood a temple of the sun whose doors were inlaid with emeralds. The reverse describes the people of the region, whom it calls the Kanares (now called the Cañari). They are said to wear their long hair braided into a crown on top of the head in a similar fashion as the man in the patterned tunic, while the women dig, sow, and harvest and the men stay home to spin and weave. It ends at Guayaquil, whose river was believed to cure the French pox and where, the text says, the Peruvian king Huayna Capac began a bridge but died before it was finished.
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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