1673 Engraving of an Indigenous Brazilian Man and Woman
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of an Indigenous Brazilian man and woman appears in this excerpted leaf from the Brazil chapter of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
A Brazilian woman and man stand in an open landscape, with a ship offshore and palms in the distance. The woman wears a broad flat hat, a bead necklace and a wrapped skirt tied with a sash, a long pipe tucked into it and a small basket in her hand; the man, nude but for a feathered cap, carries long darts across his shoulder and in his outstretched hand, while a figure sits behind him beneath a wide round sunshade. The pair follow the text beside them point for point, from the stone the man wears in his pierced lower lip, which the text calls metara, and his three long darts and feathered cap, to the reed tobacco pipe tucked into the band of the woman's apron. That description comes directly after the two Brazilians whom Pedro Álvares Cabral sent back to Portugal, so the pair appear to be those two. The same column recounts the discovery of Brazil, from the voyage it credits to Amerigo Vespucci in 1497 to Cabral's landing with thirteen ships. The reverse closes the Peru chapter with tales of Augustinian friars confronting local sorcerers and idols, then opens the Brazil chapter, explaining that Cabral named the land Santa Cruz because he found it on the feast of the Holy Cross, and that it was later named for brazilwood.
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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