1673 Engraving of Two Robed Peruvians and Two Archers
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of two robed men and two archers 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 man in a long patterned robe stands with one hand on his hip beside a tall staff crowned with feathers, a bead necklace at his throat and a wrapped headdress topped with plumes. At left, a second robed man seen from behind points toward him, a long band trailing from his headdress down his back. At right, two nearly naked men approach, one with a bow slung across his body and the other carrying a quiver of arrows and a club over his shoulder.
The robed figures follow the reverse, which says the men of Peru wore a shirt reaching below the knee with a cotton mantle over it and that an unbreakable law marked out the people of each district by their headbands and head ornaments, among them caps with two or three upright plumes like the ones seen here. The nearly naked archers may stand for the earliest inhabitants the reverse describes, who are said to have roamed together like wild animals without fixed dwellings, laws, or rulers, though the text does not confirm this reading. The text below describes the llamas that carried silver from Potosí to Arica, sixty-three miles away, and whose wool was woven into cumbi, a fine cloth with the same pattern on both sides, by the best weavers at Capachica on Lake Titicaca. The short-haired moromoro is said to stop when overtired, stretch its neck, stare at its drivers with a ridiculous face, and then bolt up the mountain with its load of silver unless shot in time. A paco that falls under its load will not rise until stroked for hours, and one with the mange the Peruvians call karache was buried alive to protect the rest. The reverse also tells of giants four times the size of ordinary men who once lived near the Cape of Santa Elena and devoured thirty Peruvians at a time, until a youth shining like the sun came down from heaven and drove them with thunderbolts into a cave where they perished. It then turns to the origins of the kingdom of Peru under its first king, whom it calls Ingaroka.
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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