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{Figure 1.1. The new world’s cannibal parents. Theodor de Bry, ‘Grand Voyages, part VIII (Frankfurt, 1599). Courtesy of the Library of Congress }
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Theodor De Bry’s en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_de_Bry massive and influential ‘Grands Voyages: America (1590-1634), for example, reinfoced both interpretations. The frontpiece to the seventh part of this compendium on European reconnaissance of the new world display the title flanked by an Indian man and woman, each gnawing a severed human body part; an infant tied to the woman’s back reaches hungrily toward his mother’s awful meal. This male-felame dyad only reproduces human beings by consuming them, with no net gain. Their postlapsarian state is echoed in another illustration, this within the first part of De Bry’s work, in a portrayal of the Fall and expulsion from paradise. Adam and Eve are in the foreground just about to taste fruit from the tree of knowledge, and their fallen selves are in the background, performing their divinely mandated tasks. Eve nurses an infant Cain in a primitive hut while Adam scores the ground with a primitive hoe. Through the visual twinning of the two illustrations, the peopeling of the world is connected to the peoples of the new world, with Edenic and satanic implications depicted in ironic juxtaposition, a new problem for the Christian faithful. ~ Page 20
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Taken on Monday November 29, 2021
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Posted on Monday November 29, 2021
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Dinesh said: