Theodore de bry christopher columbus genoese

In the center of this image we see a finely-dressed Christopher Columbus with two soldiers. Columbus stands confidently, his left foot forward with his pike planted firmly in the ground, signaling his claim over the land. Behind him to the left, three Spaniards raise a cross in the landscape, symbolizing a declaration of the land for both the Spanish monarchs and for the Christian God.

Theodore de Bry, Christopher Columbus arrives in America, , engraving, This print from , by the engraver Theodore de Bry, presents Columbus and his men as the harbingers of European civilization and faith, and juxtaposes them with Tainos, who are presented as uncivilized, unclothed, and pagan. This print, along with hundreds of others de Bry made for his 27 volume series, published over more than forty years, Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies — , affirm and assert a sense of European superiority, as well as invent for Europeans what America—both its land and its people—was like.

Though de Bry is most famous for his engravings of European voyages to the Americas and Africa, and Asia , he never actually traveled across the Atlantic.

Buy Christopher Columbus, Genoese explorer, discovering America, by Theodore de Bry as fine art print.

For instance, he adapted without credit some of the images created by Johannes Stradanus, a well-known illustrator who created early images of the Americas. In his Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies , de Bry republished and translated into multiple languages the accounts of others who had spent time traveling around the globe, and created more than engravings to illustrate the volumes.

This volume reprinted the accounts of the Milanese traveler Girolamo Benzoni, who himself had drawn on the accounts of Columbus in his own writings. The volumes of the Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies that treat the voyages across the Atlantic to the Americas are known as the Grands Voyages, while the Petit Voyages small voyages , were those to Africa and Asia.

Left: Apollo Belvedere, c. Theodore de Bry, Christopher Columbus arrives in America , , etching and text in letterpress, He made his way to Frankfurt, which is where he started work on Grands Voyages. After his death in , his family continued his work and finished the remaining volumes in Interestingly, different versions of the Grands Voyages catered to different Christian confessional groups.