Burgkmair's peoples of Africa and India (1508) and the origins of ethnography in print.(Hans Burgkmair)(Critical essay)

A broadsheet printed in the town of Augsburg in southern Germany in 1505 (Fig. 1) represents the initial public offering of New World Indians to a European audience. (1) The feather-skirted barbarians featured here stand in for a tribe of Brazilian Tupinamba Indians that Amerigo Vespucci saw for the first time in the New World. This feisty group of wild men and women illustrates passages from his letter Mundus nevus, summarized in the text beneath the image, that describe the Indians' communality, their penchant for free love, and their culinary preference for human flesh:

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

 
  No one has anything of his own, but all things are common. And the 
  men take women who please them, regardless of whether it is their 
  mother, sister, or friend. In this matter they make no distinction. 
  They also fight with each other. They also eat one another and they 
  hang and smoke the flesh of those killed. They live to be 150. And 
  have no government. (2) 

The sweeping nature of the caption's spurious claims is matched by the broad brush used to illustrate them. While the broadsheet's anonymous artist portrays these Tupinamba fantastically, in Europe, these elements solidified into a conventional visual motif: the image of an Indian in a feather crown and matching skirt, an "exotic" who quickly became the prototype from which subsequent stereotypes of Indians were drawn. (3) The illustrations of newly encountered peoples accompanying the earliest printed reports by Christopher Columbus and Vespucci (which appeared between 1493 and 1505) did not reflect real cultural difference between the Europeans and indigenous people but relied instead on recycled imagery that dwelt on their perceived warlike and cannibalistic tendencies. Unruly bands of crude, cartoonish, and bloodthirsty wild men in feathered skirts quickly calcified into the standard iconography for rendering newly discovered peoples, regardless of where they were found.

Contrast this with another account of foreign peoples recently charted by Europeans, Hans Burgkmair's Peoples of Africa and India (Fig. 2.), also printed in Augsburg, a short three years later. Whereas Burgkmair's subjects are the natives of coastal Africa and India, the leap from prints of Amerindians to ones of Africans and Asians is not as counterintuitive as it may appear. To begin with, the distinction between the Americas and Asia is anachronistic for the period. Furthermore, stereotyped images of the inhabitants of both the Americas and Asia often conflated them. Artists' proclivity to costume all newly discovered peoples in the feather crown and bustle of the Brazilian Tupinamba, a phenomenon the anthropologist William Sturtevant dubbed the tupinambization of the world, contributed to the confusion. (4) Burgkmair's images of native peoples mark an extraordinarily early departure from stereotypes. These peoples are presented in recognizable family units; their bodies are proportionately constructed and are modeled to rotate in space using an artistic vocabulary developed in the Italian Renaissance.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Unlike earlier images of newly discovered indigenes, Burgkuiair's monumental printed representation of the inhabitants of coastal Africa and the Malabar Coast of India is a precocious study in human diversity. (5) This woodcut series is based on Die Merfart and erfarung nuwer Schiffung und Wege zu viln unerkanten Inseln und Kunigreichen (The Voyage and Discoveries of New Paths to Many Unknown Islands and Kingdoms) by the Tirolese merchant Balthasar Springer, a report that records his travels in 1505 and 1506 with the mission led by Francisco Almeida that established the first. Portuguese viceroyalty in India. (6)