In this essay, I situate Theodor de Bry’s prints illustrating the Very Brief Account within the context of the Black Legend, and investigate how these artworks critiqued or commented upon Spain’s actions in the Americas, and ultimately, how these prints contributed to the propagation of the Black Legend, which isolated Spain both religiously and culturally until the twentieth century. Ultimately, I argue, using several key images as evidence, that rather than follow Las Casas’ narrative of the innocent, childlike Indians versus the cruel Spanish, de Bry’s engravings lend a certain nobility and humanity to the oppressed Indians by drawing on vocabulary used to depict the saints and various Classical figures. While imagery related to the saints was mainly relegated to Catholicism, the exchange of ideas and iconography between Northern and Southern Europe may have facilitated the flow of influence. Taking this connection between the two regions as well as de Bry’s formal artistic training into account, it would not have been out of the question for de Bry to have knowledge of Catholic/Italian models. Ultimately, de Bry presents the conflict as one between “greed[y]” colonizers and “human” Indians as in his earlier six-volume collection, America.
About the presenterDeborah Anne Krieger
Deborah Krieger is an independent scholar, arts and culture writer, and curatorial assistant at the Delaware Art Museum. She was a Fulbright grantee to Austria from fall 2016 to summer 2017, and has presented papers at recent conferences held by the Midwest Modern Language Association and the Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College in 2016, where she studied art history, film and media studies, and German.