Spain in the New World Pietro Martire d’Anghiera was an Italian serving in Spain as councillor of the Indies. In his 1516 edition of Decades he tells the story of the notorious Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, who in 1513 had arrived at the court of a native king in Panama. When Balboa found the king’s brother surrounded by men “smooth and effeminately decked” who engaged in sodomy, he had forty of them “given for a prey to his dogs.” The scene was memorialized in a famous engraving published in Frankfurt in 1590 as an illustration in Théodore de Bry’s monumental collection of accounts of the New World entitled Historia Americae. The plate shows elegantly clad Spanish soldiers posing superciliously while their hunting dogs sink their fangs into the limbs and throats of the naked Indians who writhe in agony before them. These fierce mastiffs haunted the European imagination as striking images of Spanish barbarism in the Americas and found a place in twentieth-century Mexican murals protesting the cruelties of the conquest.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 16:14:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015