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FOUR. EYEWITNESS TO AMERICA’S WONDERS: Illustrating a Natural Historyof the Indies (bk. 7, chap. 14)
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f ou r EYEWITNESS TO AM ER ICA’S WONDERS Illustrating a Natural History of the Indies (bk. 7, chap. 14) When Oviedo stopped writing about events he had witnessed in Tierra Firme and devoted himself to natural history, to depicting American flora, fauna, and ethnographic items, he confronted a dilemma. How was he to convey in his natural history the particular novelty of the New World to an audience that had never seen America? In order to accomplish this task, Oviedo made his role as a witness and writer an integral part of a complex argument in which he proposed that through the record of his own experience he would enable the king to know the nature of the Indies. This account, the author argued, would help the king to formulate just laws based on truthful knowledge of the Indies and, upon beholding the secrets of New World phenomena, to praise God. Yet just as the laws of the empire were being formulated for the New World in the course of the first fifty years after Spain’s contact with America —laws that reflect, at times, the emergence of a broadened worldview of economics, the nature of man, and natural phenomena, among many other things—Oviedo was formulating his own theories and practices for representing the New World. The official chronicler’s passages on natural history and, in particular, his illustrations open a window onto the complexities of rendering New World natural phenomena for the European reader. His visual depiction of America’s flora, fauna, and ethnographic items in more than seventy field sketches as well as his theories on the role of sight, knowledge, and representation underscore the relationship between seeing, understanding, and visual epistemology during the period. To explicate the significance of these illustrations, I focus on the concept of visual epistemology during the early modern era and how it affected ideas of history and representation. I also discuss the epistemological problem that the New World presented to the Old World and how Oviedo responded to this challenge by supplying drawings, as epitomized by his fernández de oviedo’s chronicle of america 64 chapter on the pineapple. In the process of contextualizing Oviedo’s illustrations , I will discuss how their function changed as the chronicler’s narrative purpose and methods evolved. The full impact of Oviedo’s drawings has never been completely felt because many of the illustrations have never been published in their original form. Furthermore, with the exception of a doctoral thesis by Jesús Carrillo (1997), scholars have primarily examined the drawings for their documentary and artistic value, ignoring their context within the History. The thirty-two woodcuts in the sixteenth-century editions were faithful to Oviedo’s manuscript sketches. Most of the illustrations are embedded in the narrative itself, and the pictorial style is not altered.1 The majority of the drawings are in the first part of the History, which is more clearly devoted to depicting the natural wonders of America (later parts increasingly focus on historical events), and generally illustrate a single item in a nonnarrative context.2 However, only a quarter to a third of the text was published in the sixteenth century (part I, 1535 and 1547). After revising the published version of part I in the 1540s, Oviedo added at least eighteen more illustrations to books 1–19. Parts II and III include at least another twenty sketches. Although the first editor of the complete history, José Amador de los Ríos (1851–1855), used the final version of the autograph manuscript, his edition drastically altered the drawings so that they no longer convey a sense of the role the sketches played in the text. Making engravings based on the original sketches, Amador rendered some of them fairly faithfully (mostly the floral illustrations) while redrawing others according to nineteenth-century romantic conventions (see fig. 83). In addition, he removed the illustrations from the narrative and placed them in an appendix.3 Regrettably, subsequent editions have followed this practice. Thus, many of Oviedo’s sketches have never been published in their original form.4 Moreover, about half of the fifty books of the original autograph manuscript used by Amador are now lost. Consequently scholars must rely on a sixteenth- and an eighteenth-century copy of sections of the History in order to reconstruct a more complete portfolio of the original illustrations. In appendix D, I reproduce the existing illustrations—either in their autograph form or in the most...