Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze

6 Brushing History against the Grain: Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound

6 Brushing History against the Grain Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound “Forget the gods . . . and read the rest”: this is the advice that Homer gives to the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott in Omeros, a long epic poem that has St. Lucian fishermen as its focus.1 We are implicitly invited to adopt a similar strategy when looking at the Treppenhaus fresco at Wurzburg, painted between July 1752 and November 1753 by the Venetian painter Gianbattista Tiepolo. It features the sun-god Apollo along with Europe, America, Africa, and Asia, but while the heavenly figures that occupy the ceiling are small, pale, indistinct, and decentered, the Four Continents on the friezes are imposing, solid, and independent. The personifications of America, Africa, and Asia (each occupies a frieze) are also organized according to the same decentering principle with the main figure actually placed to one side. As for Africa and Asia, one of America ’s main characteristics is mobility, one of the features that Tiepolo’s representation has in common with Stradanus’s America, notwithstanding the fact that the Venetian painter’s fresco was completed more than one hundred and fifty years after Stradanus’s drawing. Berman would characterize these two works as expressions of the first phase of modernity , but they differ in many important ways. On the Wurzburg ceiling, each continent is represented with its traditional attributes: in America’s case we can discern, among other things, a wild and topless America with a bow, alligators, a page with a chocolate pot, a pile of heads, and what looks like a cannibalistic barbecue. Yet the conventional iconology of early modernity (Cesare Ripa’s, for example) is not only upheld but also severely disrupted. Asia is here represented with an elephant and Africa with a camel whereas Ripa associated Asia with a camel and Africa with an elephant. Tiepolo’s mismatching, however, must have been deliberate, as he knew perfectly well which animal was allocated to whom—ten years earlier, on the ceiling of Palazzo Clerici in 107 Brushing History against the Grain Milan, he had allotted a camel to Asia and an elephant to Africa. Moreover , the only slave in the gigantic fresco is associated with Asia rather than, as one would expect, with Africa and/or America. A few years later, in the corner devoted to the representation of America on the Throne Room ceiling of the Royal Palace in Madrid (1764), Tiepolo will depict a manacled and desperate Amerindian slave. The most intriguing figure by far among America’s attributes is a European draughtsman who climbs the frieze in between the pile of heads and the cannibal roast with what looks like his portfolio. His presence and the fact that the draughtsman is seen from behind remind the viewer of the surreptitious, insidious, and faceless world-making power of representation that misconstrues and distorts interactions. In other words, Tiepolo lays bare the device that informs Stradanus’s work: his own knowledge of America, he suggests, is mediated by other representations. What is offered here is a representation of a representation, a self-reflexive, self-confessed, and almost literal display of drawing’s will to conquer. Tiepolo’s depiction of Europe and her function in the whole fresco substantiates my claim. Unlike America, who, like Africa and Asia, alters her pose as the beholder changes position, Europe is fixed and unalterable and the other continents are depicted in their relation to it. However, if we look closely at the way in which Europe is represented, we can see most of Ripa’s attributes (a horse, a bull, war paraphernalia, the arts) but, once again, some of them have been reassessed and recast. The visual arts have taken over and Painting here takes the place of Geography—with palette and brush she is immortalized while painting the globe.2 Tiepolo himself features on the ceiling, accompanied by his son Domenico and other collaborators. It is generally understood that Domenico painted this part of the fresco and situated his father Gianbattista at the corner of the great vault, between Africa and Europe. His intense expression seems to remind us that what we are seeing is purely the product of his own imagination and of his gaze (to be understood here in a loose sense, as he had never actually set eyes upon Africa, Asia, and America). A fresco by Domenico Tiepolo entitled Il Mondo Novo and executed in...