The Abraham Cowley
Text and Image Archive


Young man and American wild women.* Illustrating a incident from one of the famous New World letters ascribed to Amerigo Vespucci (this one being addressed to Piero Soderini, on Vespucci's third voyage) from a one-volume abridgment of de Bry's Eastern series, the India Orientalis (W. Fitzer's Orientalische Indien [Frankfurt, 1628], p. 470); this print reproduced courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University. Note the violin (or more strictly, the viol or viola da braccio) which is oddly included among the strewn goods to the right of the print; as we see from Giuseppe Scavizzi's array of examples, artists use viols and lyres with about equal frequency as the featured possession of Orpheus.
* The print has a curious connection with another, more famous production of de Bry's Frankfurt-Oppenheim publishing venture: the facing central nude is a minor variation on the Luna-Natura depicted in Robert Fludd's "Integrae Naturae speculum Artisque imago," frontispiece to Vol. I of his Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris (Oppenheim, 1617), reproduced with a valuable key in Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1972), 122-23.
Related Links:
Cannibals Surveyed / New World Cultivation and Sacrifice / The Isle of the Amazons / Orpheus beyond the Bacchantes
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