Lisa Voigt : “Illustrating Brazil in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp”
Lisa Voigt (Ohio State University)
Gravure (Ch. 24), Andre Thevet, Les
singularitez de la France Antartique, Antwerp,
Plantin, 1558
In 1558, Antwerp printer Christopher Plantin published two accounts of travel to Brazil: Hans Staden’s Warhaftige Historia and André Thevet’s Singularitez de la France Antarctique. Despite their shared subject matter, Plantin did not use any of the same woodcuts in the two texts, but instead mostly copied—with some significant alterations—the illustrations from the first editions. This article focuses on Plantin’s illustrations for his translation of Staden’s account, comparing them to some of the images in Thevet’s text as well as to the illustrations in the first edition of Staden, in order to gauge readers’ expectations regarding travel account illustrations. Plantin’s “copied” illustrations of Brazil and its inhabitants indicate that the appeal to generic exoticism did not outweigh the demand for ethnographic and textual specificity in mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp.
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Pour consulter le sommaire du bouquet du Verger consacré à L’exotisme, on peut se reporter ici.