mapping ethnography in early modern germany
TRANSCRIPT
© Association of Art Historians 2013 864
Reviews
Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany Surekha Davies
Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture by Stephanie Leitch, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, i–xvii + 266 pp., 9 col. and 78 b. and w. illus., £65
The beginning of the sixteenth century saw the
confl uence of the age of print and the age of oceanic
expansion. In Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany, Stephanie Leitch investigates the impact of
this intersection on visual representations of distant
peoples. Leitch reveals how the interplay of humanist
scholarship, printing technology and long-distance
trading centres to be found in Germany in the decades
around 1500 gave rise to a number of prints of the
peoples of Africa and Asia that eschewed vague markers
of otherness in favour of observationally derived
details, and prompted compositional choices that made
claims for the authority of this approach.
After a brief sketch in chapter 1 of the route ahead,
the second chapter explores the Nuremberg Chronicle. First printed in 1493, the book contains a Ptolemaic
world map with monstrous peoples, along the left-
hand border, who have fallen off the previous folio
where two more strips of monsters appear with
accompanying commentary. Leitch’s careful analysis
of the structure and information sources of the Chronicle is informed by comparisons to Ptolemy’s Geography
and to medieval world maps centred on Jerusalem.
Here, examples from the portolan chart tradition of
mapmaking, and of classical and medieval works of
travel and geographical literature, would also have
been helpful, as Schedel’s combination of learned
authorities and eyewitness knowledge, and of historical
events with specifi c locations, were pre-existing
geographical approaches.
One of the strengths of this impressive book
is the way in which it integrates the study of early
German attempts to understand their own ethnicity
as well as the ethnicities of distant others. In so doing,
Leitch uncovers important relationships between
forms of knowledge that scholars do not traditionally
consider together, and illuminates the fundamental
interconnectedness of European experiences at home
and abroad. Chapter 3 argues that the rediscovery in
mid-fi fteenth-century Germany of Tacitus’ Germania (fi rst century AD) led such humanists as Conrad
Celtis to identify the ancestors of the Germans as the
folkloric wild man, and, consequently, as strong and
honourable. Additionally, archaeological evidence
allowed folklorists to claim the classical Hercules
as an ancestral German. This confl ation of classical,
archaeological and folkloric sources fed a nascent
German nationalism, and explains the appearance of
Renaissance prints of Charlemagne and of Archduke
Maximilian (later Holy Roman Emperor) with the
appearance and accoutrements of wild men and of
Hercules. When people who fi tted the characteristics
of wild men were found in the New World to the west,
German illustrators portrayed them using the heroic
– and hairy – iconography they used for their own
ancestors. Leitch argues persuasively that the German
scholars and image-makers who saw elements of their
own ancestry in these distant peoples were primed to
© Association of Art Historians 2013 865
observe, refl ect upon and represent them with greater
attention to their specifi city.
Hans Burgkmair’s woodcut series on the peoples
of Africa and India, perhaps the most sophisticated
ethnographical images from the early decades of
printing, forms the subject of chapter 3 (plate 1). These
prints have been seen as constituting a rupture from
earlier exoticizing, monster-fi lled scenes of peoples
of the distant east and south. This chapter shows
that these prints were also unusual in the rhetoric of
their visual epistemology. Burgkmair constructed
his frieze according to the conventions of accuracy
current in travel accounts, maps and physiognomies:
its composition showcased its basis in empirical
observation. Leitch makes a convincing argument
for considering the frieze as a map. Indeed, the frieze
functions much like a medieval itinerary map. As the
viewer progresses from scene to scene, s/he traces the
journey of the Tirolese merchant, Balthasar Springer,
whose adventures accompanying the Portuguese
mission led by Francisco Almeida in 1505–06 are
documented by the frieze. Each compartment contains
distinctive ethnographic details drawn from Springer’s
account as well as from other sources that distinguish
the inhabitants of such regions as ‘Gennea’ and ‘Allago’
from one another. In so doing, Burkgmair assembled,
as Leitch terms it, ‘a comparative primer’ (80) of the
peoples of Africa and Asia.
This book also impresses in the way it integrates
the study of printed ethnographic images into broader
questions concerning print culture in Reformation
Europe. Chapter 5, ‘Recuperating the Eyewitness’,
takes as its subject Jörg Breu’s woodcuts for Ludovico
de Varthema’s Travels (1515), and sheds light on the
interpenetration of Reformation experience and
responses to voyages of exploration. Leitch argues
that Breu’s illustrations for the German edition of
Varthema’s text ‘visually recoup the credibility of
the eyewitness, a claim that previous travel accounts
had rendered all but bankrupt by indiscriminate and
unchecked use’ (103). If the remarkable accounts of
Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville had saturated
European audiences’ capacity to believe in the wonders
of distant worlds, Breu’s illustrations, precisely crafted
to give viewers the impression of seeing action frozen
in time through Varthema’s eyes, complete with
1 Detail from Georg Glockendon (after Hans Burgkmair), Peoples of Africa and India, 1511 (1508). Woodcut. Coburg: Kunstsammlung der Veste Coburg (Inv. Nr. I, 63, 33). Photo: Kunstsammlung der Veste Coburg.
© Association of Art Historians 2013 866
Reviews
livestock and boats moving in and out of their fi eld of
vision, created for viewers the illusion of being their
own witnesses. Leitch’s painstaking analysis of these
images reveals Breu as an artist engaged in ethnological
classifi cation: Breu dressed different Hindu castes in
costumes that his viewers would have understood as
indicators of cultural hierarchy. At the same time, the
visual parallels between Breu’s scenes of suttee (widow-
burning) and idolatry on the one hand, and European
motifs and practices such as papal paraphernalia
(visible in Breu’s Indian woodcuts) and witch-burning,
suggest an artisan sensitive to his own culture as also
deserving of refl ective critique.
The fi nal substantive chapter of this book turns to
the iconography of the cannibal. It makes the argument
that the bloodthirsty cannibals placed in the Americas
by the accounts of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo
Vespucci at the turn of the sixteenth century had been
temporarily tamed and even domesticated in the years
around 1550, and metamorphosed into two tropes: the
naïve, child-like but perfectible sauvage, and the innocent
fool. Motifs associated with New World cannibals,
such as feather skirts, headdresses and dismembered
limbs, began to creep into the iconography of exotic
and European scenes on everything from Reformation
propaganda to playing cards. Leitch suggests that
the empirically driven ethnographic impulse of
Burgkmair’s and Breu’s work was short-lived, even in
the work of Burgkmair himself. We are told that ‘from
the carefully tagged regional distinctions of his earlier
work … Burgkmair randomly appropriates costumes
and attributes’ (153).
One aspect of this book that would have benefi ted
from lengthier discussion is the broader iconographic
context for representing distant peoples c. 1500. It
maintains, for example, that such printmakers as
Burgkmair and Breu ‘were the fi rst to release these
native inhabitants from the shackles of a visual tradition
of exotica that had grouped them together with
marvelous beings, monstrous races, wild men, and
barbaric Others, and considered them instead as fully
human’ (2). Such claims could have been demonstrated
and contextualized, rather than simply stated. The
distinctions between German iconography and the
rest, as it were, and Renaissance ethnographic impulses
and medieval ones, are perhaps drawn rather sharply;
further substantiation, with comparative analyses of
German and non-German examples, and of medieval
manuscript illumination and the early printed works
under consideration, would have been desirable. The
important arguments about the empirical innovations
of the German printers’ engagement with distant
worlds would have been strengthened further with a
more detailed survey of mapping ethnography beyond
Germany, and before the era of print. This reader
wonders, for example, what makes the map in the
Nuremberg Chronicle ‘the most complete pre-Columbian
“map” of the world’ (19), apart from its appearance
in the year in which Columbus returned from his fi rst
westward voyage. The concept of monstrous races is
perhaps separated rather summarily from ethnography.
The boundary between human and monster was far
from clear in this period, as were the boundaries
between the analytical categories and frameworks of
monstrosity, civility and Christianity.
In sum, however, this book is a splendid
contribution to the history of Renaissance print culture,
which will stimulate further research interrogating
the intersections between images, knowledge making
and technology. It deserves to be read widely by art
historians, historians of science and knowledge, and
by scholars of Renaissance Europe and of European
overseas expansion.