Sunday March 08, 2009 14:19
Jan Mostaert’s “West Indies Landscape” (c. 1545) depicts the artist’s imagination of the New World having never been there before. The image is a fascinating combination of European tropes of both domesticity (the standard complement of European farm animals in the lower right corner) and exoticism (the monkey in the foreground, the strange rock formations). The dress of the human subjects, though difficult to read in this regrettably small reproduction, also provides a similarly intriguing combination of cultural references, from vaguely Mongol helmets to medieval European horns.
Benjamin Schmidt uses this painting to brilliant effect in framing his opening chapter of Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination in the New World, 1570-1670 in which he argues for the primacy of domestic, rather than colonial, concerns in shaping Dutch representations of the New World.
(via Wikimedia Commons)
