2008

University Of Minnesota Press

The lasting power of art in the public consciousness is truly amazing. In 1585, John White, an Elizabethan explorer and limner, painted the first images of indigenous people that most Englishmen and Europeans had ever seen. Later, these watercolor images of South Carolinian Algonquians became iconic pieces. Nearly 425 years later, White’s artwork continues to be a hotly debated topic. New scholarship surrounding these significant works continues to be produced by anthropologists, historians, and art historians alike. While the academic community has lauded John White’s watercolors, the engravings of White’s work by Theodor de Bry have been denied the same academic attention. In his new book, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization, Michael Gaudio refocuses academic consideration onto de Bry’s engravings.

Gaudio explores the early modern visual response to de Bry’s engravings of White’s paintings by questioning how Europeans really saw the representation of Native North Americans in artwork. To that end, Gaudio pinpoints certain aspects of de Bry’s work, such as his use of smoke and the Latin alphabet, to contextually explain how certain visual devices spoke to a European audience. His work further explores seventeenth-century religious imagery and compares perspectively foreshortened human figures, present both in Protestant ethnographic drawings and in de Bry’s engravings of “graven images,” to viewers’ desires for “the body of Christ” [p. 126]. Gaudio concludes his work with an examination of nineteenth-century re-engravings of de Bry’s seventeenth-century engravings. Gaudio argues that these modern reproductions visually inform scholars about the changing ideas surrounding “civilizing” the savages.

Gaudio’s work is remarkably detailed and filled with several thought provoking ideas. For example, he employs Mary Campbell’s definition of coloniology, a word that “describes a project wherein what we would now call ethnological data are produced and arranged in the service of explicitly colonial aims”, to the visual image [p. 1]. White’s watercolors—and de Bry’s engravings—he argues, were not merely factual depictions of life in indigenous South Carolina, but rather were colonial propaganda meant to drum up further financial support for future colonial settlements. Gaudio also introduces another interesting perspective to the debate when he argues that Europe civilized the New World through grammar and the written word. In several engravings, de Bry ascribes letters to images. This, Gaudio believes, emphasizes the preeminence of the Latin alphabet to the colonial mission.

While the book applies an interesting approach to its subject matter, it is also filled with numerous downfalls. Narrowly focused studies, such as Gaudio’s monograph, need exemplary evidence to support the arguments made by the author. Sadly, Gaudio’s book lacks this type of documentary proof. He makes numerous suppositions in every chapter without providing any type of reference. For example, in his chapter on smoke, Gaudio posits that Europeans compared the smoke of indigenous campfires, seen throughout White’s original watercolors and de Bry’s engravings, to images of witches. Yet, Gaudio provides no evidence for this supposed connection in the seventeenth-century viewer’s mind. Because the engravings of smoke look similar in pictures of witches and in pictures of indigenous people, he creates a connection where none (at least documentarily) exist.

Engraving the Savageis a book that is difficult to read. Gaudio has interesting ideas and is certainly knowledgeable about the art of engraving, but his material is presented in neither a clear nor concise manner. The reader has to sift through a narrative littered with technical jargon, semiotics, and minutia to discern the author’s point. While this is bad enough, the work is imbued with so many tangents that following Gaudio’s argument takes a Herculean effort.

Despite the poor prose, Gaudio has good thought-provoking ideas. It would have been interesting if he had a chapter comparing White’s original drawings to de Bry’s engravings, explaining how the works differ and how they compare. Gaudio could have used this comparison between White and de Bry to illuminate the differences between national colonial ideologies and artistic portrayals of indigenous people. Nevertheless, Gaudio’s work offers new ways to think about some of the most influential engravings in Western culture.

Tags: books  images  engraving  Algonquian  South Carolina  Theodor de Bry