Stradano’s Allegorical Invention of the Americas in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence

Author(s): Lia Markey

Source: Renaissance Quarterly , Summer 2012, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 385-442
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of
America

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 Stradano’s Allegorical Invention of the
Americas in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence*
by L I A M A R K E Y

This essay situates Giovanni Stradano’s engravings of the discovery of the Americas from the
Americae Retectio and Nova Reperta series within the context of their design in late sixteenth-
century Florence, where the artist worked at the Medici court and collaborated with the dedicatee
of the prints, Luigi Alamanni. Through an analysis of the images in relation to contemporary texts
about the navigators who traveled to the Americas, as well as classical sources, emblems, and works
of art in diverse media — tapestry, print, ephemera, and fresco — the study argues that Stradano’s
allegorical representations of the Americas were produced in order to make clear Florence’s role
in the invention of the New World.

1. I N T R O D U C T I O N

I n the late 1580s, nearly a century after the travels of Columbus and
Vespucci, Giovanni Stradano (also known as Jan Van der Straet and
Johannes Stradanus, 1523–1605) designed engravings in two print series
representing the discovery of the New World. In the renowned prints
navigators are fashioned as mythological heroes, and Stradano’s images
suggest a fantasia, or dream, rather than a record of newsworthy events. The
Americae Retectio series includes an elaborate frontispiece (fig. 1) and three
prints (figs. 2–4) in chronological order that depict Christopher Columbus

*
This article began as a paper given at The Renaissance Society of America’s
conference in Cambridge in 2005, and developed out of the final chapter of my 2008
dissertation. I am especially grateful to my dissertation advisors, Charles Cohen, Rebecca
Zorach, and Clara Bargellini, and to fellow session participants at that RSA conference,
Michael Gaudio and Michael Schreffler, who first provided feedback on this study. Thanks
also go to past and current members of the Medici Archive Project, Lee Behnke, Surekha
Davies, Sara Matthews-Grieco, Liz Horodowich, Constance Markey, Jonathan Nelson, and
Susanna Rudofsky, who helped me to find, decipher, or translate sources related to the prints
discussed here. At various points in its development, this study benefited substantially
from the comments and suggestions of numerous readers, including Timothy Krause, Colin
Macdonald, and Erika Suffern of RQ, the anonymous RQ readers, Alessandra Baroni
Vannucci, Déborah Blocker, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Jessica Keating, Alexandra Korey,
Daniel Margócsy, Lisa Neal Tice, Meredith Ray, and Larry Silver. I also thank in particular
Blocker for sharing her knowledge of the Alterati with me, and Manfred Sellink and Vanessa
Paumen for providing me with proofs of the publication, Stradanus (1523 –1605), Court
Artist of the Medici.

Renaissance Quarterly 65 (2012): 385–442 [385]

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386 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

FIGURE 1. Giovanni Stradano, Frontispiece for the Americae Retectio series, late
1580s. Engraving. Private collection.

(1451–1506), Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512), and Ferdinand Magellan

(1480–1521).1 Two prints from Stradano’s Nova Reperta series similarly
unite allegorical imagery with captions to portray Vespucci’s encounter
with the New World (figs. 5 and 6).2 The Nova Reperta series includes
nineteen prints, each representing a different invention or discovery of the
recent centuries, ranging from the cure for syphilis to the production of
silk.3 Stradano’s four Americae Retectio prints and these two Nova Reperta
prints possess similar iconography, and all were dedicated to members of
the Alamanni family and first printed by the Galle publishing house in
the late 1580s and early 1590s.

1
On the general history of the Americae Retectio prints, see the following catalogue
entries: Van der Sman, 1992, 1001–02; Kenseth, 226–27. See also Leesberg and Leeflang,
3:26–32; Baroni Vannucci, 1997, 401.
2
The most thorough studies of Nova Reperta prints are McGinty; Van der Sman, 2011.
On many of the preparatory drawings from this series, see Benisovich. On the prints,
see Leesberg and Leeflang, 1:xxxviii; ibid., 3:5–15; Baroni Vannucci, 1997, 397–400;
Margócsy; Park, 363-364. On the role of invention, see Gombrich.
3
Three other prints from the series also relate to New World discoveries: the magnet
(2), guaiacum as a cure for syphilis (6), and longitude (16).

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 387

FIGURE 2. Giovanni Stradano, Columbus in the Americae Retectio series, late

1580s. Engraving. Private collection.

Since the late sixteenth century, Stradano’s prints depicting the Americas
have been used as artistic sources by artists and printmakers, and more
recently as illustrations for scholars writing about the interaction between
the Old and New Worlds. The roles of both Stradano and the Alamanni in
the creation of the prints have often been disregarded, and they are
frequently solely attributed to the Flemish printmaker and publisher. In
the early seventeenth century, the Northern printmaking family, the De
Brys, reproduced the Americae Retectio series with few alterations, and the
Stradano designs are therefore often mistakenly attributed to the De Brys.4
Since Michel de Certeau’s use of Stradano’s America image (fig. 5) from the
Nova Reperta series on the frontispiece of his 1975 The Writing of History,
Stradano’s prints and their reproductions by De Bry have served to illustrate

4
The prints were first reproduced (in reverse) by Theodore DeBry in the early
seventeenth century in book 4 of America Pars Quatre, and for this reason the works are often
attributed to the Northern printmaker: on the relation between De Bry and Stradano, see
Keazor. Bettini, 1987, and de Certeau are just two authors who mistakenly attribute
Stradano’s prints to the DeBrys.

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388 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

FIGURE 3. Giovanni Stradano, Vespucci in the Americae Retectio series, late 1580s.
Engraving. Private collection.

countless texts about the discovery of America and colonialism.5 Despite

the popularity of the images, and the recent fascination with promoting
Stradano’s America in particular as a representation of the colonial Other,
the works have not been fully considered within the context in which
they were produced, and even their complex iconography remains largely
unexplored.6 Most recently, Michael Gaudio has called for a reevaluation
of Stradano’s America in relation to ‘‘the very real space of the engraver’s

5
For instance, similar to de Certeau, authors such as Mason; Hulme, 1985, 17; Hulme,
86, 1; Grafton; and Canizares-Esguerra use Stradano’s prints as illustrations or emblems
without discussing their iconography or meaning in the context in which they were
produced.
6
Christadler traces the historiography of the Vespucci ‘‘America’’ print in particular,
and explains how it has been commonly discussed as ‘‘an icon of postcolonialism.’’ Sources
that expand on de Certeau’s use of the image and discuss it as an image representing
colonialism include Montrose; Zamora, 152–55; McClintock, 25–27; Conley, 305–09;
Schmidt, 129–31. Both Rabasa and Schreffler examine the image more closely with regard to
the discourse of colonialism. The most detailed and thorough studies of the images that are
exceptions to this general interest in using the image as a symbol in a pan-European context,
include Palm, 1984–85; Bettini, 1987 and 1988; Margolin, 2001; Van der Sman, 2011.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 389

FIGURE 4. Giovanni Stradano, Magellan in the Americae Retectio series, late

1580s. Engraving. Private collection.

workshop where this print was made.’’7 Yet this print was conceived, not
in the engraver’s workshop, but rather on Stradano’s page. The prints
were repositories of factual and fictional information gathered by
reading, speaking, and writing about these celebrated navigators among a
circumscribed group of individuals in Florence.
This study argues that the America print, along with Stradano’s five
other New World images, must be examined together within the context
of his circle. The first part of this study therefore establishes the cultural
environment of the prints’ production in late sixteenth-century Florence.
Examination of Stradano’s experience as a print designer and Medici court
artist, and of Luigi Alamanni’s involvement in the Florentine Accademia
degli Alterati, provides critical insight into the creation of these images.8
Stradano designed the prints around the time of Ferdinando de’ Medici’s
(1549–1609) 1588 accession as Grand Duke. Previously Stradano had been
involved in the creation of allegorical paintings, ephemera, and cartography

7
Gaudio, xvi.
8
Markey, 2008, 233–36; Van der Sman, 2011.

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390 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

FIGURE 5. Giovanni Stradano, America in the Nova Reperta series, late 1580s.
Engraving. Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.

for Medici propaganda under Ferdinando’s father, Grand Duke Cosimo

de’ Medici (1519–74), and his brother, Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici
(1541–87). At the Medici court he would have encountered objects
from, texts about, and images of the New World. Though the Medici
were not involved in the colonization of the Americas, and they themselves
were subsumed under the sovereignty of Spain, Grand Duke Ferdinando
sought to strengthen cultural and economic ties with the New World during
his reign. The second part of the essay closely examines the text and image
of each print in relation to this milieu. Captions on the prints, chosen
by the Alamanni, and Stradano’s inscriptions on the related preparatory
drawings reveal specific sources for, and ideas behind, the conception of
the images.9 Using the textual materials available about the New World
and stimulated both by contemporary epic literature written about the
navigators and by ancient sources such as Lucretius, Stradano produced
allegorical images that borrow from emblems and imprese, court frescoes,
festivals, tapestries, cartography, and other printed images. These other

9
See Van der Sman, 2011, 139– 42.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 391

FIGURE 6. Giovanni Stradano, The Astrolabe in the Nova Reperta series, late
1580s. Engraving. [NC266.St81 1776St81], Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Columbia University in the City of New York.

media provided an allegorical visual language that was familiar to sixteenth-

century viewers.
According to José Rabasa, in Stradano’s prints and especially the America
engraving, ‘‘newness is produced by means of discursive arrangements
of more or less readily recognized descriptive motifs.’’10 These ‘‘descriptive
motifs’’ to which Rabasa alludes are produced through the construction
of complex allegorical narratives comprised of emblematic compositions
that incorporate the representation of gods and navigators alongside
personifications of the New World, fantastical monsters, hybrid creatures,
and ancient gods. These discursive and anachronistic images would have
seemed customary, and would have been comprehensible, to the prints’ late
sixteenth-century audience. Yet as Sabine MacCormack has explained, there
were ‘‘limits of understanding’’ in constructions of the New World, for
images ‘‘did not on their own lead to a significantly new perception of
Greco-Roman antiquity or of the Americas.’’11 By framing the New World

10
Rabasa, 37.
11
MacCormack, 79.

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392 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

in recognizable allegorical imagery, Stradano’s engravings could declare

the novel idea that the New World was a Florentine invention and
patriotically revel in these discoveries.12 In his seminal study on mythology
and allegory in the Renaissance, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Jean
Seznec writes that ‘‘basically, allegory is often sheer imposture, used to
reconcile the irreconcilable.’’13 Indeed, these images do just that: they make
no reference to the Spanish, overtly connect the New World to Italy, and,
with the figure of Vespucci in particular, highlight Florence’s role in the
discovery. Fraught with temporal clashes between the old (pagan mythology)
and the new (the discovery and invention of the Americas) the prints,
disseminated throughout the world, made America part of Florence’s
history, even though in reality the New World played a small role in
Florence’s past and present. This claim could be made only through the
language of allegory because implicit in allegory lies fantasy and the notion
that the representations are imaginary.

2. S T R A D A N O , A L A M A N N I , A N D T H E A C C A D E M I A
DEGLI ALTERATI

As is common in sixteenth-century engravings, the captions on the prints

make clear that their production was the result of a collaboration between
the designer or inventor (Stradano), the printmaker and publisher (Galle
and Collaert), and the dedicatee or patron (the Alamanni). A Flemish artist
who began working at the Medici court sometime before 1554 first as
cartoon designer for Grand Duke Cosimo’s new tapestry workshop and
then as an artist under Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), Stradano was by the
1560s a relatively well-known independent artist living in Florence.14
He was an active member of the Accademia del Disegno and secured
commissions for paintings and frescoes at the Medici court and also from
private patrons and churches in Tuscany. Stradano was also involved in the
production of several court festivals and weddings, and in the 1570s he
worked briefly in Naples and in Flanders for John of Austria.15 The artist is

12
On the meaning of allegory in relation to personifications, see Fletcher, 4; Zorach, 87.
13
Seznec, 274. On allegory in the early modern period, also see Fletcher; Allen; Baskins
and Rosenthal; Park.
14
For monographic studies of Stradano, see Baroni Vannucci, 1997; Sellink, 2011a. For
the biography of the artist, see Vasari, 7:99, 309, 584, 617; Borghini, 151–57; Baldinucci,
591–96; Van Mander, 65–73.
15
On Stradano’s festival designs, see Van Sasse van Ysselt, 1990.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 393

best known for his large number of preparatory drawings for prints and
tapestries that illustrate and document life at the Medici court, significant
battles, hunts, as well as other current events, and religious subjects.
Stradano established a partnership with the Galles, a family who ran
a print publishing house in Antwerp, where most of his print designs, such
as the engravings in these two series, were produced initially under Philips
Galle (1537–1612).16 The family business was subsequently taken over by
Philips Galle’s son, Theodor (1571–1633), and then his grandson Johannes
(1600–76). Accordingly, the first two editions of the Americae Retectio prints
cite Philips Galle as the printer and Philips’s son-in-law, Adriaen Collaert
(1560–1618), as the engraver, while the second edition names Johannes
Galle as the printer.17 Similarly, the first edition of the Nova Reperta series
labels Philips Galle as the printer of the first edition, and then Theodor
and Johannes Galle are credited with the two subsequent editions.18 A
comparison between the engravings themselves and Stradano’s six finished
preparatory drawings for the prints — five are in the Laurentian Library
in Florence and the ‘‘America’’ print is housed in The Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City (fig. 7) — makes clear that the Galles
reproduced Stradano’s drawings with great precision and had little input
into the content or style of the prints. They did, however, likely control
when the prints would be published, how much they cost, and where they
would be sold and distributed. Though little is known about the
dissemination of the prints and though the prints are undated, a 1589
date on the Vespucci preparatory drawing in the Americae Retectio series
(Laurentian Library) provides a date for Stradano’s drawings and suggests
that the prints were produced soon after this time.19 It is believed that at
least four editions of the Nova Reperta series were printed between 1591
and 1638, and that the Americae Retectio series was first printed in 1589 and
then reissued in 1592 for the one-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s
discovery.20
Luigi (1558–1603) and Ludovico Alamanni are both cited as ‘‘noblemen
of Florence’’ in the caption on the Americae Retectio frontispiece, but only

16
See Sellink, 2001, xlviii; Leesberg and Balis, Part I, unpaginated; Sellink, 2011b.
Around 1580, after Adriaen Collaert married Philips Galle’s daughter, the Collaert
engraving family, brothers Adriaen and Jan II in particular, began working exclusively
with the Galle family as well.
17
Leesberg and Balis, Part V, 182–83.
18
Ibid., 189–91.
19
Inscribed on the broken mast of the ship: JOAN/STRAD/ANUS/INVEN/1589.
20
Leesburg and Balis, Part V, 182, 189. McGinty, 21, is less certain about the exact
dating of the prints and speculates that the earliest possible date for the Nova Reperta is 1588.

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394 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

FIGURE 7. Giovanni Stradano, America, late 1580s. Pen and brown ink, brown
wash, heightened with white, over black chalk. New York, Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Image copyright Ó The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

Luigi is named on the Nova Reperta frontispiece.21 Gert Jan Van der Sman
has pointed out that Stradano refers to Luigi Alamanni as the auctor
intellectualis, or ‘‘intellectual advisor,’’ of many of his print designs in various
inscriptions on preparatory drawings and sketches, and has considered
Alamanni’s scholarship as a catalyst for many of Stradano’s designs.22 Luigi
Alamanni commissioned other works by Stradano, such as a series of
drawings of Dante’s Divine Comedy, a series illustrating Homer’s Odyssey,
and some of the prints from a series representing different types of hunting.23
Most of the preparatory drawings for the Americae Retectio prints and the

21
There is some discrepancy over the birth and death dates of Luigi Alamanni, and little
is known of Ludovico. Brunner, 1994, 123, and the Dizionario biografico, 1:571, state that
Luigi Alamanni lived from 1558 to 1603. Baldini, 66, attributes these dates to Ludovico
Alamanni and includes no specific birth and death dates for Luigi, stating only that he was
the Provveditore of the Accademia Fiorentina in 1579. The Dizionario describes Ludovico as
a jurist and heretic and Luigi as a scholar. Luigi and Ludovico’s sister, Costanza Alamanni,
also commissioned a print series from Stradano related to the Nova Reperta series. Her series
is on the discovery and use of silk worms and entitled ‘‘Vermis sericus.’’
22
Leesberg and Leeflang, Part I, xxxviiii, cite Van der Sman, 2011, 140 –42.
23
On Alamanni patronage, see Brunner, 1999, 123–32; Baroni Vannucci, 1997, 57,
217, 233; Leesberg and Leeflang, Part I, xxxvi, xxxviiii; Van der Sman, 2011, 135–43.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 395

drawings for the Dante series are today located in the same archival album of
the Laurentian Library in Florence, indicating that they were conserved
together by the Alamanni.24 The dates of the sheets, including the date on
one of the American drawings, range from 1587 to 1589, indicating that
they were produced in Florence during this two-year period of time. The
album is composed of fifty-six drawings: fifty illustrate canti from the Divine
Comedy, four are preparatory drawings for the Americae Retectio series, one is
a preparatory drawing for the print of Vespucci and the astrolabe from the
Nova Reperta series, and one is a preparatory drawing for the frontispiece
for Stradano’s Calcius series — an unfinished series presumably dedicated
to soccer.25 Alamanni wrote copious notes on Dante in this album, and
perhaps even did some of the drawings in it, demonstrating that he was closely
involved in the creation of Stradano’s images.26 He can also be credited with
providing titles for the Dante drawings in the album, since his hand is
visible on some of Stradano’s signed drawings.
That the preparatory drawings for the Americae Retectio series and
for the Vespucci ‘‘Astrolabe’’ print returned to Florence after they were
engraved, and were placed together in the album with these important
Dante drawings, demonstrates that they were considered to be important
collectibles for the Alamanni. In 1587, when Alamanni and Stradano
were producing the Dante drawings representing hell, Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642) presented two lectures to the Accademia Fiorentina on the
‘‘Shape, Site and Size of the Inferno of Dante.’’27 Thomas Settle proposes
that the letters from Alamanni to Galileo from this period make clear that
some of these illustrations in Alamanni’s album were created in conjunction
with Galileo’s work, or that Galileo even had a hand in their design.28 The

24
The album or codex has been dismantled so that Stradano’s drawings have been taken
out of the album and are now conserved in separate folders. The album and separate
drawings share the same title: Laurentian Library, Mediceo Palatino 75; Michael Brunner
discusses this archival font and the possibility that the works were in Luigi Alamanni’s
possession — see Brunner, 1994, 123–24, 131; Brunner, 1999, 94–95 — and a facsimile of
the album was published by Guido Biagi. The most recent addition to the scholarship on the
album following its restoration is Baroni Vanucci, 2002. The other Nova Reperta preparatory
drawings are dispersed throughout museums and private collections all over the world: see
Leesberg and Leeflang, 5–15.
25
Alamanni quite likely also commissioned Stradano to create a print series on soccer,
entitled Calcius Ludus; however, there is no evidence to indicate that these prints were ever
created: see Van Sasse van Ysselt, 1993. A few unsigned drawings of paradise from Dante’s
Inferno in the album have been attributed to Alessandro Allori by Brunner, 1999, 327–29.
26
Brunner, 1994, 126–28; Brunner, 1999, 330–36.
27
Settle, 834.
28
Ibid., 837, 842.

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396 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

drawings of the navigators also include extensive notes, in Flemish and in

Stradano’s hand, to the printmakers. Stradano wrote in the captions at the
base of the drawings and added several explanatory notes in the margins in
order to describe some of the iconography in the images to the printmakers.29
Therefore, these drawings included important notes and ideas of Galileo
and Stradano that Alamanni felt were worthy of safekeeping.
During the time in which Stradano was producing the preparatory drawings
for the prints, Luigi Alamanni was an active member of the Accademia degli
Alterati, a literary group for whom the discovery of the New World was
a subject of inquiry. A smaller and more private academy in comparison with
other Florentine Cinquecento academies, such as the Accademia Fiorentina
and the Accademia della Crusca, the Accademia degli Alterati began in 1569
among a group of Florentine noblemen who met frequently to discuss
theoretical and technical issues related to their own writing and to other
authors, particularly ancient poets, as well as Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso.30
Members included individuals from prominent Florentine families, such as
the Ricasoli, Neroni, Rucellai, Davanzati, and Albizzi. Two of the more
famous members of the academy were Filippo Sassetti (1540–88), a merchant
who traveled to India and whose letters from abroad are informative about
India and the New World, and Giovanni Battista Strozzi (1551–1634), the
author of both an epic poem about Vespucci and an elaborate Vespucci
intermezzo for Prince Cosimo II de’ Medici’s marriage celebration in 1608. In
an undated document Strozzi wrote out a list of potential discussion topics for
the Alterati: one of them included whether ‘‘the discovery of the Indies was
damning or useful to our country.’’31 According to academy member Jacopo
Soldani’s funeral oration for Alamanni, Luigi suggested that a poem be written
about the navigator in order ‘‘to render more glorious his country.’’32

29
For instance, a marginal note on the Columbus drawing explains that the text for the
caption will be sent in a following mailing. All of the sheets have both vertical and horizontal
creases, suggesting that they were folded up for travel, mailed to Antwerp to be printed, and
then sent back to Florence and inserted into Alamanni’s album. See also Sellink, 2011b;
Van der Sman, 2011, 140–41.
30
On the Accademia degli Alterati, see Blocker; Manni; Plaisance; Van Veen; Weinberg,
1954a and 1954b. Diaries of the academy and archival documents regarding its members are
located in the Laurentian Library and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.
31
The entry reads, ‘‘Che il ritrovamento dell’Indie nuove è stato piu di dano a nostri
paesi che d’utile’’: BNCF, MS Magliabecchiano, IX, 124, c.279v.
32
Soldani, 56: ‘‘Quanto tale cognizione fusse perfetta nel nostro Alamanni ne può essere
ora testimonio, chi per rendere più gloriosa questa Patria, si è proposto per soggetto di
Poema degnissimo quell maraviglioso viaggio d’Amerigo Vespucci, pel quale quella sı̀ vasta
penisola della nuova spagna, e del Perù ritrovando, e del suo nome illustrandola, e nuovo
mondo al vecchio mondo aggiungendo, la informò de’ precetti della nostra Religione.’’

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 397

Not coincidentally, Sassetti and Strozzi were writing about the Americas
in the years just preceding Stradano’s design of these American prints for the
Alamanni. Sassetti was an esteemed member of the Academy before his travels
around the world, and many of the letters that Sassetti wrote on his journey
were sent to members of the group, such as Bernardo Davanzati, Pietro
Vettori, Francesco Buonamici, and Strozzi.33 Although Sassetti does not
write about his brief experience in America, some of his letters refer to the
discoveries of Vespucci and Columbus.34 In December 1585, Sassetti wrote
passionately to his friend Michele Saladini, a Florentine merchant living in
Pisa, of Columbus’s route and discovery, and then explained: ‘‘But to return
to Columbus once more, I do not think that his glory was dictated by the
action of the wind . . . and I in particular know this so much so that I have
helped and urged our Tender one [il Tenero] to write about it: a worthy work
of such greatness and wonder as to compete with the story of Ulysses.’’35 ‘‘Our
Tender one’’ here is the Accademia degli Alterati’s pseudonym for Giovanni
Battista Strozzi. The comment that Columbus’s story rivals Ulysses’s tale
is intriguing, since Alamanni was involved with Stradano in producing an
illustrated edition of Homer’s epic poem that never came to fruition. This
citation from Sassetti’s letter clearly shows that already by 1585 Sassetti had
contacted Strozzi about writing a poem about Columbus’s heroic travels.
But Strozzi chose to write about Vespucci rather than Columbus.36
He likely began writing the poem in the mid-1580s, when he and Sassetti
were obviously engaged in a discourse on the importance of writing about
the Italian navigators.37 Strozzi could have also been influenced by Giulio
Cesare Stella’s (1564–1624) epic poem about Columbus, and perhaps it
was knowledge of Stella’s poem that provoked Strozzi to write of Vespucci
instead of Columbus.38 In 1590, Il Colombeide (The Columbeis, 1589),

33
Manni, 22v. Sassetti’s travels were principally to India, though he stopped in Brazil on
his way there. On Sassetti as a member of the Academy, see Blocker.
34
For instance, Sassetti’s 1583 letter to Francesco Buonamici explains how his own
travels mirrored Columbus’s: Sassetti, 355.
35
Dei, 122–23: ‘‘Ma per tornare un’altra volta a Colombo, io non credo che per levargli
la coniettura de’ venti se gli levi la Gloria dell’azione sua . . . io in particolare sapete quanto io
ho aiutato ed esortato il nostro Tenero a tentare la sua passata: opera degna e che ha in se in
grandezza e maraviglia, e ha in sé altro che le novelle d’Ulisse.’’
36
On Strozzi, see Barbi; Fido. Barbi, 55–56, speculates about the influence of Stella’s
Columbus poem on Strozzi.
37
Barbi, 56; Fido, 288.
38
Fido, 281, also points out that all of these authors could have been inspired by Luis
Vaz de Camoes’s Os Lusiadas (1572) and Alonso Ercilla y Zuñiga’s L’Araucana (1569–89),
two epic poems about Portuguese conquests in the late sixteenth century.

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398 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

Stella’s romantic text based on the writings of Gonzalo Fernández de

Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557) and Peter Martyr d’Anghiera (1457–1526)
and describing Columbus’s discovery and interaction with the natives,
was sent to the Accademia degli Alterati.39 Certainly the Academy knew of
Stella’s poem earlier, since it had already been published in a pirated
version in London in 1585. Similar to Stella’s poem, Strozzi’s text about
Vespucci boasts of the navigator’s Florentine origins and describes him as
a mythological hero. The writings of Sassetti, Stella, and Strozzi, who were
all involved in the Accademia degli Alterati, reveal that Alamanni and
members of the Academy were discussing the accomplishments of
Vespucci as well. That Luigi Alamanni wrote and read Sassetti’s funeral
oration and that the two men exchanged letters, suggests that they were
not only colleagues, but close friends as well.40 Stradano’s preparatory
drawings for the prints were born out of these literary activities, which were
related to the discovery of the New World as considered among the
Alterati.

3. S O U R C E S AT THE MEDICI COURT

Stradano and Alamanni had other ways in which to gain information
about the New World that might have provoked the production of these
prints. Another Alamanni family member, Vincenzo di Andrea Alamanni
(1537–91), had access to news about the Americas. From the late 1570s
to the 1580s, he was an ambassador employed first by Grand Duke
Francesco de’ Medici (1547–87) and then by Grand Duke Ferdinando
de’ Medici to work at the Spanish court in Madrid, where he supplied
information about imports from the Americas and sent updates about
shipments being sent from Portugal to the Medici-controlled port
at Livorno.41 It was Vincenzo Alamanni who was entrusted with the
acquisition of Father Giovanni Pietro Maffei’s Historiarum indicarum
(History of the Indies, 1588) — a book about the conversion and history of

39
Barbi, 55. On Stella’s Colombeide, see Bradner; Hofman, 1998, 1990, and 1994;
Llewellyn.
40
Alamanni, 43–51. Furthermore, one letter from Alamanni to Strozzi indicates that
Alamanni sent Dante ‘‘studies,’’ perhaps meaning drawings, to Strozzi in order to gain his
insight on the work: Biagi, unpaginated.
41
Vincenzo Alamanni (1536–90) was likely Luigi and Ludovico’s older cousin. Besides
being an ambassador and a member of the Accademia degli Alterati, he was also a member of
the Accademia Fiorentina and the Accademia della Crusca: Dizionario, 1:573.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 399

the natives of both the New World and Asia — on behalf of Grand Duke
Ferdinando.42
Before defining the significance of Maffei’s text for Stradano, it is
necessary to expand on Grand Duke Ferdinando’s cultural politics in
relation to the Americas, since Stradano’s prints evoke the interests of the
duke during this first year of his dukedom. In 1588, Ferdinando left his
position as cardinal in Rome to become Grand Duke of Florence, following
the sudden death of his brother Francesco. In Rome he had been an avid
collector of American objects, such as featherwork and hammocks: more
importantly, he became the custodian of an important manuscript about
Mexico, the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (General History
of the Things of New Spain), a codex written by the Franciscan friar
Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590).43 This manuscript recording the
history and nature of New Spain was banned by King Philip II and was likely
entrusted to Ferdinando because he was cardinal protectorate of the
Franciscan order and possessed an interest in the Americas. He brought these
treasures to Florence and commissioned Ludovico Buti (1560–1611) to
fresco American natives and a scene of the conquest of Mexico in his
Armory, a space for entertaining visiting dignitaries. Though Ferdinando
and his Medici predecessors had no concrete ties to the Americas, in
subsequent years he would devote himself to the development of the port
of Livorno and to the creation of a colony — or at least an outpost — in the
New World.44 Ferdinando’s support of the publication of Maffei’s book on
the land, people, and conversion of the New World and Asia was therefore
relevant to both his political agenda and to his religious and cultural
interests. The patronage of the book began during his cardinalship and the
text was ultimately published in 1588 after he became Grand Duke and
while Stradano was working on these print designs.
Stradano refers to Maffei’s text in an inscription on the verso of the
preparatory drawing for the ‘‘America’’ print (fig. 5) for the Nova Reperta
series.45 He writes with regard to one of the novel animals he portrayed in the

42
ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4919, 504 (15 October 1588, Vincenzo di Andrea
Alamanni in Madrid to Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici in Florence). This letter demonstrates
that Alamanni was reporting on the shipment of goods from the New World and was
working on acquiring Maffei’s History of the Indies for the duke: Medici Archive Project,
DocID 8424.
43
See Markey, 2011.
44
On Ferdinando and the New World, see Markey, 2008, 165–225; Mangiarotti; Ciano,
161–71; Heikamp, 18; Guarnieri, 1963, 62–120; Guarnieri, 1928; Uzielli, 36–38; Ridolfi.
45
McGinty, 21; Achilles, 1982, 162; Baroni Vannucci, 1997, 283, 397; Van der Sman,
2011, 142.

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400 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

drawing: ‘‘See volume II of the Bergomese Jesuit Pietro Maffei’s Historiarum

Indicarum.’’46 Stradano used Maffei and other contemporary textual sources
about the New World when designing the iconography of the prints in his
Venationes (Animal Hunt) suite of 104 engravings, also printed by the
Galle family, begun as early as 1570 and initially dedicated to the Medici.47
Several of the prints in the series depict natives in feather skirts and
headdresses in idyllic landscapes, where they are seen procuring birds,
animals, and pearls in great abundance and using novel means. For example,
the print for the ‘‘American Indians catching geese with gourds’’ (fig. 8)
illustrates an unusual style of hunting that was described in great detail in
Oviedo’s De la natural hystoria de las Indias (Natural History of the Indies,
1526).48 These same Native Americans are also depicted in the scene
of natives using pelicans to fish, a Chinese method of fishing with birds
described in Maffei’s History.49 Stradano also used José de Acosta’s
(1539–1600) Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Natural and Moral
History of the Indies, 1590) for his preparatory drawings for a never-produced
print of ‘‘Indians smoking out animals.’’50 This was another unusual means
of hunting in which Mexicans set fire to land in order to force animals out
of hiding and then capture them.51 In comparison with the images of
hunters in the Venationes series, Stradano’s New World representations in
the Americae Retectio and the Nova Reperta appear fanciful. While many of
the hunt prints are certainly imaginary, their subject matter and the series
as a whole are more ethnographic in conception, endeavoring to portray
realistic representations of different types of hunting throughout the world.
By contrast, while perhaps also based on the writings of Maffei, Oviedo, and

46
‘‘Vides Petrus Mafforum . . . Historiarum Indicarum, Tome 2.’’
47
Many of Stradano’s drawings for the hunt series were based on his own tapestry
designs produced in the preceding years for the Medici, and which were ultimately derived
from courtly hunting manuscripts. On the hunt series and their relation to literature about
the Americas, see Leesberg and Balis, Part VI, 192; Baroni Vannucci, 1997, 373–74;
Bok–van Kammen, 525; Achilles, 1980, 162. There is some uncertainty about the exact
dating of the specific prints from this series. Stradano seems to have continued to produce
drawings for it throughout the 1590s, and Luigi Alamanni has been named as the auctor
intellectualis of some of these prints as well: Leesberg and Leeflang, Part I, xxxviii.
48
The preparatory drawing for this print is located in New York at the Cooper Hewitt
National Design Museum, inv. 1901–39–131: Bok–van Kammen, 525; Fernández de
Oviedo y Valdés, 22–23. A similar scene with squash and geese is depicted in Alessandro
Allori’s tapestry of natives of the New World, indicating that contemporary artists used the
same source as Stradano.
49
Bok–van Kammen, 61, 512–13; Baroni Vannucci, 1997, 387.
50
Baroni Vannucci, 1997, 316–17; Bok–van Kammen, 372; Van Sasse van Ysselt, 2003.
51
De Acosta, 274.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 401

FIGURE 8. Giovanni Stradano, Indians Hunting for Geese with Gourds in the
Venationes series, 1580s. Engraving. [NC266.St81 1776St81], Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

de Acosta, the Americae Retectio and Nova Reperta prints of the Americas
neither reflect current events nor endeavor to portray the New World
realistically. In this way, they are more similar to some of the allegorical
paintings and cartography produced at the Medici court.
As a member of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence and as a
participant in Vasari’s workshop at the court, Stradano would have been
continually confronted with the use of emblems and imprese in art.52 For

52
The terms emblem and impresa are often used interchangeably in modern scholarship
and both generally include a symbolic image and a motto. However, an emblem usually
provided an explanatory text and an image personifying a particular idea or allegory; an
impresa is generally a particular visual device that stands for an individual. These definitions
are based on Manning; Caldwell, 2001 and 2004. It should be noted that by the late
sixteenth century the study and use of emblems (and particularly of imprese) were especially
popular at the Medici court and within the Florentine academies. One of the Accademia
degli Alterati diaries from the 1570s and 1580s includes pages of analysis of imprese in
various different hands, and in 1573 Filippo Sassetti presented a lecture on imprese to the
Accademia Fiorentina: BNCF, MS Magliabecchiano, IX, 124.

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402 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

instance, Stradano likely aided Vasari with the frescoes in the Sala
degli Elementi in the Palazzo Vecchio from the late 1550s, which
were commissioned by Duke Cosimo and employed imprese.53 Two of
Vasari’s frescoed walls, like each of Stradano’s prints, feature a hero or
god in the center of the composition acting out a narrative: Saturn is
offered fruits on one wall and Venus rises from the sea (fig. 9) on the
adjacent wall.54 In the waters surrounding these figures emblematic
compositions — such as a symbol of abundance with her cornucopia (at
left on the Saturn wall); a turtle with a sail alluding to one of Cosimo’s
favorite mottos borrowed from Augustus, festina lente (‘‘make haste
slowly,’’ at right on the Saturn wall); and a triton blowing into a shell,
representing fame (at right on the Venus wall) — reveal different aspects of
Medici power.
Francesca Fiorani has shown how these emblematic frescoes in the
Palazzo Vecchio communicated Medici control over the cosmos in a similar
way as the cartography produced at the court.55 Stradano himself made
maps for the private rooms in the Palazzo Vecchio and was certainly aware
of the traditional use of allegory in cartography.56 He would have known
well Egnazio Danti’s (1536–86) and Stefano Buonsignori’s (d. 1589)
painted maps in Cosimo’s Guardaroba Nuova, a collection space comprised
of cabinets decorated with different parts of the world, begun in 1563 and
left unfinished in the 1580s.57 Here the artists-cartographers incorporated
fantastic and mythological creatures in their stunningly accurate portrayals
of different regions. In Stradano’s prints the visual morphology of allegory,
as seen in Vasari’s frescoes and in maps produced at the Medici court, are
united with knowledge about the New World acquired through circulating
texts and news in order to convey a message regarding Florence’s propitious
role in the Americas.

4. A M E R I C A U N V E I L E D

The frontispiece of Stradano’s Americae Retectio series serves to introduce

this celebratory print series. It exhibits an elaborate mythology rejoicing in

53
See Baroni Vannucci, 1994, 79; Baroni Vannucci, 1991, 6.
54
Fehl, 211, has shown how other prints by Stradano resemble Vasari’s work in the
Palazzo Vecchio, and has expanded on the relationship between the two artists.
55
Fiorani, 33–35.
56
McGinty, 55.
57
On the Guardaroba Nuova, see Cecchi and Pacetti; Fiorani, 17–140; Rosen.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 403

FIGURE 9. Giorgio Vasari, Cristofano Gherardi, and workshop, Birth of Venus,

1555. Fresco. Florence, Sala degli Elementi, Palazzo Vecchio. Alinari/Art Resource,
NY.

the retectio, or discovery, of the Americas as an Italian endeavor. Though

Magellan, a Portuguese explorer, is featured as the fourth print in this
series, significantly, there is no reference to him or to his Portuguese origins
on the frontispiece. In the frontispiece the gods Flora and her husband
Zephyr (symbols of Florence), Janus and a pelican (a symbol for Genoa),
and Oceanus (a symbol for sea travel) present a globe, while set within
medallions at the top of the sheet are the two Italian navigators, Christopher
Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. At the upper corners of the composition,
other symbols for Florence and Genoa, namely, Mars and Neptune, ride
chariots. Thus, Florence, Vespucci’s birthplace, is represented at left in the
composition with images of Mars, Flora, and a portrait of Vespucci
himself, while Genoa, Columbus’s birthplace, is represented at right with
Neptune, Janus, and a portrait of Columbus. This entire scene floats above
the waters off the west coast of Italy, allowing an Italocentric view of land
at the bottom of the composition to highlight the cities of Florence and
Genoa, again reminding the viewer of the origins of the navigators portrayed
above.

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404 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

Stradano quite likely emulated another triumphant work of art when

he designed this frontispiece.58 The organization of the composition of
the Americae Retectio frontispiece print closely resembles a tapestry from The
Spheres series produced in Brussels around 1530 for John III of Portugal
(1502–57) and his new Habsburg wife Catherine of Austria (1507–78).
These three tapestries, each featuring a sphere held by mythological figures
and attributed to the design of Bernard van Orley (1491–1542), glorify the
discoveries of the Portuguese navigators during a period in which Portugal
was at the height of its mercantilist power, with possessions in both
Asia and Africa.59 Jerry Brotton writes of the final tapestry in the series,
representing earth held by Jupiter and Juno (fig. 10): ‘‘In one breathtaking
visual conceit the globe visualizes [John’s] claim to geographically distant
territories, whilst also imbuing his claims with a more intangible access
to esoteric cosmological power and authority reflected in the celestial
iconography which surrounds the central terrestrial globe.’’60 As a Northern
tapestry designer, Stradano could have known firsthand, or heard descriptions
of, these renowned textiles. While he emulates the basic composition of
Van Orley’s tapestry of Jupiter and Juno, he substitutes different gods
and turns the globe upright to make the New World and Europe most
prominent. In mimicking this propagandistic tapestry boasting of Portugal’s
navigational and commercial prowess, Stradano usurped its message of
power and glory on behalf of these two Italian navigators. Within the
iconographic framework of Van Orley’s tapestry, Stradano in his print
includes many more emblematic figures, as well as small details, portraits,
and a map to emphasize Italy’s role in the discovery. Below the dove at the
top of the print, navigational devices, namely a sextant and a compass,
represent the tools the explorers used to make the journeys possible.
The minuscule ships depicted on the globe represent Columbus’s and
Vespucci’s voyages and are more subtle indicators of the travels of the
two navigators.
The frontispiece also recalls preparatory drawings for, and commemorative
prints of, ephemeral events at the Medici court. The images of the two gods
aboard chariots recall the floats that were paraded down the Arno or in the
Pitti Palace courtyard in Medici festivals, as well as wedding celebrations,
such as the boats and seascape scenes used in the 1579 wedding between
Grand Duke Francesco and Bianca Cappello (1548–87) (fig. 11), and in the

58
For another reading of the iconography of the frontispiece, see Bettini, 1988;
Marrani.
59
On these tapestries, see Carretero, 1991, 62–67; Carretero, 1999; Delmarcel, 268, 300.
60
Brotton, 18.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 405

FIGURE 10. Attributed to the design of Bernard Van Orley, The Earth Protected
by Jupiter and Juno, 1530s. Tapestry. Madrid, Palacio Real.

intermezzo for the 1589 celebration for Ferdinando’s wedding.61 For the
drapery held by Flora and Janus, Stradano might have also looked to
triumphal arches in public Florentine processions, where pagan gods would
flank a coat-of-arms and drapery was used as decoration on arches and on the
facades of churches for special events. As a court artist who worked on the
production teams of various Medici festivals and public events, Stradano

61
Scholars have noted the similarity between the Americae Retectio and art produced for
public spectacles: McGinty, 53; Bettini, 1987, 415.

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406 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

FIGURE 11. Artist unknown, Parade boat for the wedding of Francesco I de’
Medici to Bianca Cappello in Raffaello Gualterotti, Feste delle nozze del serenissimo
Don Francesco Medici Duca di Toscana et della serenissima sua consorte Bianca
Cappello. Florence, 1579. Woodcut. Spencer Collection, The New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

would have been quite familiar with this style of representation and its
triumphal intent.
The portraits of the two navigators within the medallions at the
top of the image, combined with the blatant omission of Magellan, are
perhaps the most overtly Italianist aspects of the print. For the portrait of
Vespucci, Stradano likely copied a dubious portrait of the navigator painted
by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–94) in a fresco of the Madonna della
Misericordia in the family chapel in Ognissanti church in Florence (fig. 12).
It is not certain whether the figure at the far left in the Ghirlandaio
fresco that recalls Stradano’s portrait actually represents Amerigo Vespucci,
especially since Vespucci, who in the fresco looks to be an adult, would
have been an adolescent when the fresco was painted in the 1470s. But
Vasari’s having written in his Le Vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed
architettori (The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects,
1550) that the navigator was represented in the fresco, demonstrates that
among sixteenth-century Florentines it was thought to be a true likeness of

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 407

FIGURE 12. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Madonna della Misericordia, 1470s. Fresco.

Florence, Vespucci chapel in Ognissanti church. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

the explorer.62 Stradano reuses this same profile of Vespucci wearing a late
fifteenth-century style hat in all of his representations of the navigator in his
other prints.63 Stradano’s portrait of Columbus was most certainly based on
the portrait of the navigator first produced for Paolo Giovio’s (1483–1552)

62
Vasari, 3:255. On Vasari’s comments on Vespucci’s portrait within the Ghirlandaio
fresco, see Cadogan, 192–93; Douglas, who attributes a different portrait within the
Ghirlandaio to Vespucci; Conti, 160–62, who attributes the likeness of an angel in the upper
left of the fresco of the Misericordia (and the adolescent at left in Ghirlandaio’s Deposition
in the same church) to Amerigo.
63
This image of Vespucci then becomes the typical mode of representation for the
navigator that is copied in other prints. Several prints of Vespucci appear to reproduce
Stradano’s portrait of the navigator. For example, there are several anonymous prints of
the navigator from the sixteenth century and a Crispin de Passe portrait of Vespucci based
on Stradano’s image in Effigies Regum et Principum (Cologne, 1598). De Passe has also
reproduced Stradano’s Columbus in this same text and borrowed the captions. The
printmaker and cartographer Levinus Hulsius also reproduced the two portraits in his
1598 world map. The Medici portrait collection included a similar portrait of Vespucci
by Cristofano dell’Altissimo (1525–1605), painted in the late sixteenth century. Though
in Cristofano’s painting the navigator is not depicted wearing a hat, Vespucci is again
represented in profile with a prominent nose, perhaps indicating that the Florentine artist
had also looked to Ghirlandaio’s fresco.

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408 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

portrait museum and then reproduced both in Paolo Giovio’s Elogia

virorum bellica virtute illustrium (Praise of Men Illustrious for Courage in
War, 1575) (fig. 13) and in a portrait within the Medici collection.64 This
portrait type became the standard iconography for Columbus, and can be
seen in many other portraits of the navigator, both painted and in print.65
Stradano used the most well-known images of the explorers to make
them easily recognizable to his viewers. With their names and origins
inscribed around their likenesses, the medallions in Stradano’s print recall
commemorative numismatics and endow these likenesses with antique
grandeur.
The spatially manipulated map of the Tuscan and Ligurian coast at the
very bottom of the image makes clear that the discovery of the New World
began from the northwestern coast of Italy, specifically from the navigators’
hometowns, Florence and Genoa. Here the west coast of Italy is reoriented
so that it is featured at the base of the page. Though Florence is actually
a good distance from the coast, it is depicted prominently at the lower left
of the map with an entire cityscape, quite close to the water’s edge and
framing the view of the coast. The Medici port of Livorno is also highlighted
at the left with an image of a Medici fortress. Other important port towns
are labeled and illustrated similarly with recognizable buildings. Genoa
marks the very center of the map and is a larger coastal town in comparison
with smaller towns labeled Cogoreto, Albizola, Savona. Cogoreto and Savona
are included on the map likely because Oviedo wrote that Columbus might
have been from one of these towns outside of Genoa.66 By reorienting
Columbus’s and Vespucci’s birthplaces on the map, Stradano appoints
these Italian cities as the starting points for the discovery of the New World.
Stradano’s distorted map closely resembles Egnazio Danti’s map of
Liguria in his frescoes in the Vatican (fig. 14) painted from 1580 to 1581,
indicating either that the two one-time Medici court artists used the same
source to depict the coast or that Stradano knew Danti’s frescoes in Rome.67
Within Danti’s map a detail of Neptune in a chariot leading an allegory of
Columbus holding a compass includes tritons, fantastical sea creatures, and

64
On the Giovio portrait, see Klinger, 2:57–58. It is not certain whether Giovio
included a portrait of Vespucci in his collection. Vespucci was not included in his Elogia.
65
On Columbian iconography in general, see Ferro, 1992a and 1992b. A similar
likeness of Columbus, with a high forehead and with his head turned slightly to his right, was
painted in the map room of the Villa Farnese at Caprarola in the years preceding Stradano’s
print: Kish, 483–84.
66
Carrillo, 44.
67
Gambi and Pinelli, 2:200–01, are uncertain what visual source Danti might have used
to depict Liguria, since there is no extant map of Liguria that predates the frescoes.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 409

FIGURE 13. Tobias Stimmer, Columbus, in Paolo Giovio, Elogia Virorum Bellica
Virtute Illustrium, Basel, 1575. Woodcut. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D.
Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

a banner stating, ‘‘Christopher Columbus of Liguria: Discoverer of the

New World’’ (‘‘Christophorur Columbus Ligur. Novi Orbis Repertor’’).
The use of allegory and inscription in Danti’s cartography are in the same
vein as Stradano’s allegory of Genoa both in the frontispiece and in the
Columbus print. Danti’s and Stradano’s maps — with their manipulated
westward view of the coast of Italy, heroic representation of Columbus,
and boastful Latin inscriptions — reveal the way in which cartography and
allegory were used as cultural propaganda.
Though Stradano is credited for the design of the image on the
frontispiece, it was likely the literary scholar Alamanni who chose the

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410 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

FIGURE 14. Egnazio Danti, Liguria, 1580. Fresco. Vatican, Gallery of Maps.
Scala/Art Resource, NY.

erudite Latin inscription for the caption below the image.68 The print’s
caption includes the characteristic signature of the artist and printmaker at
left and the dedication to the ‘‘noble Alamanni brothers’’ at right. Both the
preparatory drawing and the print include an interrogative title in the center
between the artist’s signature at left and the patrons’ names at right: ‘‘QUIS
POTIS EST DIGNUM POLLENT PECTORE CARMEN CONDERE
PRO RERUM MAIESTATE, HISQUE REPERTIS?’’, which translates as:
‘‘Who is able to compose a song worthy of a powerful heart on behalf of
the majesty of these things that have been discovered?’’ These Latin words
are the first lines from book 5 of Titus Lucretius Carus’s (99–55 BCE) De
Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) written in the first century BCE. By
the sixteenth century the De Rerum Natura was available in several printed

68
There are very few differences between the preparatory drawing and the print of the
Americae Retectio frontispiece, indicating that the Galles closely reproduced Stradano’s design.
In the drawing Stradano used more identifying labels on the globe. The shape of the continents
is slightly more accurate in the print in comparison to the preparatory drawing, indicating that
the printmakers may have corrected the map based on sources available to them in Antwerp.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 411

editions and was scrutinized within literary circles both as a significant

scientific treatise and as a work of great poetry that was thought to have
inspired Virgil.69 The De Rerum Natura likely formed part of the readings
and discussion of the members of the Accademia degli Alterati, who were at
this time emulating the epic poetic form of Virgil.70 Lucretius’s discussion
of technology and invention could have likewise shaped Alamanni’s
conception of both of Stradano’s print series, documenting the new
inventions and discoveries of early modern man.
The last lines of book 5 of Lucretius, in particular, describe the idea
of progress in a manner that recalls the prints in the Nova Reperta series:

Ships, farms, walls, laws, arms, roads, and all the rest,
Rewards and pleasures, all life’s luxuries,
Painting, and song, and sculpture — these were taught
Slowly, a very little at a time,
By practice and by trial, as the mind
Went forward searching. Time brings everything
Little by little to the shores of light
By grace of art and reason, till we see
All things illuminate each other’s rise
Up to the pinnacle of loftiness.71

Like Lucretius, whose poem lists the various new inventions of his time,
Stradano’s Nova Reperta prints each represent a different result of progress
in the sixteenth century, illustrating many of the examples that Lucretius
cites, including ships, arms, and painting. Lucretius’s discussion of early
man is also intriguing with regard to Stradano’s prints because it corresponds
with many sixteenth-century descriptions of the people of the New World:

People did not know,

In those days, how to work with fire, to use
The skins of animals for clothes; they lived
In groves and woods, and mountain-caves …
Relying on their strength and speed, they’d hunt
The forest animals by throwing rocks
72
Or wielding clubs — there were many to bring down.

69
On the general reception of Lucretius in the Renaissance, see Depue Hadzsits,
248–83; Brown, 2001 and 2010; Greenblatt.
70
Blocker has found that another Academy member, Lorenzo Giacomini, was an avid
reader and follower of Lucretius (private correspondence).
71
Lucretius, 200–01 (De rerum natura ll. 1448–57).
72
Ibid., 186–87 (De rerum natura ll. 953–69).

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412 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

The idea of the unclothed noble savage who hunts wild animals with a club is
here described in Lucretius in a similar way that many sixteenth-century
sources described the New World native, and like Stradano depicts the
native in many of his hunt prints. For instance, Alison Brown has shown that
Vespucci’s writings about the New World ‘‘were interpreted within the
conceptual framework of Lucretius’’ in early sixteenth-century Florence.73
Though written in the first century BCE, the De Rerum Natura must have
appeared shockingly modern and comprehensible to these sixteenth-century
scholars who were considering new inventions and discoveries, and trying
to comprehend progress and this previously unknown land often equated
with antiquity.
Lucretius’s evocative question used in the caption — ‘‘who is able to
compose a song worthy of a powerful heart on behalf of the majesty of these
things that have been discovered?’’ — could have also been understood as
a literal challenge to poets contemporaneously writing about the discovery.
Perhaps the caption even alludes to Stella’s Columbeidos and Strozzi’s text
about Vespucci’s journey. Here Stradano has not chosen to write a song,
but has rather designed images ‘‘on behalf of the majesty of these things that
have been discovered.’’ By referring to this other medium, the song or poem,
within his own engraving, Stradano has commented on the paragone debate
between the different arts, and has shown that the print is the ‘‘worthy’’
medium for depicting this ‘‘majesty.’’ The following three prints in the series
thus represent visual printed songs dedicated to each discoverer.

5. C O L U M B U S AS HEROIC CRUSADER

The second print in the series following the frontispiece features Christopher
Columbus and, like the other prints of the navigators in the series, it is
saturated with symbolic imagery and formatted with a central image and
a caption below. Here the caption describes Columbus’s accomplishment:
‘‘Christopher Columbus of Liguria. With the terrors of the ocean having
been overcome, Columbus has awarded almost all of the regions of the
whole other world, which he found by himself, to the Spanish king.’’74
Columbus is depicted as a knight in armor holding a nautical map in one
hand and a crucifixion banner in the other. Tritons announce his voyage
and Neptune, again the symbol for Columbus’s birthplace, ushers him in

73
Brown, 2001, 39–40; Brown, 2010, 31, 89–90, 109. Campbell, 323; and Greenblatt,
229, have similarly pointed this out.
74
‘‘Christopher Columbus Ligur terroribus Oceani superaris alterius pene Orbes regions
a se inventas Hispanis regibus addixit. An Salutis aVIID.’’

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 413

toward the shore. Nereids and other sea creatures surround him and Diana,
goddess of the moon, leads his ships toward the Caribbean islands under
a crescent moon.
Various textual sources could have functioned as Stradano’s and
Alamanni’s guides for designing the Columbian iconography. By the late
1580s, one could read about Columbus’s journey in Peter Martyr’s writings,
in Girolamo Fracastoro’s (1478–1553) poem about Syphilis (1530), in
Oviedo’s History (1526), in Las Casas’s (1484–1566) writings, and in
Francisco López de Gómara’s (1511–56) Historia general de las Indias
(General History of the Indies, 1552). Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s (1485–
1557) Navigazioni e viaggi (Navigations and Voyages, 1555) included
excerpts from many of these sources, and Columbus was included in
André Thevet’s (1516–90) and Giovio’s books of illustrious men in history.
His biography was written by his son, Ferdinand (1488–1539), and
published in 1571, was recorded by Lorenzo Gambara (1495–1585) in
his De navigatione Christophori Columbi (The Navigations of Christopher
Columbus, 1585), and was dramatized by Stella’s recent Latin poem about
the navigator (1585, 1589).75 Much of the elaborate iconography and the
emblematic compositions in the prints can be explained by these literary
descriptions of the navigator and his journey.
Without the inscription below the image and without Columbus’s
name inscribed below his feet, one would have been able to identify the
navigator thanks to the various attributes surrounding him. For instance, the
flag flying on the mast above Columbus bears his coat of arms. Though not
of noble birth, in 1492 Columbus received a title and a ‘‘patent of nobility’’
from the King and Queen of Spain that included the creation of an elaborate
coat of arms. In his History, Oviedo describes the coat of arms in great detail
explaining how ‘‘the royal arms of Castile and Léon [were] conjoined with
newly-conceded arms and the confirmation of some old arms of his
lineage.’’76 Columbus’s arms, therefore, were comprised of the symbols of
the castle and the lion for the houses of Castile and Léon in the upper two
quadrants, and of more personal symbols — islands and anchors — for the
navigator in the lower two quadrants. The islands in the arms are then
repeated by the islands in the background seascape, and the three anchors

75
Though Columbus wrote a journal recording his travels and wrote many letters to the
King and Queen of Spain, to the pope, and to friends, his writings were not published in the
sixteenth century and were subsequently lost. The writings of Ferdinand Columbus and
Bartolomé de las Casas are based on his journal entries and letters. For more on Columbus’s
writings and their afterlife, see Lardicci.
76
Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, 55–56.

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414 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

depicted elsewhere in the print likely also recall his coat of arms. These details
and attributes liken the entire image to one elaborate Columbus impresa.
The Christian symbols in the image — the crucifixion banner and
a dove with a crusader cross at the prow of the ship — are other significant
features of this intricate impresa that correspond with several descriptions
of the navigator in contemporary texts. Oviedo in particular refers to
Columbus as the bringer of the Catholic faith throughout his texts,
explaining in one section of his History: ‘‘For Columbus was the cause of
so many good things, particularly the reimplanting of the Catholic faith of
Christ in these Indies, forgotten since time immemorial in such far-flung
regions.’’77 Las Casas similarly describes Columbus as being endowed with
‘‘divine providence.’’78 Dressed in armor and holding a crucifixion banner,
Columbus is depicted as a crusader who brought Christianity to the New
World. A passage from Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father
might define the meaning of the dove in the image as well: ‘‘If we consider
the common surname of his forebears, we may say that he was truly
Columbus, or Dove, because he carried the grace of the Holy Ghost to the
New World that he discovered, showing those people who knew him not
who was God’s beloved son, as the Holy Ghost did in the figure of a dove
when St. John Baptized Christ; and because over the waters of the ocean,
like the dove of Noah’s ark, he bore the olive branch and oil of baptism.’’79
In Stradano’s print the dove could make reference to the Italian meaning
of Columbus’s name, the Holy Ghost and the dove that led Noah’s ark.
The Columbus print is the only engraving in the series to include these
Christian symbols, besides the frontispiece (which also features a dove), and
he is the only navigator wearing a full suit of armor, indicating that his role as a
Christian crusader was a significant aspect of his commemoration in the print.
The mythological gods in the print also possess specific symbolic
meanings that can be understood in light of literature written about
Columbus. While Neptune at right, like the Neptune on the frontispiece,
certainly represents Genoa, the significance of Diana is less overt. J. C.
Margolin and Alba Bettini each cite, as the source of inspiration for
Stradano’s scene, an excerpt from Girolamo Fracastoro’s poem on syphilis,
in which the coast of the New World is first seen under the light of
the moon, the jurisdiction of the goddess Diana.80 Fracastoro wrote this
allegorical poem in Latin in the early sixteenth century about Columbus

77
Carrillo, 90 (for the Spanish text, see ibid., 167).
78
Symcox, 50.
79
Columbus, 4.
80
Margolin, 1972; Bettini, 1987, 194–95.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 415

and the transfer of syphilis to Europe, and dedicated the first book to
Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) and the second book to Medici Pope Leo X
(1475–1521). It was first published in 1530 and then subsequently was
made available in various other editions throughout the century. It would
have certainly been known to the Luigi Alamanni and to members of the
Accademia degli Alterati. In Fracastoro’s poem, Diana inflicts syphilis on
the central character, Ilceus, and then she, in turn, becomes the guide to
syphilitics. Fracastoro describes, without ever mentioning the navigator
by name, Columbus’s arrival much in the same way that Stradano has
illustrated his approach to the land: ‘‘It was night and the Moon was shining
from a clear sky, pouring its light over the trembling ocean’s gleaming
marble, when the great-hearted hero, chosen by the fates for this great task,
the leader of the fleet which wandered over the blue domain, said, ‘O Moon
whom these watery realms obey, you who twice have caused your horns to
curve from your golden forehead, twice have filled out their curves, during
this time in which no land has appeared to us wanderers, grant us finally
to see a shore, to a reach a long-hoped-for port.’’81 In Stradano’s print, as
in Fracastoro’s poem, Diana guides Columbus to her land under the
moonlit sky.
The waters through which Diana leads Columbus’s ships are filled with
menacing sea monsters that could also be references to other textual sources
about his journey. For instance, Ferdinand Columbus describes Columbus’s
ship as being constantly surrounded by sharks: ‘‘These beasts seize a person’s
leg or arm with their teeth . . . they still followed us making turns in the
water . . . their heads are very elongated and the mouth extends almost to
the middle of the belly.’’82 Though the monsters that Stradano represents
on both sides of the ship do not conform to our contemporary knowledge
of sharks, they do recall Ferdinand’s description of the fierce teeth and large
heads of the sharks encircling Columbus’s ships.
Other sea creatures in the background, also prevalent in the Magellan
print, could reveal a continuation of a long tradition of portraying sea
monsters in maps and images of the sea as symbols of unexplored and
dangerous territories.83 For instance, sea monsters feature in nearly all of the
sea imagery in Sebastian Münster’s (1488–1522) Cosmografia universale,

81
Eatough, 91 (book 3, ll. 101–09).
82
Columbus, 247.
83
Though much has been written about the history of the representations of monsters in
the early modern period — most famously by Wittkower, 1942; more recently by Daston
and Park — I have not found a study on the significance of the representation of sea
monsters in particular.

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416 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

first published in 1544, and in the maps within Ramusio’s Navigationi e

viaggi from the 1550s. In editions of Alciati’s Book of Emblems the dolphin-
like creature, like the sea-creature with the curly tail in the upper left
of Stradano’s composition, represents the dangers of the sea.84 Pliny’s
Natural History, a familiar source for sixteenth-century scholars and artists,
including Stradano — who refers to it frequently in inscriptions on various
drawings — describes in great detail marvelous sea creatures, including
sharks, whales, tritons, and nereids in exotic waters in the Indian sea.85 These
sea creatures in both the Columbus and the Magellan prints evoke the
dangers of the sea in unknown territories, and at the same time likely derive
from specific descriptions of the navigators’ journeys.
The tritons and the nereids in the image could possess multiple
meanings since they resemble creatures represented in art at the Medici
court, figures in prints and emblem books, and also textual descriptions of
the New World. For instance, Vasari’s allegorical portrayal of Venus (fig. 9)
in the Sala degli Elementi in the Palazzo Vecchio from the late 1540s,
similarly depicts nymphs riding on satyr-like tritons and male sea gods
blowing horns made out of shells. Vasari’s and Stradano’s sea gods could
derive from early prints such as Andrea Mantegna’s (1431–1506) Battle
of the Sea Gods (before 1481) and printed emblem books that include
similar sea creatures. A scene from Grand Duke Francesco and Bianca
Cappello’s wedding celebration (fig. 15) similarly illustrated tritons, in this
case probably courtiers dressed as tritons, pulling a giant whale or some
sort of sea creature in a procession.86 Various editions of Alciati’s Book of
Emblems employ an image of a triton blowing a shell horn as a symbol for
fame or immortality (fig. 16). An inscription below a 1551 edition describes
the creature as half fish and half man, announcing fame through his horn.87
Indeed, the tritons beside Columbus’s ship, like the prints themselves,
broadcast Columbus’s fame to the world. These tritons could also simply
represent New World fish: when de Acosta describes the fish near Lima, he
states that ‘‘they resembled Tritons or Neptunes, who are represented upon

84
Alciati, 1584, 228v.
85
See Book IX in particular of Pliny’s Natural History. Several of Stradano drawings at
the Cooper-Hewitt (1901–39–157, 1901–39–159v, 1901–39–124v, 1952–37–5v ) include
inscriptions citing certain passages in Pliny.
86
Gualterotti, 55.
87
Alciati, 1551, 130: ‘‘Tritone, ch’è; Trombetta di Nettuno, / E mezzo pesce, e mezzo
forma humana, / Lo cinge un Serpe & gli fa cerchio intorno, / Che ne la bocca tien la coda
stretta. / Cola buona fama, che d’alcuno / Abbraccia qualche degna opera eletta. / In ogni
parte va suonando il corno / Del mondo o sia vicina, o sia lontana.’’

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 417

FIGURE 15. Artist unknown, Parade boat for the wedding of Francesco I de’
Medici to Bianca Cappello, in Raffaello Gualterotti, Feste delle nozze del serenissimo
Don Francesco Medici Duca di Toscana et della serenissima sua consorte Bianca
Cappello. Florence, 1579. Woodcut. Spencer Collection, The New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

the water.’’88 The tritons thus possess at least a dual function in this image:
they act as mythological emblems representing fame, and at the same time
they symbolize the exotic creatures in the waters surrounding the New
World. This anachronistic depiction again pairs fantasy and idealized
imagery derived from Medici court culture and from prints with firsthand
reports about the voyages to make Columbus’s journey both more plausible
and romantic.
The gesturing women located in the waters at the left in the Columbus
print are featured in all three of the prints of the navigators and represent
yet another type of symbolic sea creature. Because we only see them in bust
length, it is difficult to determine whether they are mermaids, sirens, or
nereids. Their kind faces and pleasant interaction with one another tell us
that they are benevolent and quite different from some of the other more
menacing sea creatures in the print. The complex gestures of the women
convey that they are telling a story. Perhaps these gestures should be read in
a similar way as the emblematic compositions. In the late sixteenth century,

88
De Acosta, 136.

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418 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

FIGURE 16. Mercure Jollat, Emblem 133 in Andrea Alciati, Emblematum liber.
Paris, 1534. Woodcut. Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor,
Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 419

gestures were beginning to be codified in handbooks and illustrated texts.89

For instance, Giovanbattista della Porta’s (1535–1615) De humana
physiognomonia (1586) discusses the way in which different emotions and
states of being are manifested through human expression and gestures.90
Perhaps these women are the Fates, telling the navigators’ stories and leading
them to their destiny. In this visual medium, their hands tell the story of
the navigators’ travels.
The story being told in Stradano’s Columbus print also corresponds
closely to Stella’s Columbeidos in terms of both the genre and style of the
representation of the navigator. Stella’s poem is the first fictional text on
Columbus that incorporates classical elements along with a discussion of
the navigator’s Christian mission.91 Stella based his poem on Virgil’s Aeneid,
even emulating specific lines from the epic poem and referring to the fatum,
or fate, that led the navigator like the fate that led Aeneas. Within this
classical construct, Stella continually reiterates that Columbus neither came
to the Americas to dominate the natives nor to seek out treasures, but rather
to bring Christianity to its people. Similarly, Stradano’s image combines
Christian symbols such as crosses and the dove in conjunction with
representations of the pagan gods. Just as Stella utilizes Virgil’s language
and style, Stradano used allegorical and symbolic visual elements, like the
sea monsters and tritons, to fictionalize Columbus’s journey. Though the
iconography of the image derives from many nonfictional and biographical
sources, Stradano emulates the genre and style of Stella’s poem to produce
a heroic image of the Italian navigator.

6. A W A K E N E D V E S P U C C I

The third print in the series, the Vespucci image (fig. 3), must be examined
similarly in light of Strozzi’s epic poem about the Florentine navigator.
Though sources on Vespucci in the late Cinquecento included Vespucci’s
own letters and biographical texts by Thevet and others, it was likely
Strozzi’s poem that Alamanni, the Academy, and Stradano knew best.92
Extant today in only one canto, Strozzi’s text, written in Italian rather than
Latin, fictionalized and romanticized the tale of the navigator, much like
Stella’s text on Columbus. Stradano emulates Strozzi’s dramatic setting
and the patriotism implied in the text. Throughout the canto Strozzi

89
Valeriano was the first to visually catalogue gestures.
90
See della Porta, book 4.
91
See Hofmann, 1994.
92
On Vespucci’s letters and biography, see Formisano; Luzzana Caraci.

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420 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

describes the rays of the sun that shine through the sky in the dawn and tells
of the dangerous waters and fierce winds that Vespucci encountered. In
the print Stradano nearly translates this passage visually by portraying a
luminous rising sun in the horizon and representing choppy waters. Strozzi
writes that Vespucci was born from the river Arno, and Stradano depicts
several Florentine symbols to represent Vespucci’s origins: in the background
at right, Mars, a symbol for Florence, rides a turtle, perhaps a reference to
the Medici motto, festina lente. Another turtle is visible at left in the
background, and Minerva, who pushes Vespucci’s ship, holds a giglio, or
lily — a symbol for the virgin of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore — and
a spear with a Florentine lily at its end. Later in his text Strozzi alludes to a
column broken in the waves. Stradano too depicts a broken columnar mast
aboard Vespucci’s ship in the foreground. Stradano has in many ways
captured the patriotic fervor, setting, and drama of Strozzi’s poem in his
visual rendering of the hero.
Yet other details in the print derive from studies, both of emblems and
of other images of the New World, to produce a bizarre conglomeration
of allegory and depictions of cannibalism. Stradano transformed the
emblematic tritons from the Columbus print into fanciful cannibalistic
Native Americans clutching human body parts. Half serpent–half woman
and half Amerindian–half European, the New World nereid at the left of
Vespucci’s ship wears a peacock-feather headdress as a symbol of her riches
and her pride in the way figures representing superbia, or arrogance, do in
other sixteenth-century prints. She tames her scorpion tail with the club
she holds in her left arm, and with her right arm she raises a human arm on
a skewer. The devilish male triton next to her with pointy ears and beard
holds a dismembered male torso as if it were a piece of antique statuary,
rather than a piece of meat to be devoured. By the late sixteenth century,
images of cannibals were widespread in European art, particularly in maps
and prints.93 Though it was common since Pliny’s time to represent cannibals
with men and women holding body parts on skewers, images rarely (if ever)
portray cannibals dressed as mythological or allegorical figures. By doing
this, Stradano has represented these New World natives as proud, demonic
cannibals, different from the cannibals depicted on mappaemundi and in
early Vespucci broadsheets. They are fantastical cannibals that reference
anthropophagy but also mask this gruesome practice playfully, in the guise
of personifications. In this way their discursive representation acts as
nonthreatening figures of fantasy.

93
See Davies.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 421

The two Vespucci prints in the Nova Reperta series (figs. 5 and 6) must
be examined here in relation to the Vespucci print in the Americae Retectio
because of the commonalities they share with regard to the representation of
Vespucci, the depiction of cannibals, and the imagined New World. The
Vespucci prints in the Nova Reperta are even more overtly propagandistic
than the Americae Retectio works in their praise of the navigator and
particularly of his Florentine origin. First, Vespucci is the only navigator
portrayed in this series of some nineteen new inventions. Second, most other
prints in the series portray a community of people implementing a new
invention, whereas in the ‘‘America’’ and ‘‘Astrolabe’’ prints Vespucci is
depicted alone as the sole inventor of the New World and the Astrolabe, two
things that he did not invent.
In the ‘‘Astrolabe’’ print (fig. 6), Vespucci is pointedly connected to the
Florentine poet Dante, who in his Purgatory describes the Southern Cross
(or four stars), Vespucci’s navigational guide.94 Stradano’s image is divided
into two parts: at right a scene represents Vespucci, who stands in front of
a desk piled high with his nautical devices and a small crucifix. He gazes up
toward the Southern Cross in the sky at an armillary sphere that he holds
while his shipmates sleep on the ground beside him. At left Stradano
included a large caption with the passage from Dante’s Purgatory, both in
Italian and in Latin, where Dante sees the four stars. Above this an
inscription explains that Vespucci cited Dante in his letter and frames
a portrait of the poet.95 In his famous letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’
Medici, which had been published as early as 1502 and enjoyed great
popularity in various publications throughout the century, Vespucci
describes the use of his astrolabe and writes: ‘‘And while pursuing this, I
recalled a passage from our poet Dante from the first canto of Purgatorio,
when he imagines he is leaving this hemisphere in journeying to the other.
Wishing to describe the South Pole, he says: ‘Then I turned to the right,
setting my mind upon the other pole, and saw four stars not seen before
except by the first people.’’’96 Alamanni, as a Dante scholar and colleague of
Galileo, must have been particularly interested in this Vespucci letter. It was
quite likely his idea to emphasize the connection between these two great
Florentines in the Nova Reperta print and to have this particular moment
commemorated. In his funeral oration for Alamanni, Soldani explicitly
connects Vespucci’s voyage to Dante’s journey and describes Alamanni’s

94
Alighieri, 5–7 (Purgatorio canto 1, ll. 2–27)
95
‘‘His verbis ab Americo Vespuccio in suis Epistolis adductis.’’
96
Formisano, 6.

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422 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

fascination for the two travellers.97 By linking Vespucci to the great Florentine
poet, Dante, the print produces a claim for the large navigational impact of
Vespucci and subsequently of Florence.
In the Astrolabe print, the representation of Vespucci recalls two other
great men, Christ and Odysseus, two subjects that Stradano also designed
for the print series. The sleeping shipmates surrounding Vespucci evoke the
sleeping apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane, likening the navigator to
Christ.98 The composition of the print also closely resembles another emblem
in Alciati that represents Odysseus in the land of the lotus-eaters. In the emblem
Odysseus reaches toward a tree while a group of sleeping men lay below the tree.
They represent the men who ate the lotus leaves and, as a result, forgot their
homeland. Vespucci is thus portrayed as a hero like Odysseus, who did not
forget his homeland, and like Christ, who engaged in prayer in the garden.
Vespucci is portrayed in a similarly heroic mode in the well-known
‘‘America’’ print (fig. 5) from the Nova Reperta. However, in this print there
is no mention of Dante, and Vespucci gazes, not toward the stars, but toward
a semi-nude female personification of the New World. Sharing the same
physiognomy as the representations of Vespucci in Stradano’s other prints,
Vespucci here looks as if he has just set foot on land and, in a sense, is
continuing the narrative begun in the Americae Retectio print. His ship is
anchored nearby and his rowboat is beached behind him. In one hand he
holds a banner with the Southern Cross and crucifix on a pole, and in the
other hand, a compass. America gestures toward Vespucci. She is seated on
a hammock and her Tupinamba club leans against the tree at the right.
Stradano could have seen these two artifacts from the New World in the
Medici collection, since inventories from Duke Ferdinando’s reign reveal
that he owned such items.99

97
Soldani, 56–57: ‘‘Non lo distolse finalemente d’adoperarsi in altrui benefizio la
Cosmografia, la quale misura i corpi, di cui fu intendissimo, come ne può essere indizio il
dono, che fece all’Accademia nostra del proffilo dell’Inferno di Dante, dal cui sacro viaggio,
come di quello del Vespucci, fu indicibilmente studioso, ammirando, che quell sovrano
intelletto, non per l’acque dell’Indie, dell’Australe, del Magellanico, ovvero del Settentrionale
oceano; ma per le viscere della terra, per le bolge dell’Inferno, tra fuoco, tra martiri, tra demoni,
e dannati, camminando, arrivasse al centro: volasse al Cielo, ove rimirando la gloria de’ Beati,
s’affittasse nel Sole, che muove il Sole, e l’altre Stelle.’’
98
Achilles, 1982, 161.
99
The hammocks are listed in Ferdinando’s inventory from the 1580s: ASF,
Guardaroba Medicea 132, 340. The club depicted by Stradano does resemble one of the
Tupinamba clubs, thought to derive from the Medici collection and today located in the
National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology. The 1631 inventory of the Armeria does
list ‘‘Quattro legni indiani di differente sorte’’ (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Guardaroba
Medicea 513, 19), so it is possible that Stradano saw both of these objects at the court.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 423

Other details, such as the cannibal scene in the background and the
various animals grazing in the foreground and background, reflect Stradano’s
(or perhaps Alamanni’s) knowledge of the New World, acquired from maps,
images, and texts. The representation of cannibals roasting human body
parts on skewers over a fire is a more traditional depiction of New World
cannibals than the allegorical cannibals in the Vespucci print in the
Americae Retectio series. Stradano might have taken this particular
arrangement of figures from a small detail in Egnazio Danti’s Brazil map
(figs. 17 and 18) in Cosimo’s Guardaroba Nuova that similarly represents
two seated men beside a human leg on a spit.100 Michael Schreffler has
shown that this scene is borrowed from various other printed views of
cannibals, and is correct in pointing out the ‘‘indistinct’’ nature of this
representation of the cannibals. Set in the background far from the
narrative in the foreground, the scene functions differently than the
allegorical female and acts more like a ethnographic symbol of the New
World.101 The animals are also ethnographic in conceit. Stradano’s Flemish
inscription on the back of the preparatory drawing both labels and describes
the animals for the Northern printmakers, and, as previously mentioned,
here states that he used Maffei’s Historiarum Indicarum as his source for
them. In using and citing this text, Stradano was consciously portraying
particular New World animals and sought to illustrate some of the fauna
of the Americas more accurately.
The other inscriptions on the preparatory drawing (fig. 7) provide
insight into the Latin caption on the final print. The caption on the print
alludes to the female seated on the hammock and reads: ‘‘Amerigo rediscovers
America, he called her but once and thenceforth she was always awake.’’102
Though the caption is omitted from the recto of the preparatory drawing, it
is written on its verso above two other lines in Latin in what appears to be
Luigi Alamanni’s hand: ‘‘Tua sectus orbis nomina ducet. Hor. Ode 17 t. 3/
Parsq tuum terre tertia nomen habet. Ovidius Fasto.’’103 As the citations
conveniently tell us, these are lines from Horace’s Odes and Ovid’s Fasti.104
The Horace quotation translates to: ‘‘part of the world shall henceforth carry

100
For this small detail, see Pacetti, 34.
101
Schreffler, 301–02. Similarly, Gaudio, xv, points out that the ‘‘image hardly serves as
a white pebble promising access to untainted origins.’’
102
‘‘America. / Americen Americus retexit, semel vocavit inde semper excitam.’’
103
There are some transcription errors in Alamanni’s citation here since the actual Latin
in Ovid reads ‘‘parsque tuum terrae teria nomen habet’’ and the Horace is from Ode 27
rather than 17.
104
Alamanni is slightly incorrect in that these lines come from Horace’s book 3 and Ode
27 (rather than 17) and Ovid’s fifth Fasti, specifically section 14.

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424 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

FIGURE 17. Egnazio Danti, Brazil, early 1540s. Oil on panel. Florence,
Guardaroba Nuova in the Palazzo Vecchio.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 425

FIGURE 18. Egnazio Danti, Brazil, early 1540s. Oil on panel. Florence, Guardaroba
Nuova in the Palazzo Vecchio (detail).

Europa’s name,’’ and derives from a passage in which Venus tells Europa
the news that a continent has been named for her.105 The Ovid passage
cited similarly recounts Europa’s story when Venus tells her that ‘‘earth’s
third part has your name.’’106 We can speculate that Alamanni devised the
caption for the print, using the words of Horace and Ovid as his guide.
Vespucci, then, is like Europa and the woman seated on the hammock is
an American Venus telling him the significance of his name.107 Indeed, the
caption here, like the captions in the Astrolabe print and the Americae
Retectio prints, literally defines the allegorical scene. In the preparatory
drawing, the word ‘‘AMERICA’’ is written in bold and in reverse on the
recto of the drawing just above the cannibal scene and in line with Vespucci’s
lips, producing the effect that the words are coming out of the navigator’s
mouth, indicating that he is calling out to the New World. At the same time,
he names her ‘‘America,’’ which, as Peter Hulme originally remarked and
Rabasa has repeated, ‘‘is his name feminized.’’108 We might never know why
the Galles omitted this detail from the final print, but its inclusion would

105
Horace, 178.
106
Ovid, 132.
107
Rabasa, 26, who mistakenly considers the captions to be a product of the Galle
workshop, rightly points out that these words ‘‘transform allegory into a repository of true
statements about the discovery.’’
108
Hulme, 1985, 17; Rabasa, 33.

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426 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

have functioned to elucidate the image, and would have corresponded with
the caption.
Much ink has been spilled about this caption and the representation
of America as a nude female awakening to find Vespucci’s gaze upon her.
Vespucci’s typical profile has been read as a symbol for the colonial gaze and
America’s nudity has been viewed quite rightly as a symbol of her sexual
and/or spiritual naiveté.109 Stradano has here used a common sixteenth-
century visual allegorical device, the female nude, to represent a place.110 A
nude woman was a common visual trope in the sixteenth century for the
personification of the New World. After all, descriptions of the Americas
by Vespucci and Columbus mention that both men and women in the
Americas were, like the ancients, unclothed.111 A woodcut from Girolamo
Benzoni’s (1519–?) Historia del Nuovo Mondo (History of the New World,
1565) (fig. 19) in which a tattooed nude female is seated among clothed
European men illustrates this point.112 The ‘‘America’’ on the frontispiece
of Abraham Ortelius’s (1527–98) Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theater of
the World, 1570) wears a similar headdress to Stradano’s America and might
have functioned as the very source for Stradano’s image. Another semi-nude
female New World personification frames many of the portraits in a 1575
edition of Giovio’s Elogia (fig. 13) and could have also been a source for
Stradano. Like Stradano’s, these last two representations of the New World
link a semi-nude female with cannibalism. In the case of the Giovio and
Ortelius images, the iconography is more subtle: severed heads next to the
women connote their flesh-eating tendencies. Looking at Stradano’s image
within the context of its creation within the culture of print production in
late sixteenth-century Europe, it becomes clear that Stradano here was
building on a preestablished allegorical depiction of the New World that
combined a nude female figure with signs of cannibalism and other
attributes related to the Americas.
Stradano could have also been commenting on, or unconsciously
copying, well-known works by Michelangelo (1475–1564), Florence’s
great artist, when he represented America as a nude woman roused from
a deep slumber. Jonathan Nelson has convincingly proposed that Stradano

109
Regarding the gender of the figure of America and her political and cultural
connotations, see, in particular, McClintock; Zamora; Montrose. See also Timberlake,
589–90; Dean, 267–68; Park, 363.
110
In her article on the allegorization of Pisa, Baskins, 96, points out that Pisa was
generally depicted as a female allegorical figure.
111
On the significance of the unclothed New World native and its relation to classicism
and nature, see Zorach, 210–11.
112
Benzoni, 3v.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 427

FIGURE 19. Artist unknown, Marvelous Indian Woman, in Girolamo Benzoni,

La historia del Mondo Nuovo. Venice, 1565, 3v. Woodcut. [B917B443], Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

used Michelangelo’s sculpture of Night from the Medici funerary chapel

at San Lorenzo as a model for his portrayal of America, illustrating the
parallel between Dawn’s awakening and the discovery of the New World.113
Anne McClintock has also connected the image to another work by
Michelangelo, calling the representation of ‘‘America’’ ‘‘a visual echo of
Michelangelo’s ‘Creation’’’ and expounding that ‘‘Vespucci, the godlike
arrival, is destined to inseminate her with the male seeds of civilization,
fructify the wilderness and quell the riotous scenes of cannibalism in the
background.’’114 While McClintock has perhaps pushed the analogy too far,
Stradano could be referencing Michelangelo’s creation scene and could
have connected Vespucci’s discovery and awakening to the Creation. With
the nude woman, Stradano has produced an allegorical representation of

113
Unpublished RSA conference talk and personal correspondence.
114
McClintock, 26.

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428 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

America in keeping with previous emblematic depictions in other printed

sources, and images and iconographic renderings familiar to him.
Details in the print and in the preparatory drawing indicate, however,
that the woman represented in the print could in fact be a very specific
New World figure and that the navigator portrayed could have initially
been designed to represent Columbus rather than Vespucci. The first
evidence for this hypothesis is an inscription in Stradano’s hand on the verso
of the preparatory drawing that states clearly ‘‘De Christoforo Colombo’’
(‘‘On Christopher Columbus’’). Furthermore, in the ‘‘America’’ print
Vespucci wears armor beneath his robe. This costume is unlike Vespucci’s
dress in the print dedicated to him within the America Retectio and in the
‘‘Astrolabe’’ print in the Nova Reperta, where he does not wear armor. Both
Columbus and Magellan wear armor in the Americae Retectio series. Also, it
is Columbus who first planted a crucifix in the New World, as this figure
does with the banner. Additionally, there are no references to Florence or
Vespucci’s origins in the print, unlike the quite overt ones in the other prints
of Vespucci. Finally, the representation of the woman is reminiscent of the
Princess Anacaona, a Haitian princess in Stella’s Columbeidos, described as
an alter ego to Dido and who, according to various sources, fell in love with
Columbus. In Stella’s text, Anacaona falls so deeply in love with Columbus
that she cannot fall asleep — and when she finally does, she sees Columbus
in her dreams.115 She then confronts Columbus with her love, and when
Columbus renounces it and sails off, Anacaona faints. Perhaps Stradano
is representing a scene from Stella’s verses — either the moment when
Anacaona sees Columbus in her sleep, or the moment just before she is about
to faint. It is possible that Stradano’s image was initially inspired by Stella’s
text about Columbus. If this is the case, the gaze is reversed and it is
Anacaona, the representation of the New World, examining Vespucci,
a representation of the Western world.
Yet it is Vespucci’s portrait that is represented in the America print,
and the recto of the preparatory drawing includes the inscribed words
‘‘Americus Vespuccis Florentinus 1497’’ at the feet of the navigator. It is
possible that initially the America print was to depict Columbus and to
allude to Stella’s romantic epic, but the conception of the print was
consequently altered due either to Stradano’s interests or to those of the
Alamanni. This might explain why there are two representations of
Vespucci in the Nova Reperta series and why Columbus is mentioned on
the frontispiece of the Nova Reperta, but not represented in any of its prints.

115
On Anacaona in Stella, see Hofmann, 1994, 466.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 429

The emphasis here is evidently on the Florentine Vespucci. America is

conceived within this series as a new invention, or reperta, and Vespucci,
a Florentine, is considered its true discoverer, even though his travels
followed those of Columbus. Within the Nova Reperta, America is tied to at
least ten of the nineteen inventions, but interestingly there is no mention
whatsoever of Spain, Portugal, or the actual conquest of the Americas in
these prints. These works, produced nearly a century following the initial
encounter, therefore still conceive of the Americas as a Florentine invention
connected to the poet Dante, even though Florence had little or no direct
relation with the Americas following Vespucci’s travels.

7. P I G A F E T T A ’ S M A G E L L A N
The Magellan print, the final work within the Americae Retectio series,
represents a non-Italian explorer. Yet the source used to depict the
Portuguese Magellan in Stradano’s print is clearly a famous Italian one,
Antonio Pigafetta’s (1491–1534) journal of his voyage around the world
with Magellan. A native of Vicenza, Pigafetta was the only Italian who
participated in Magellan’s journey, and his journal was the most important
printed Cinquecento firsthand account of the circumnavigation.116 First
published in Italian in Venice in 1536 and then later included in Ramusio’s
Navigazioni, Pigafetta’s fanciful text records Magellan’s journey from Spain
through the Straits of Magellan to Asia and back to Spain in great detail
in the style of a courtly adventure. Because Stradano illustrates specific
moments from Pigafetta’s text to represent Magellan, the image reflects
more upon Pigafetta than it does upon Magellan. In the print, Stradano
truly represents the imaginative journey that Pigafetta describes rather than
the voyage of the navigator. Pigafetta’s text, like that of Stella and Strozzi,
provided Stradano with the visual content for an allegorized scene that
again merges this real voyage with fantasy in a recognizable way through
mythological and emblematic representation.
Much of the iconography in the print can be linked to specific moments
in Pigafetta’s text. Different from the prints of the other two navigators
who sail on the open sea, Magellan sails through the Straits that were named

116
On sources regarding Magellan’s journey, see Joyner; Nowell. Another firsthand
account by an anonymous Portuguese seaman was published in Ramusio’s Navigazioni;
a few other printed sixteenth-century secondary reports on Magellan’s journey were written
by Peter Martyr, by the Portuguese naval commander, Antonio de Brito, and by a Spanish
court secretary, Maximilian of Transylvania. Pigafetta’s work was disseminated most widely
and in the most languages.

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430 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

for him. Pigafetta vividly describes the ship’s entry into the straits and
Magellan’s incredible knowledge concerning their whereabouts.117 The
fires on the land at the left are labeled in the preparatory drawing as the
Tierra del Fuego, which Magellan named because of the campfires of
the natives visible from the ship. Pigafetta’s text also certainly inspired the
portrayal of a giant seated to the right of the ship putting an arrow down his
throat. In several passages Pigafetta describes giants in great depth, and was
fascinated by their stature and customs. In one section he relates one of
the more unusual actions of the Patagonian giant that Stradano illustrates:
‘‘When these people feel sick to their stomachs, rather than purge
themselves, they thrust an arrow down their throat of two palms or more
and vomit up a green colored [substance] mixed with blood.’’118 In a later
passage, Pigafetta describes a giant bird in China that is capable of carrying
an elephant or a buffalo.119 Stradano also represents this bird, the garuda,
or roc, with an elephant flying through the sky in the upper left corner of
the composition. Rudolf Wittkower suggested that although Stradano
could have read about the roc in Pigafetta, he based his visual depiction
of the bird on a representation of the roc in a Persian manuscript in
Florence.120 Though it is possible that Stradano used this particular
manuscript, an image of a bird carrying a creature within Alciati might
have also functioned as the source.
Other smaller details in Stradano’s print — such as the running native
figures along the shore at the right and the various menacing sea creatures in
the water surrounding the boat — also recall sections of Pigafetta’s text.
Throughout the text, Pigafetta describes natives as gentle beings who go
about nude with only a bit of leaves around their waists.121 He also often
refers to the menacing fish called ‘‘Tiburons’’ that surround their ship.122
Just as Stradano emulated the genre and style of Stella’s text in his Columbus
print, and the patriotism and drama of Strozzi’s epic in the Vespucci print,

117
Pigafetta, 188–93.
118
McGinty, 58; Pigafetta, 183: ‘‘Quando questa gente se sente malle al stomaco, in
loco de purgarse se meteno ne la golla dui palmi e più d’una friza e gomitano coloro verde
mischiade con sangue.’’
119
Pigafetta, 340: ‘‘nel qualle abitano ucceli deti garuda, tanto grandi che portano un
buffalo e uno elefante al luoco.’’
120
Wittkower, 1938, 255–57.
121
Pigafetta, 221: ‘‘Questi populi sonno gentili; vanno nudi e depinti; portano uno pezo
de tella de arbore intorno le sue vergonie.’’
122
Ibid., 167: ‘‘Venivano al bordo de le nave certi pessi grandi che se chiamano tiburoni
che hanno denti teribili e, se trovano omini nel mare, li mangiano.’’

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 431

in the Magellan print, Stradano represents specific moments from Pigafetta’s

text and captures its fantastical genre.
From among these many depictions of the New World and Asia from
Pigafetta’s text, Stradano used gods and creatures to aid in telling the tale
of the navigator, in the same way that he did in the other prints. Apollo with
his lyre functions like Diana in the Columbus print and Minerva in the
Vespucci print, and here leads the ship along the coast of Tierra del Fuego.
The caption on the print helps define the meaning of Apollo, the sun god,
since it explains that Magellan emulated the passage of the sun when he
circumnavigated the earth.123 Aeolus in the clouds in the upper right, labeled
as such in the preparatory drawing, ushers in a strong wind that pushes
Magellan’s ship onward. A triton holding her tail, borrowed from emblem
books, recalls the tritons in the Columbus print and represents fortuna.
One of the gesturing nereids, or Fates, in the waters behind fortuna mimics
her gesture and points in the direction of Magellan’s journey.
In the Magellan print, Stradano implements the same format and
similar emblematic compositions as the other two prints, but this one differs
significantly in terms of its dramatic content. Stradano’s Magellan scene
includes many more emblematic compositions in the water, land, and air
surrounding Magellan than in the Columbus and Vespucci prints, revealing
a design more dense with images, more cluttered, and less refined in terms
of its composition. Furthermore, Magellan appears less active and less
engaged in his journey than the other two Italian navigators in the series.
Dressed partially in armor, he is seated aboard his ship examining an
armillary sphere. This is different from the two other navigators, who stand
aboard ship and look out toward the water. A flag with a coat of arms hangs
above his head, but rather than a personal coat of arms for the navigator as
is the case with the two other prints, the flag above Magellan represents that
of Emperor Charles V (1500–58), Pigafetta’s intended audience for the text
who ultimately funded Magellan’s journey. A small crusader’s cross flies
from the very top of his mast and is the only religious element aboard his
ship. Thus Magellan’s journey, unlike those of Vespucci and Columbus, was
neither a religious crusade nor a mission to open up new lands. Rather, it
was an incredible voyage around the world, fraught with Pigafetta’s magical
creatures. The Magellan print in turn lacks the patriotic fervor and the
dramatic composition that the other two navigator prints possess.

123
Wittkower, 255. The caption reads: ‘‘FERDINANDES MAGALANES LUSITANUS
anfractuoso euripo superato, } telluri ad Austrum nomen dedit, eiusque navis omnium prima
atque novissima solis cursum in terries emulata, terrae totius globum circumiit. An sal. }
DXXII.’’

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432 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

8. C O N C L U S I O N

Further study is needed in order to learn more about the reception and use
of Stradano’s images, and even to understand his own relation to the
New World. It is known that Stradano’s prints made their way to the
New World. One of his hunt prints was used as a model for a fresco design
in a home in Columbia in the late sixteenth century.124 Furthermore, a
printmaker by the name of Samuel Stradanus, likely a relative of Giovanni,
produced religious prints in Mexico City in the early seventeenth century
in a style very similar to Giovanni’s.125 Perhaps Stradano’s relationship
with the Americas transcended his Florentine designs, and perhaps his
family traveled to and even worked in this Nova Reperta. Both possibilities,
like Stradano’s American prints themselves, are examples of transculturalism,
in which images are shaped by cultural and artistic exchange. It is only
through the careful consideration of objects within their global context
of creation that their complex identities and implications can be revealed.
Stradano’s American prints could only be born out of this particular
environment in Florence, when the discovery of the New World was a topic
of discourse among academicians, and when Grand Duke Ferdinando
brought to Florence new books and objects from the Americas. By
establishing the engravings’ relation to the Alamanni and the Accademia
degli Alterati, and by demonstrating connections between the imagery in the
prints and the production of art, cartography, and literature at the Medici
court, the social and intellectual context for the creation of these complex
visual allegories is unveiled fully for the first time. An examination of
Stradano’s preparatory drawings and inscriptions, and an analysis of the
various figures and emblems represented in the prints, demonstrate close
associations to contemporary narratives by Stella, Strozzi, and Pigafetta,
writings about the nature of the New World by Maffei, as well as the work
of Lucretius and Dante.
Viewed and read together the images produce a hierarchical fantasy
that places the Florentine Vespucci, and therefore Florence itself, at the
pinnacle. Though Columbus is referenced on the frontispieces of both
the Americae Retectio and Nova Reperta series (fig. 20), he is forgotten in the
Nova Reperta print cycle, while Vespucci is fashioned in two separate
engravings within the series as a Christ-like figure encountering a new land
to awaken. A brief comparison of the three prints in the Americae Retectio

124
Palm, 1956, 68–69; Leesberg and Leeflang, xlvii.
125
Very little is known about the work and life of Samuel Stradanus: see
Donahue-Wallace; Romero de Terreros.

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 433

FIGURE 20. Giovanni Stradano, Frontispiece for Nova Reperta series, late 1580s.
Engraving. [NC266.St81 1776St81], Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Columbia University in the City of New York.

series demonstrates how drama is purposefully heightened, through

composition and iconography, in the Vespucci image in order to
emphasize his importance. While the Magellan print is saturated with
details that distract the viewer from its seated central character, and the
Columbus sheet shows the navigator on languid waters guided by a
nonchalant Diana, the Vespucci image reveals a spectacular adventure.
His ships travel on an acute diagonal in choppy waters, indicating the
force by which armed Minerva propels him with her Florentine lily.
Standing in an active contrapposto stance, Vespucci fearlessly confronts
the allegorized cannibals before him, while in the distance a rising sun
implies hope. The Florentine is the true protagonist of this narrative of
discovery.
The prints’ captions also contribute to this pro-Vespucci message. The
words inscribed on all three of these Americae Retectio prints identify the
great accomplishments of these navigators. Using similar vocabulary and
stressing the significance of naming, the captions assign attributions to the
new lands in the same way a printmaker or publisher might provide

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434 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

authorship for a particular print.126 The Magellan caption explains that he

‘‘gave a name to the land to the south’’ and that ‘‘his ship was first of all
ships to go around the circle of the whole land.’’127 The Columbus caption
states that he found these lands ‘‘himself,’’ using the same verb used to
describe the designer of a print, inventio.128 According to the Vespucci
caption, this navigator ‘‘opened up two parts of the globe amidst omen-filled
travels’’ and for this reason Vespucci ‘‘nominavit,’’ or named, the New
World. As in the Americae Retectio frontispiece, the Nova Reperta frontispiece
is inscribed at the bottom right: ‘‘Stradano has invented these prints as a
gift for Luigi Alamanni’’ and ‘‘Philip Galle published them in Antwerp.’’129
Similarly, the roundel at left reads ‘‘Christopher Colvmbus Genvens,
inventor. Americas Vespuccis Florent. Retector et denominator.’’ Here
Columbus as ‘‘inventor’’ is likened to an artist who designs a print or
discovers an invention, while Vespucci, as ‘‘retector et denominator,’’ is
equated with the publisher who makes the design or invention known to
the world. Thus Vespucci, like the Galles, who ultimately produced and
disseminated the images, is the navigator worthy of most fame.
In the Nova Reperta and the Americae Retectio the textual and visual
language of printmaking defines the discovery of the Americas, emphatically
promotes Vespucci, and exhibits anxiety about invention and the conquest
in early modern culture. The Italian city states were hindered from
participation in the conquest of the Americas, yet these prints announced
Florence’s role in the New World, both implicitly through the imagery and
explicitly through their captions. Through the print medium that could
be circulated throughout the world, these Florentines laid claim to this
unattainable new invention that they were learning and writing about, but
that they could not experience firsthand. Here the engravings distinguished
the Florentines in particular, and these Italian navigators and writers in
general, from the Spanish and Portuguese. Antiquity, both embodied in
the mythological depictions and in the Latin captions, functioned here as
a means by which Stradano could represent this still-mysterious New World
to an early modern audience, while allegory — evoked through elaborate
personifications, emblems, and imprese that mix mythology with cannibalism

126
A similar point is made in Margócsy, 40.
127
‘‘telluri ad Austrum nomen dedit, eiusque navis omnium prima atque novissima solis
cursum in terries emulata, terra totius globum circumiit. An Sal. ‘DXXII.’’
128
‘‘Christopher Columbus Ligur terroribus oceani superatis alterius pene orbis regions
à se inventas Hispanis regibus addixit. An Salutis ‘. VIIID.’’
129
‘‘Aloysio Alamannio Flor. I Strad. Invent. DD’’ and ‘‘Philippe Galle excudit
Antwerpiae.’’

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 STRADANO’S ALLEGORICAL INVENTION 435

and the actual travels of these men with references to heroic journeys —
acted at the same time to remind the viewer that Stradano’s images were
themselves merely false constructions of the past. Through their emphasis
on allegory these printed images served as powerful vehicles of cultural
propaganda, allowing Florence obliquely to assume a prominent role in the
discovery of the New World and appointing Vespucci as the hero of the
invention of the New World.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

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436 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

Abbreviations
ASF: Archivio di Stato di Firenze BNCF: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di
Firenze

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