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Moffitt starts with Spain's fascinating pre-historic art and moves up through the Roman, Islamic, Romanesque, Gothic, and Golden Age periods straight through to the 20th century. Like most studies, he races through the 18th and 19th centuries, but the quality of his remarks makes up for his brevity. As the title indicates, he briefly discusses architecture, sculpture, and the decorative arts as well as painting. This approach puts painting in a broad aesthetic context as well as an historical one.
Additionally, the illustrations are excellent and mostly in color.
I already knew something about Spanish art when I picked up this book, but I felt I learned a lot. If you know absolutely nothing about Spanish art and haven't had much luck with art history books in the past, this is definitely the place to begin.
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Published review, in Latin-American Indian Literatures Journal: "The book merits wide circulation. The impressive scholarship embraces both pictorial and written sources, and the lengthy quotations in English translation from the early explorers and chroniclers are helpful."
Another published review by DANIEL K. RICHTER (Dickinson College), in American Historical Review, December 1998.
This book by John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastián appears, at first glance, to be a blast from the historiographical past. Readers of such standard works as Robert Berkhofer, Jr.'s The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1979) and Olive Patricia Dickason's The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (1984) will find much that is familiar. Early modern Europeans invented perniciously enduring stereotypes about Indians, images rooted almost entirely in their own fantasies and fears rather than in empirical data. Those familiar with such more recent, theoretically sophisticated studies as Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991), Anthony Pagden's European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (1992), or Gordon M. Sayre's Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (1997) will be disappointed in a book that openly disavows "the imposition of the kind of theoretical constructs that so bedevil current, postmodernist academic writing" (p. 3). Nonetheless, this product of a long collaboration between Moffitt and the late Sebastián has at least three great strengths. First, as art historians, the authors bring to visual materials an attention to detail seldom available to more text-oriented scholars. Second, as specialists in Renaissance art, they take medieval and classical influences on those materials seriously as systems of belief rather than mere artistic conventions. These first two strengths especially come together in their analysis of the meaning of the term India to fifteenth-century Europeans. When Christopher Columbus reported that he had found "Paradise-on-Earth" on "the Indian Islands, Located Beyond the Ganges River, Which Have Just Been Newly Rediscovered," Moffitt and Sebastián argue, he was not merely compounding a geographic error with rhetorical exaggeration. Instead, "as employed by Columbus, the term precisely meant a specific place described in the Book of Genesis as having been initially inhabited by Adam and Eve," a place Columbus and contemporary artists and map-makers sincerely believed still existed at the extreme tip of the Indian subcontinent (p. 16). This framework of ideas about an Indian Eden provides a compelling context for the many descriptions of "Indians" as pre- or post-lapsarian inhabitants of an early paradise. It also helps to explain why explorers, map-makers, and illustrators peopled the Americas with every lurid humanoid type found in the pages of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (13561357) and other Indian subcontinent travel fantasies. The third strength of Moffitt and Sebastián is their effort to reconstruct the ways in which early modern viewers actually experienced images of alleged Native Americans. They are particularly effective in contextualizing dozens of woodcut and copperplate illustrations that previous historians have considered in isolation from the books in which they first appeared. When placed against the texts-and in light of the fact that European illustrators nearly always worked solely from written descriptions rather than illustrations from life-it becomes clear that the visual images were entirely products of European imaginations rather than American experience. Illustrators appear to have made almost no attempt to render details about Native American appearance and behavior contained in explorers's written accounts with any accuracy. Instead, they reproduced stock images of "savages," "wild men," "Amazons," and "cannibals" familiar from books written well before 1492. Few publications went as far as a 1554 edition of Francisco López de Gómara's Historia General de las Indias y Nuevo Mundo mas la conquista del Peru y de Mexico that recycled a set of illustrations originally drawn for a 1520 edition of Livy's history of Rome. Yet most had little more relevance to the subjects they purported to illustrate. The same disconnection from American reality apparent in negative stereotypes also applied in more positive, and presumably accurate, contexts. The famous illustrations of Theodore de Bry-most of which took as their originals the watercolors that Englishman John White painted at Roanoke in 1585-were, Moffitt and Sebastián argue, part of a concerted effort by Philip lI's Dutch Protestant opponents to promulgate the "Black Legend" of Spanish cruelty to Native Americans. In this politicized context, de Bry's images, far from attempting to convey accurate information about Native Americans, added to "the Noble and Ignoble Indian tropes" a new, third stereotype: "the figure of the 'doomed Indian'" (p. 303).