ART on view 74 Historical Notes on an Unexpected Continent While Spain and Portugal were the two European countries that were the primary and central powers in the “discovery” and then the conquest of the Americas, Italy was also an active participant in these events. These were described in 1552 by chronicler Francisco López de Gómara in his Historia General de las Indias as “the most important thing since the creation of the world, apart from the incarnation and the death of he who created it.” This “world which did not exist” in the eyes of the European Renaissance, was found by accident on the route taken by Christopher Columbus (1451– 1506) on his famous journey of 1492, the objective of which was to reach Asia. The famed Genovese navigator was in the service of the Catholic rulers, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, and they hoped to be able to establish a link with faraway China, which had been visited and described by another famous Italian explorer, Marco Polo. In his quest to fi nd a new westerly route for the spice trade and to Asia, he set sail on an as yet unknown ocean, and believed, until the day he died, that he had reached the Indies, somewhere off the coast of Japan, which was called Cipango in the Livre des Merveilles du Monde (Book of the Marvels of the World) written in 1298. When Columbus arrived in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, and subsequently in the Greater Antilles, he encountered The Italians and the New World By André Delpuech indigenous inhabitants whom he referred to as “Indians,” believing that he had reached part of the East Indies in the form of a few islands off the coast of Japan. On his second voyage, which amounted to a true colonial expedition consisting of seventeen ships and nearly 1,500 men, Columbus reached the Lesser Antilles and encountered “cannibals.” It was not until his third voyage in 1498 that he came upon the mainland terra fi rma of South America when he reached the Orinoco River Delta on the coast of what is now Venezuela. On his last exploratory voyage, between 1502 and 1504, he sailed along the coast of Central America. In the end, Columbus never fully realized that he was at the door of a new continent. The place was ultimately named after another Italian navigator, Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512). A native of Florence, Vespucci played a decisive role in making Europeans aware that they had in fact found a new continent. He made three, or possibly four, voyages there. Whether or not the fi rst one of 1497–1498 actually took place is questionable. The second, between May of 1499 and September of 1500, proved to be decisive in developing an understanding of what these new lands really were. The expedition, undertaken in the service of Spain, reached what is now the Guyanas, and then sailed south along the coast, encountering the Amazon Delta and the northern Brazilian coast, before returning to Trinidad and the Orinoco River Delta. Vespucci’s next two voyages were made in the service of Portugal. On the third, he followed a route that took him from northeastern Brazil to a latitude of more than 50 degrees south, along the coast of what is now Argentina, directly across from the Falkland Islands. Between 1499 and 1502, Vespucci explored the greater part of the South American Atlantic coast. THE INVENTION OF AMERICA The name of another Italian, Pietro Martire d’Anghiera (1457–1526), who was not a navigator and who never left Europe, needs to be mentioned in connection with furthering the process of this dawning consciousness of the discovery of FIG. 14: Necklace with a zemi fi gure. Taïno, Haiti. AD 1500. Shell (Strombus gigas), fi ber. Museo di Antropologia e Etnologia, Florence. Collections Medici Collection, cat. 215.
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