European and American Barbarians, from the sixteenth century to the Enlightenment

KWIATKOWSKI, NICOLÁS

Dundee

Conferencia; TENTH IAWIS/AIERTI TRIENNIAL CONFERENCE ?Riddles of Form: Exploration and Discovery in Word and Image?; 2014

IAWIS-AIERTI

During the sixteenth century, European artists depicted the bodies and faces of American people. These portraits echoed and reinforced several texts that represented the inhabitants of the New World as barbarians. It is hardly surprising that Europeans conceived the peoples they encountered in this manner: in classical antiquity, the concept of ?barbarian? was a Greek and Roman generalisation applied to those ?others? who did not share the language, the gods, the legal and political convictions of the polis and the civitas. In most cases, the ?barbarians? of early modern times were criticised and even despised by the Europeans that so named them. In some other anomalous instances, they were seen with curiosity and even admiration. The visual portrait of the "Indians/barbarians" was, then, an attempt to understand their features, customs and cultures, a way to dominate their communities, and also a mirror of European barbarism. The first part of my contribution will provide an analysis of a large corpus of these representations as means of knowledge, power, and imagination. The second part will describe the ways in which this perception of the American ?other? as barbarian stimulated research and curiosity about European barbarians, both contemporary and of past times. A study of images of European barbarians produced in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries could, then, reveal a connection between the construction of the other as barbarian and a reshaping of some European historical identities. This is yet another indication of the fact that the American experience was not understood only according to European ideas, but that it also returned to the Old World and contributed to transform them. Images, portraits in particular, were key to this process.