Giordano Bruno’s criticism of Spanish colonization in America: animalization as a visual metaphor of barbarism

VIDAL, SILVINA PAULA

Oslo

Jornada; The Foreignness of Universal Historiography; 2022

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters

Between 1584 and 1591, Giordano Bruno developed a harsh criticism to European colonization. Although there a few explicit references in his work, they play a major role in connecting cosmological, anthropological and religious aspects of his universal reform. Bruno’s anthropological defense of Pre-adamic polygenism (natural, plural and independent generation of different human groups in diverse countries) runs parallel at a cosmological level with the existence of infinite homogeneous and autonomous planetary systems. According to Bruno, Spanish domination in America could not be justified by any kind of religious, cultural or economic superiority, but it was associated with piracy, deceit, depredation and brutal violence. In this occasion I will address the third dialogue of Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante (1584), in which Argo Navis symbolizes Spanish colonization. Saverio Ricci has related this Brunian motif with Sebastian Brant’s stultifera navis, Erasmus’ Praise of Folly and the reflection on the tragic effects of European wars of religion and the conquest of the New World. Without underestimating this analysis, but enriching and expanding it, I would like to focus on the transformation of Argo Navis into a cetus that swallows and vomits naked bodies, with the purpose of tracing its literary, historical and iconographical sources. I will argue that Bruno, in his attempt to invert the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale, not only relates whales to sea monsters following an old cultural tradition (from the Physiologus and Medieval Bestiaries to Renaissance cosmographies and natural histories), but also, inspired by Bartolomé de Las Casas’ Brevissima relación de la destrucción de Indias (1544) and his protestant translators, operates an animalization of the Spanish conqueror as a new way to illustrate his barbarism, reversing the Catholic epic of Spanish colonization in America.