The New World Encounters

The New World

Wow, her family must also be the same, was my first thought when I met the woman who was going to pierce my belly button. Her body was completely covered in tattoos, she had a piercing in every possible area of her face and she had no fashion sense whatsoever. I immediately made an assumption about her whole family based on this one experience I had with her. We started to talk and she told me that her family was shocked when she came home from college appearing how she looked now. Apparently her family is extremely conservative and in a sense, normal and not "weird." As I was reading the journal of Columbus and the readings by Munkler and Seymour Phillips I realized that when Columbus was describing how he saw one young female with no clothes on he assumed that every female was improper and didn't wear clothing either. I had just put an image in on my friends heads about how weird and different the lady and her family was only to discover that not only was her family like my family, but she was also polite and nice and normal. I had judged her just like Columbus and the explorers judged the "others" in America.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" can really be put to the test on the debate about how the Europeans portrayed the Americas and the people living there. The power of the image of "America" by Cavalier d'Arpino and of "Europe" by Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, 1603, represents a thousand words. These artists show the viewer what the Europeans thought of America, the image stays in people's memories longer than descriptions. This painting is able to give the words, "other" "different" and "strange" an image they can associate with. The Europeans viewed the "New World" as barbaric, inhumane, and foreign, the voyagers wanted to give others a reason for why they were treating the Indians so atrociously. Cavalier d'Arpino drew "America" as a scantily clad woman with a severed head by her feet, some sort of creature that appears to be an alligator, and holding a small crossbow. Compared to a drawing of "Europe," which depicts a lady sitting with a crown clothed in a conservative dress with horses, light, food, and readings by her feet, "America" would appear very strange and uncivilized. "America" is deemed inferior by these two paintings.

The reason for why the painting of "America" by Cavalier d'Arpino captures such an image of distaste, barbaric, and uncivilized is not because the natives actually appeared that way, but because the European discoverers needed a way to associate strangeness and to interpret the differences (Munkler, Medieval History Journal). The aborigines who were deemed as monsters weren't actually "monsters" but rather strange. The word "monstra" actually means strange, not scary or dangerous (Munkler). And while the word "strange" still has a negative connotation to it, the Europeans back in the 15th and 16th centuries associated it with the natives as being inferior and alien like. According to Munkler, "In this way strangeness has two significations. On the one hand, it signifies what does not belong to the