Theodor de Bry (1528–1598) – The Great-Grandfather of Maria Sibylla Merian
We will be seeing and reading a lot about Maria Sibylla Merian here. Several current biographies describe her life, and extensive websites are dedicated to her. But how did she become this extraordinary woman? What are her roots? We will explore this in a multi-part series.
The story of the Merian family from Frankfurt, from which Maria Sibylla descends, begins with the artist family de Bry. The de Brys were goldsmiths and copperplate engravers in Liège, in present-day Belgium. Theodor de Bry converted to Protestantism and was subsequently sentenced to lifelong banishment, his property confiscated. Via Strasbourg, Theodor de Bry moved with his family to Frankfurt am Main, where he founded an engraving workshop and a publishing house.
He focused on a subject for his books that promised high sales: the conquests of the Spanish conquistadors in South America. In 1598, he published an illustrated edition of Bartolomé de Las Casas’ work A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies under the title Narratio regionum indicarum per Hispanos quosdam devastatarum verissima.
A Spaniard Criticizes Spanish Atrocities
Las Casas himself was a Spanish conqueror involved in numerous atrocities until he turned away from them and became one of the fiercest critics of the abuses. In his book, he describes them in drastic terms:
„“The Spaniards made bets among themselves as to which of them could split a man in two with a single sword stroke from above, or cut off his head with a spear, or tear the entrails from his body. They tore newborn children from their mothers’ breasts, seized them by the legs, and dashed their heads against the rocks. […] Others made wide gallows, so that the feet almost touched the ground, and in honor and glorification of the Savior and the twelve apostles, they hanged thirteen Indians on each of them, then placed wood and fire underneath and burned them all alive.”
The page with part of the text and the engraving, a teeming scene of horror:
Between Outrage and Profit
It was these copperplate engravings – explicitly brutal and technically masterful – that turned the work into a bestseller. They lastingy shaped the perception of the century of conquest. De Bry was outraged by the double standards of the Catholic Church, which permitted inhuman acts in the name of the Cross. The conquistadors were depicted – certainly with justification – as cruel torturers and murderers.
However, with a keen sense of the market, de Bry toned down the depictions of Spanish atrocities in the Latin edition of his book; he likely did not want to diminish sales success among foreign, often Catholic, buyers and also feared censorship.
The Aesthetics of Horror
One cannot accuse de Bry of inventing the suffering of the Indigenous people. The horror of the Conquista was real. But de Bry was a master of visual communication: he used the best craftsmanship of his time to depict this suffering so unmistakably and monstrously that no viewer in Europe could look away. He turned a distant report into an immediate, painful experience.
The 17 engravings became icons of the Spanish terror in the New World and contributed for a long time to the negative perception of Spain in Northern Europe – the “Black Legend” (Leyenda Negra).
The enterprising de Bry did everything in his power to satisfy the great interest in the newly discovered regions of the 16th century. He published current travel reports in two large cycles: The Grand Voyages about America and The Small Voyages about Asia and Africa. Most of these books he provided with engravings in the proven style we have seen here: artistically and technically superior, with explicit depictions of gruesome details.
I will soon be presenting texts and images from these travel books published by Theodor de Bry.
A gallery shows all engravings of Las Casas’ book.
Text: Gerhard Groebe | Images: Public domain
