(In)fertile Grounds: Viewing de Bry’s Illustrations of Las Casas’s Brevisima relación as Dutch Landscapes

Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevisima relación de la destruición de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies), published in 1542 and illustrated by Theodor de Bry in 1598, conveyed Spain’s conquest of the “New” World to an Old World audience. This presentation positions de Bry’s engravings of New Spain as landscapes, calling for their contextualization within the emergent, seventeenth-century genre of the Dutch printed landscape. The central object of study is a 1638 Dutch translation of the Brevisima relación: Antwerp publisher Jan Evertszoon Cloppenburch’s Den Spiegel der Spaense Tyrannye (The Mirror of Spanish Tyranny). Housed in Yale’s Beinecke Library, Den Spiegel includes an additional history of the Spanish Netherlands with reproductions of de Bry’s engravings. I examine the relationship between text and image in Den Spiegel and the function of its images for a Dutch audience. In the Valley of Mexico and Antwerp alike, de Bry emphasizes the body in relation to landscape. The articulation of bodies within their respective landscapes visualizes differential modes of occupying land. De Bry depicts a landscape made infertile under Spanish rule: an inverted image of the Dutch “rustic landscape.” Cloppenburch’s publication sets the stage for a reworking of landscape—a correct fertilization—as a mode to counter Spanish hegemony in the New World while affirming a Dutch ethic of occupation. This paper questions the role of such images in a Dutch landscape tradition which has sought to diminish depictions of colonial occupation and violence in its own canon.