Conocer el Nuevo Mundo: referencialidad en las ilustraciones de Fernández de Oviedo

Abstract

The illustrations drawn by the official chronicler of the Indies, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, to accompany his sections on American flora were the first of this type to appear on a printed edition. Between the paradigms of medieval bookish hermeneutics and the growing appreciation for the witness testimony, the Veedor del Oro in the New World, writer and illustrator employs visual language devices to offer reliable proof of the nature he observed and, simultaneously, apprehend it through the imperial discourse’s forms of discernment. In this paper, we will analyze the images that Oviedo merged into his manuscripts and printed editions to show several amazingly significant references concentrated in them: references to American reality, by means of mimesis and similitude; references to the familiar schemes of Western pictorial traditions, and, finally, to Christian imperial hierarchies. This whole referential complex is finally put to the service of imperial expansion