Texts, Images, and the Perception of ‘Savages’ in Early Modern Europe: What We Can Learn from White and Harriot 1 Joan-Pau Rubiés The question of what artistic images can really tell us about European perceptions of Native Americans is methodologically complex, because, as argued in this paper, what was perceived is not to be taken as being identical with what was represented. White’s paintings are so exceptional in their quality and closeness to an observed experience that they can tell us a great deal about this problem. At the same time, however, because of this very exceptionality, it will always be risky to analyze them in isolation from the wider contemporary corpus of texts and images about the New World. Therefore, I will propose a wider perspective informed by earlier materials, followed by a close analysis of the relation between text and image, and of the role of artistic licence, in the creation of the Harriot–White corpus. Mental images and artistic images: a Renaissance perspective We can take as a starting point what I call ‘the mental images of Jean de Léry’, the French Huguenot colonist who famously described the Tupinambá of Brazil in a book first published in 1578 (although his personal observations date from 1557): If you would picture to yourself a savage ... you may imagine in your mind [vostre entendement ] a naked man, well formed and proportioned in his limbs, with all the hair on his body plucked out; his hair shaved in the fashion I have described; the lips and cheeks slit, with pointed bones or green stones set in them; his ears pierced, with pendants in the holes; his body painted; his thighs and legs blackened with the dye that they make from the genipap fruit that I mentioned; and with necklaces made up of innumerable little pieces of the big seashell that they call vignol. The description was accompanied with what was to become one of the most iconic early-modern images of the American savage (Fig. 1 ). Thus you will see him as he usually is in his country, and, as far as his natural condition is concerned, such as you will see him portrayed in the following illustration, wearing only his crescent of polished bone on his breast, his stone in the hole in his lip, and, to show his general bearing, his unbent bow and his arrows in his hands. To fill out this plate, we have put near this Tupinamba one of his women, who, in their customary way, is holding her child in a cotton scarf, with the child holding on to her side with both legs. 2 Not content with this single image, Léry also described a number of variations, or, as he called them, four additional ‘contemplations’ for the European imagination, in which, like in a game of dressing up dolls, the Tupinambá appeared with a feathered body, traditionally ornamented, half dressed with European clothes (a ludicrous image), or equipped with maracas and araroyes made of feathers for dancing. The latter image was also illustrated in a woodcut (Fig. 2 ). Interestingly, Léry assumed responsibility not only for the literary description, but also for the design of the visual representations. He understood that only the combination of image and text, on the basis of a personal experience (what one has seen and heard), may allow the traveller to transmit to his European audience the reality of a New World which was especially admirable because the ancients had never described it. 3 Léry is, in terms of lineage, important because he was a precedent to Harriot and White in the Protestant theme and iconography of a savage who was in some ways a ‘good savage’, that is, a natural man whose virtues were uncorrupted by civilization while at the same time an idolater heading for eternal damnation. The interaction between the humanist Figure 1 Tupinamba family, Jean de Léry, woodcut, from Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre de Bresil, ch. 8, Paris: Antoine Chupin, 1578, (©British Library Board, All Rights Reserved, G 7101) Figure 2 Tupinamba men dancing, Jean de Léry, woodcut, from Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre de Bresil, ch. 8, Paris: Antoine Chupin, 1578, (©British Library Board, All Rights Reserve, G 7101) 120 | European Visions: American Voices